The last week has presented us with many opportunities to explore the natural world around around us, making observations and drawing pictures of living things.

Our apple tree now has soft green buds, tinged pink at the base.

When we return from the Easter holiday, will the buds have blossomed? We hope so.

A visit to Mrs Whittaker’s colourful forest school was a treat. We noticed the violas, primroses, forget-me-nots, grape hyacinths and the beautiful prunus tree (‘The Bride’).

Look at the beautiful drawings/collage we created.

The highlight of the visit for many, though, was noticing that there are tiny tadpoles emerging from the frogspawn. Thank you, Mrs Whittaker, for all you do to make this part of school so inviting.

Thank you to Isaac, who brought in his seven pet stick insects for us to meet. He answered lots of questions, very eloquently, in assembly and in our outdoor area. We learned that stick insects can live from 2-3 years. They are herbivores and like to eat (stolen!) privet. They are nocturnal and are most active at night. They ‘play dead’ when they feel threatened by a predator, tricking their enemies into thinking that they really are just a stick. We all had a go at ‘playing dead’ in the classroom, which was very peaceful.

When we undertook some research as a class, we discovered that stick insects have breathing holes down the side of their bodies and they shed skin regularly as they grow. They also have the ability to regrow limbs: wow! Humans need to take more care of theirs.

Happy Easter!

We have prepared for Easter by making energetic chick cards, decorating eggs and using our imaginations to think about what could come out of a chocolate egg.

Wishing you all a funshine-filled break.

Making (and, especially, eating) chocolate nests – symbolic of Spring – was one of the highlights of this week. The children noticed how the chocolate was a solid block and we wondered why it would not stick onto the rice crispies. When someone suggested that we needed to melt it, ideas for how we might do this were debated: suggestions of “building a fire”, “leaving it in the sun” and “putting it in a pocket” were considered but we settled on using the microwave. The chocolate melted into a delicious-smelling liquid. We stirred crispies into the mixture before spooning it into cases. Finally, we popped the nests in the fridge to cool and for the chocolate to re-solidify. The nests definitely passed the taste test so if you would like to make them at home, here are the instructions that we recorded in our writing books.

Mother’s Day

This week, we have reflected upon how our mummies and other grown ups care for us at home. The children have enjoyed making Mother’s Day ‘mummy’ portrait cards and flower pop outs for you.

Our storytelling session also took on a Mother’s Day focus with a bear called Ben, who wanted to treat his mummy. However, his head became stuck in the teapot, the toaster blew up and the flowers were sleeping. Can your child tell you what they wrote about?

Wishing all of our families a happy weekend.

We have been learning that our senses help us to make sense of the world around us.

Let’s start with our favourite sense! Our tongues are covered in thousands of tiny taste buds, which help us to determine if food and drinks taste bitter, sweet, savoury, salty or sour. During a test of crisps, dark chocolate, sultanas and lemon slices, the children recorded whether they did or did not like the taste.

Our noses are used to recognise things that smell nice, such as cakes baking in an oven or fresh flowers, and things that don’t smell so nice, such as trumps and sweaty feet. Our sense of smell helps to keep us safe. The smell of smoke alerts us to fire and the smell of sour milk warns us not to drink it. The children were brilliant at identifying the contents of our smelling pots: coffee, minty toothpaste, ginger, garlic and washing powder.

We use our eyes to see things. Many of us wear glasses to help us see better. When we returned from our walk, in the spring sunshine, to St. John’s church, we talked about all of the things we had noticed on the journey and in the church. We have also looked carefully at the frogspawn in the forest school pond.

Our ears help us to hear. In circle time this week, we enjoyed testing our sense of hearing when we played ‘Doggy, doggy, where’s your bone?’. We also noticed the sounds that instruments, water and leaves make.

When something touches our skin, our brains identify whether something is hot, cold, hard, soft, prickly, rough or smooth. What’s inside our feely box? What happened when we rubbed wax crayons on paper over the objects in our outdoor area?

Please notice which senses the children are using at home.

Thank you, Rev. Sharon….

….for welcoming us into your church and for teaching us that: stained glass windows helped people to understand Bible stories before they could read, organ music travels through pipes; a stole is like a scarf (but is definitely not stolen) and will be a different colour depending upon the point in the liturgical calendar or occasion and that the books we noticed contain the words to hymns. Well done, children, for sitting and listening so attentively. Thank you to all of the adults, who were able to join us for the walk.

….is the question we have been discussing, as hope is our focus value of this half term. For the children in RS, ‘hope is wanting something good to happen‘.

The children were invited to talk about, draw a picture or write down what they hope for and there were some wonderful contributions: a train ride; a visit to a museum; a story from a big sister; a turn with the puppets; a visit to the garden; some new shoes; to sit with a new friend.

As part of our learning about hope, we explored the concept of trust. We considered how Jesus placed his trust in God during his time in the wilderness, refusing the temptations offered by the devil [Matthew 4:18:22]. We also learned how Peter, Andrew, James and John left their fishing boats to become disciples, who followed Jesus [Matthew 4:1:11]. The children suggested that the fishermen were happy to follow Jesus because “they liked him” (Coby) and “He was the son of God” (Isaac). We played a fun game of ‘Follow the leader’ but recognised that we should only follow someone, whom we trust to make good and kind decisions.

brings new life and we have noticed that, while our class tree is still leafless as it wakes up from Winter, there are flowers on the ground under the tree. Did anyone know what the flowers were? “Yellow ones!”, said someone. “You mean daffodils,” Edie specified. We also noticed crocuses.

In class, we made observational crayon drawings of daffodils.

Lent

Ash Wednesday marked the start of Lent. We learned that during the 40 days (not including Sundays) of Lent, some Christians choose to give something up that they like/enjoy, just as Jesus gave up food and drink during the time he spent in the desert to be with God. We talked about what we might give up. Jay suggested “Pringles”. Leon thought he might give up his “house”.

I hope that the practice we put into flipping pancakes in our outdoor area saved some mess at home. We talked about how the ingredients used for making pancakes are not eaten until Easter by some Christian families.

Planting potatoes

We examined a real potato and gathered the children’s ideas about where potatoes come from. “The shop” was the most popular response but some children suggested that, before they arrived at the shop, potatoes grow “in soil”….”on farms”…”in fields”. We then found a toy potato in our feely bag and considered why it might not grow if we planted it. “Well, it will just get dirty, won’t it?” suggested Reggie.

Mrs Wake has kindly given us some seed potatoes to grow. We went outside and added nutritious soil to the bag – not too much as we learned that we will need to ‘earth them up’ when shoots appear. The seed potatoes were positioned carefully so they would have room to grow. We checked for stones as Aunty Mabel (Come Outside) warned that any stones might result in funny-shaped potatoes! The children suggested that the plants would need water and a sunny spot in the outdoor area. We can’t wait to follow their progress.

World Book Day

Thank you so much for all of the effort that went into costumes for World Book Day. Well done to Edie, who read us the story of The Ugly Duckling. I wonder which stories you might share at home this weekend?

….a basket appeared in RS. It contained a cake, a hooded red cape, an axe and a grandma. What were they doing in our classroom? Where had they come from?

The children guessed that the objects may be connected to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ – a popular traditional tale. We discovered that some of us were familiar with this story. We also discovered that we had different ideas about how the story unfolds. Over the course of the week, we discussed the beauty of traditional tales; they are passed down from generation to generation and the details change depending on who tells the story, creating many different versions. We don’t always need a book to experience the magic.

The children were invited to paint a wolf and to draw Little Red.

We have been reading and acting out lots of other traditional tales too. Zoe and Frankie enjoyed pretending that the book was the fox’s mouth and snapped the gingerbread man inside!

Which traditional tales do you enjoy at home? Maybe you could phone/FaceTime a relative and ask them to tell you their favourite from when they were younger?

Don’t forget….they all lived happily ever after. The end.

In Reception, maths involves lots of manipulatives and is very visual to support the children’s understanding of new concepts.

When considering the composition of 6, 7 and 8 this week, we have used ladybird outlines and the children explored how many spots (counters) could go on each wing. We then noted aloud what each part was and the whole; for example, 4 is a part and 3 is a part, the whole is 7.

Outdoors, we threw 6, 7 or 8 beanbags into a hoop and observed the split between how many beanbags were in/out.

As an introduction to pairs, we considered where we might find pairs: socks, shoes, earrings, scissors, swimming goggles, eyes, ears. Patterned socks and wellies were used to illustrate the concept of pairs. The children noticed that 2 socks make 1 pair, 4 socks make 2 pairs, 6 socks make 3 pairs and so on. This is particularly tricky to get our heads around so please do practise at home with family socks! We learned that 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 are even numbers because we can make pairs without any spare socks left over. When we have 3 socks, we can make 1 pair and there is 1 sock left over: 3 is an odd number.

Away from maths, the children were invited to make a love bug. Some of them chose to include a message of thankfulness, for the recipient, on the back.

Can you believe that we are half way through this Reception year? It’s always an opportune moment to reflect, with the children, on how much progress they have made since September. Well done, RS, and thank you to everyone at home for your support. Enjoy your week off.

This week we have been learning about Lunar New Year. We started by looking at the places in the world where many people celebrate Lunar New Year. We discovered that Lunar New Year is a celebration of a new moon every Spring. Families prepare by cleaning the house before putting up decorations: lots of red for luck and flowers as a reminder of Spring. On the morning of Lunar New Year, new clothes are worn to recognise the fresh start and children are given red envelopes containing money. Lanterns are made to symbolise the brightness of Spring and people offer good luck messages. Feasts with eight or nine (lucky numbers!) dishes are eaten. Families then go outside to watch the dragon parade and dancing. After the parade, there are firecrackers to deter bad spirits. Each year is named after an animal. I wonder if the children can recall why this is?

2025 is year of the snake so we have been learning lots of interesting facts about snakes.

Our beautiful lanterns required lots of precise cutting and stapler-support from Amy. Some children decided to make a snake too: joining the parts with treasury tags was challenging but great for developing our fine motor skills.

We enjoyed our own animal races in the outdoor area.

Thank you to Mr Chan for coming in to tell us how he has celebrated Lunar New Year with Ian and his family in Hong Kong.

Motivated by the RSPB big garden birdwatch, we have been learning all about our feathered friends.

We discovered, from an information video, that all birds: have feathers; lay eggs; have a beak instead of teeth and have wings (but not all birds fly). After enjoying the book, ‘A Busy Day for Birds’ by Lucy Cousins, we went on our own birdwatch around the school grounds. Can the children recall which birds they spotted in the sky or on the field and which birds they heard in the hedgerows?

To try and attract more birds to our class apple tree, we made bird cake. Here are the instructions if you want to make some at home.

The children were also invited to draw a bird.

Our class story invention this week featured Muffin, the Puffin, being rescued by his lifelong mate, Huffin.

Can the children tell you what happened?

How exciting to walk into assembly and discover that police officers, Sarah and Paul, had come to visit us in school. We thought about the questions we would like to ask them when it was our turn to go outside so that we could learn more about what the police do to help us.

During the visit, Sarah asked us which vehicles the police might use other than a van. Their favourite answer was from Emma, who thought that they might drive “Lamborghinis”. Sarah and Paul also loved the idea that there may be police camels, giraffes and cows when they asked which animals help the police with their work. We learnt that dogs and horses are used by the police but that Paul thought that “Giraffes is a great idea for looking in high places”.

We all had the opportunity to be ‘locked up’ in the back of the police van and were excited when the lights and sirens were switched on by Zoe and Lucas.

When we returned inside, we reflected on what we had learned about how the police help us.

Lucas recalled that, “the baddies go in the back and are locked in so they cannot escape”. “The uniform is bright yellow so we know they are there at night.” (Isaac). “If people hurt you, you use a shield to stop them.” (Ian) “The sirens are really loud.” (Reggie) “The sirens were so loud I had to put my fingers in my ears.” (Hector) “You ring 999.” (Coby) “Being an officer is good because you can catch baddies.” (Toby)

Thank you to Sarah and Paul for coming and for inspiring so many of us to say, “I want to be in the police when I grow up!”.