Reception Newsletter

For week ending 14th February 2020

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This week has been Eco Week – one of our themed whole school curriculum weeks, and we have been unashamedly prejudicing the children against single use plastics and trying to promote keeping the oceans healthy.  The children have been litter picking in the school grounds (we realised just how good Joe is at this part of his job – keeping the school grounds clean and tidy  - when a dearth of litter when it was Wellington’s turn saw them raiding the skip that was at the end of the alley behind the Year 3 and 4 classrooms !!  They did pick out things that should have been recycled before staff caught up with them and put a stop to it.  The whole cohort came together to make a rainbow from coloured rubbish that had both been donated and found on the litter pick – apologies for all the PVA glue on clothing, but it is completely washable.  The rainbow is on display outside the Reception classrooms – please look and admire when you are next in school.  We have been emphasising all week the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” including in music lessons with Mr P – the Jack Johnson song can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSM2riAEX4U . We gave it a unique Wimbledon Park twist by using percussion instruments to keep the pulse of the music, with variable results.  Children have also used the junk you have kindly donated to make fish and octopuses from bottles and tubs, and other junk modelling of rubbish collecting vehicles has been inspired by the week’s activities. We also stayed in our own classrooms for phonics but wrote phonetic phrases to do with the topic.  Over the course of 4 days we garnered some lovely writing, which the children have made into booklets which you will be able to see at Parents Evenings in 3 weeks time.

Throughout the week we have also continued our maths learning – the focus this week was inevitably 19.  Staff are regularly commenting on how wonderful it is to see children’s confidence growing at doing 1 more and 1 less than the focus numbers, and in being able to explain what missing numbers in sequences are using the language of one more and one less.  You can try this at home by writing a series of numbers below 19 and either covering some up or replacing them with a square.  Get your child to tell you what the missing numbers are, explaining how they know it is that number.

After half term we are switching topic to Hooves and Trotters – thank you for the trickle of ideas sheets we have received so far, please could we have a deluge of them in the first few days back.  We start with learning about pigs, using the story of the Three Little Pigs as a vehicle for this.  As you will remember from the story, three houses are made from widely differing materials.  The Science Museum are coming in on an outreach visit on Wednesday to do a Three Little Pigs workshop specifically aimed at Early Years children that focusses on the uses of and properties of different materials.  In order to make a day of it our children are also getting a Bubble Workshop in the morning too.  Please make sure you have made your contribution to the costs of this via parent pay – you have had a separate letter about this by email recently.  We will finish our maths learning of individual numbers in the first week back with number 20 before moving on to other mathematical concepts in the following weeks.

Requests and reminders

• Upcoming events – parents evenings are on the Tuesday 3rd and Thursday 5th of March - the second week after half term.  Please book a slot as soon as you can, otherwise you may miss the opportunity to talk to your child’s teacher
• PE bags have come home – please take the opportunity to launder kit and check shoe sizing.  We will do PE again on the first day back, so please make sure you return your child’s kit promptly.
• We sent the beanstalks home a couple of weeks ago – we would love to receive photos of them as they continue to grow – our aim is to display them in the corridor.  One year a child’s bean actually produced a pod before the end of the summer term !

 

Have a lovely, restful half term,

The Reception Team

pgreenwood@wimbledonpark.merton.sch.uk

fdavies@wimbledonpark.merton.sch.uk

obacon@wimbledonpark.merton.sch.uk

Quotes of the week:

The children were deciding which images of food were healthy. One child said of the carrot sticks pictured ..”those are chocolate sticks.  Mummy says that when I eat them my eyes go soggy and I stare a lot…”

Your children are not backward about sharing information with us  “Mrs Bacon, my daddy has hairy shoulders…” another chips into the conversation “and my dad has a hairy chest…” (a good job these anecdotes are anonymous!)

On Monday morning a child thrusts a bag full of magazines into his teacher’s hand with the comment “some of those magazines have Boris Johnson in…”

One of the first things a teacher does when starting a new topic is introduce and explain the vocabulary.  The class were asked “what does ‘Eco’ mean?...” and the somewhat surprising lone suggestion was “it means people aren’t working…”

A child is trying to write and says to an adult near them “this pen keeps coming off my hand…”

A child is answering the ‘when did you get it?’ question during their show and tell presentation.  They replied “when I was five…” to which the teacher replied  “hang on, you’re only 4…”

We read the picture book Greta and the Giants to the children this week.  In the discussion to explain and explore the metaphor of the giants the teacher explained that Boris Johnson (referencing back to the comment about the magazines) was one of the giants, as is Donald Trump in America and Mr Macron in France, to name just three.  A child interrupts saying “yes, there’s one of those in Bolivia and no-body likes him…” the child looks a bit non-plussed at the stunned look on the teachers face and then explains “my au pair is from Bolivia…”

We are talking about what can be recycled and the class have confidently mentioned all varieties of paper and plastic.  The teacher tries to get them to guess what can be recycled and starts with “m”.  “mum…!” comes the enthusiastic response.

In another show and tell a child has brought in a picture book of different lego models.  When asked which was his favourite he explains it’s a pirate ship but struggles to find a picture of it in the book.  There is a Viking longboat pictured but he explains to his peers that isn’t it  “no, that’s a duck boat – see it has a duck on the end…”