Maple Class - Summer 2 week 1
Date: 8th Jun 2025 @ 9:37pm
It was lovely welcoming Maple back into class for their final term in Reception. We can't quite believe we only have 6 weeks left. It has been a wonderful year and the children have been a pleasure to teach. It was great to see them return with such eagerness and they were all so excited to share with us what they had been up to in half term.
We started off our week by introducing our key question this term – I wonder where animals live? And the book we will be learning off by heart, and putting with actions, this term is Walking Through the Jungle by Julie Lacome. The children picked up the story really quickly and were joining in with familiar phrases and anticipating words.
We looked at the 7 continents and started to look at which animals are from which continent. There was a great discussion about the 7 continents and this lead us onto learning the 7 continents song. The children loved finding out which was the biggest to the smallest and singing the song several times to remember it. I’m sure some of you will have been hearing it over the weekend!
In phonics this week we have continued to learn our level 4 phonics and this all surrounded a story called The Camping Trip, which several children could relate to! We learnt the new level 4 tricky words ‘were’, ‘there’, ‘little’ and ‘one’ and learnt to spell our level 3 tricky words ‘they’, ’are’ and ‘all’. We learnt to read and write words and captions with adjacent consonants, such as ‘crab, clams, limpet, shrimp, shells, starfish, sticks, brush’. We really are producing fantastic writing, remembering to start with a capital letter, finger spaces between words and ending with a full stop. Our segmenting of unfamiliar words, and blending of sounds is really embedded and children are confident at knowing how to read unfamiliar words – we are remembering to spot those diagraphs and trigraphs in words first, before segmenting and blending.
In maths this week we have been learning about using repeated addition to find doubles, using repeated addition to find even numbers, combining equal groups to find a total and solving problems involving even numbers and doubles. This has been quite a new concept and children have been brilliant at trying to answer what they are noticing by using the sentence “I can see _____”
Maple have enjoyed some transition activities in Willow this week, they are always so excited to visit Miss Jackson and Mrs Gardner in, what will be, their new classroom come September. On Friday they joined in with their music lesson and Mrs Duffey and Mrs Cordell were invited to listen to their composition and it was amazing! Great work Maple and Willow!
On Tuesday afternoon we had the “Life van” visit us and we had a fantastic workshop thinking about our bodies. We discussed what gives us energy, keeps us healthy and well. We learnt that the five things are - sleep, food, exercise, water and oxygen. We were all asked what do we like to do to keep us happy, we answered …
Frankie – I like growing strawberries
Sophie – I like ballet
Loris – I like playing with my friends
Della – I like playing with my friends
Bunny – I like eating vegetables
Daisy – I like playing with my friend Loris
Felix – I like building lego
Leone – I like planting carrots
Octaviah – I like making friends
Szymon – I like planting sunflowers
Aldie – I like playing with my friends
Woody – I like playing with Alfie
Alice – I like playing with Felix
In forest school it was a rather wet session, but that didn’t bother us!! We all put on our waterproofs and enjoyed splashing in the rain on the way to our forest area. We listened to the story Aaaarrgghh! Spider! By Lydia Monks and then created our own bug houses so as the spiders could stay outside! We also discovered loads of tiny little caterpillars on lots of leaves and loved looking at them. We also noticed the apples on the trees are growing and turning red.
In PSED this week we watched Superworm by Julia Donaldson and then talked about making the right choices. We discussed the story characters and who made good choices and who made bad choices and why.
What a busy week we had, we also did lots of learning in Explore and Learn with our friends, we got very creative in the art area, built lots of structures and amazing buildings in the construction are and got rather messy in the sand area, exploring what happens when we add water to create a sloppy dinosaur land! All our seeds and plants are growing – we had our first crop of strawberries this week, which tasted delicious! We shared them out between us all and loved tasting them. And we also have noticed our first beans too. We also enjoyed playing the interactive game Picnic on Pluto, reading words contating level 4 words and working out if they are real or fake words.
We hope you have had a lovely weekend and look forward to seeing you this coming week.
