Reception

Reception, Sue Hayward has been reading your blog page and write the following,

Dear Reception G and B

You have been busy haven’t you? I am so glad that you enjoyed your visits to the Wetland Centre.

I know that the ducks were very pleased that you went to see them.

The bus driver was so pleased with how polite you were when you got on and off the bus. Did you have to wait long for the bus to arrive?
I was very pleased that you had your rain coats on and some of you were wearing welly boots too….what a good idea! Perhaps when you go on your next trip the sun will be shining!

I’ll pop in to your rooms and have a look at the frog work you have been doing.

Mrs Hayward

24th February 2012

Welcome back to school Reception B and G! We hope you are all well recovered and have rested lots, ready for our new topic – Dungeons and Dragons!!!

We have been reading a story called ‘In the Castle’, which follows the life of a little boy who is the King’s nephew, who is learning to become a heroic knight. We have learnt what a castle is for and about the different parts of a castle, such as the tower and drawbridge. We have also talked about who lives in the castle such as princesses, kings, queens, servants, knights, cooks and jesters and have found out what their job is in the castle. We have played with the small world castle and used puppets and dolls to make up our own stories.

We then looked carefully at the amour that Knights wear and why they need to be protected. The children have been very excited by this and made their own shields and swords out of the construction toys. We then went outside and used the big building blocks to build a big castle. Again we thought about the parts that it needed, a moat, drawbridge, turrets, walls, doors and towers. Reception G made a castle and then Reception B also did, and so we tried to invade our enemy’s castle using the pretend shields, swords and crowns we had made! We role played and acted as kings, queens, princesses, knights and servants in our big castles outside.

Reception G have a fantastic new castle role play area and Reception B have an overgrown forest role play area. Come and have a look! If you have any creative ideas or objects that could go inside these areas, let us know!

Sophie, Miss Goulden, Tara and Nisreen.

10th February 2012

Hello everyone!

This week we made spider biscuits by covering biscuits with black icing sugar and adding on sweetie legs. We counted how many we needed altogether and as we decorated it, we worked out how many more legs we needed to add on. We also made clay bugs by moulding, pressing, pushing, squeezing and rolling clay into different body shapes. We added lollipop legs and when the models were dry we decorated them using paint. Both Reception B and G made a HUGE group papier mache spider, using mud rock, bendy straws, newspaper and plaster. We had to take it in turns to work and discuss how we would make it. Come and have a look at our spiders each one is hanging from the wall!!

We also used the beebots and remote control bugs to develop out ICT skills. We used the beebots (programmable toys) to give directions and instructions using important words such as left, right, up and down. We also had to say how many spaces were needed to give clear instructions to our friends. We used the remote control bugs to navigate our way around a range of maps and used positional language to describe where objects were.

Enjoy your half term holiday and we shall see you when you return, well rested and excited for the new topic! Remember you can visit https://fronter.com/lbhf/ at home, with your new password and username now, to play on some numeracy and language games!

Have fun!

Sophie, Miss Goulden, Tara and Nisreen

27th January 2012

Hello everyone!

This week we have been learning about Chinese New Year and how some people celebrate this throughout the world.

Both Reception B and G read the Chinese New Year story, which is called ‘The Great Race’ and listened carefully to the order of the animals in the story. We put the order of the numbers in the correct sequence. We also discussed if the story was fair or unfair and what we would have done to solve the Emperor’s problem. We then pretended to have a Great Race in PE and raced each other to see who was the fastest of us all. Both classes talked about the Chinese traditions that some people have at Chinese New Year, such as red packets, red decorations, lion dances and lanterns. We also all tried Chinese foods, by tasting noodles, beansprouts, stir fry noodles with vegetables, chestnuts, bamboo shoots and prawn crackers! We all absolutely loved the tasty stir fry noodles, with soya sauce!

In Reception B’s music and movement session in the attic we listened carefully to music from different cultures and used our bodies to move imaginatively to the music, thinking about high, low, fast and slow movements. We watched a video of a Chinese New Year Lion dance, listened to the loud clanging music they dance to and tried to move our bodies like a lion in groups of 3. We also danced imaginatively to other pieces of music from China, such as Chinese lullabies and Chinese pop music. Reception G made Chinese dragons using a range of materials and tools and decorated them using red, yellow and gold colours.

Kung Hei Fat Choy!

Sophie, Miss Goulden, Nisreen and Tara

Friday 20th January 2012

Hello there! We have been getting really excited about our new topic Creepy Crawlies this week. The children have all been very enthused and responsive to this topic, talking lots about bugs and animals.

This week we have all been on a trip to the local community by visiting the pet shop! Both Reception B and G really enjoyed looking and talking about the different colours, shapes, sizes and feel of the animals and finding out what the shopkeeper needs to do in the pet shop.

Reception G read the story The Very Busy Spider and used hand puppets and words from the text to retell the story in the correct order. They also used their PSRN skills to share out the spiders equally onto 4 webs. The children also wrote alliterative poems about creepy crawlies by thinking of words that start with the same sound such as slimey slug! We also have a new role play area where we can use tools such as the magnifying glasses to investigate all the different bugs. They also made clay bugs thinking carefully about the characteristics of each bug, such as number of legs and learning new vocabulary such as antennae and wings. Come and have a look at their great clay models of spiders, snails, worms and butterflies. Reception G also have begun to make a talking book using the facts and information that they know about different bugs and animals. They planned what they were going to say and recorded their voices to make an information book. Please do come and listen to our non-fiction book!

Reception B read The Bad-Tempered Ladybird and talked about the importance of sharing, being kind and not fighting with each other. We used puppets made out of pictures on lollipop sticks to sequence the story and put the animals in order. We used speech used by the characters and language from the story such as ‘in the light of the moon…’ to retell the story in small groups. In our music and movement session we moved and danced like the animals from the story and talked about which instruments reminded us of each animal. We used the shaker to sound quiet and slow like the snake, the wooden sticks to sound like the fast snapping of the lobsters claws, the tamborine to sound fast like the wings of the wasp and the cymbal as the loud splash of the whale! We have also counted the number of legs on each of the bugs to solve which bug had the most and the least legs. Come and look at our green topic books to see our learning and do pop in to see our new pet shop role play area!

We can’t wait to tell you what we get up to next week in our learning! Come back to the blog to find out next week.

Sophie, Tara, Claire and Nisreen

Monday 9th January 2012

A Very Happy New Year to everyone! We hope you enjoyed your break! It is great to see everyone back and also have some new faces join our classes….how exciting!

Since returning to school both reception classes have been getting to know one another by playing lots of circle time games such as hiding objects, name games and guess the instrument. The new children have been exploring our classrooms and have settled in very well. Much of that has been down to our older reception children who have been helpful, kind and sharing with the younger children – well done! Reception B have had lots of leaves added to their friendship tree, come and find out how and why we are such good friends in our class. Both reception classes have been exploring the tools and materials in the art area and have used these to make some fantastically creative constructions and artwork.

Our new topic is Creepy Crawlies and we are beginning to learn about bugs such as, beetles, slugs, spiders, bees, snails, butterflies and caterpillars. Both reception classes have made up some funny, clever and some silly alliterative bug poems. We did this by thinking about what words started with the same letters such as ‘slithering snail’ and ‘ beautiful butterfly’.

Reception G explored creepy crawly bugs by using magnifying glasses and non-fiction books. They have been learning some facts about bugs and finding out how a story book is different from an information book. They also looked closely at the different features, colours and the number of legs of the bugs. Also as it is maths week we have been solving number problems such as ‘how many legs are there altogether on a spider and beetle?’.

Both classes have been painting pictures of ladybirds by counting the number of spots on each wing, finding out what one more would be such as ‘what if we added one more spot, how many are there now?’ and finding out how many spots there are altogether by writing picture number sentences.

Stay posted to find out lots more exciting learning and fun things that we have been getting up to in reception!

Sophie, Miss Goulden, Tara and Nisreen.

Wednesday 7th December 2011

Hello there!

Our reception children have been very VERY busy in the last few weeks! They have been using the projector and screen to explore light and colours, by putting different coloured paper in front of the screen. Reception B were really good at using this to make art designs by overlapping sheets of acetate (plastic) and placing them in different places to make art just like Kandinsky or Matisse that we looked at last week. The children also used the projector and screen to investigate shadows by thinking about how a shadow is made and how to make shadows bigger and smaller. They also used a variety of puppets to tell stories. Reception G were great at making up their own interesting stories about all sorts of animals, monsters and characters and they made up many different, exciting plots!

We have looked closely at three story books recently. We read Peace At Last and used the musical instruments to create the sounds in the book such as the ‘tick, tock’ of the clock and the ‘drip, drip’ of the tap. Reception G took photos of their role play and recorded these sounds onto their talking book – please come into their classroom and listen to their story! Last week we read Oliver’s Wood and reception were able to retell the story in the correct order using puppets, drama and language from the text. This week we read Whatever Next a story about making a rocket and flying to the moon! Reception acted out this story and made huge rockets out of recycled materials. Reception B recorded their retelling of this story onto a talking book and made their own story books to retell this tale too.

We are also very excited about our nativity next week and have been practicing lots! We can’t wait to see you there!

Sophie, Miss Goulden, Tara and Nisreen

20th Novemeber 2011

Hello everyone! What a busy week we have had. We have been artists!

We have been learning all about colours this week. We looked at a rainbow and tried to name all the colours we knew, then we learnt some new colour names such as indigo and violet. We have learnt that those names describe different types of purple and that we can also use lighter and darker to describe the shade of colours. We also learnt how to mix the primary colours to make purple, orange and green and how to make colours lighter or darker using white or black paint.

Then we looked closely at and talked about how three different artists used different shades of colours and shapes in their artworks. We looked at Mondrian, he uses black lines to make squares and rectangles some of which are red, blue, yellow and white. Next we looked at ‘the snail’ by Matisse who made a collage using cut out shapes. Then we looked at Kandinsky who used different sized and coloured circles in his artworks. We used these ideas to be artists ourselves and worked in the art workshop to create our own fantastic pieces of art!

Finally, we looked at the artwork of Pollock, who drips and splashes paint and Rothko, who used watery paints. We worked in groups in the outside area, to create our artworks this time. We loved splashing, dripping, flicking, pouring and splatting the paint!

Please do come into our classrooms and see these wonderful artworks on display or in our special books! We are very proud of our creativity!

Sophie and Miss Goulden

7^th November 2011

Hello there everyone!

Reception has had a super start to this half term, beginning with our trips to i-space! We had a fantastic time in this ICT space, which was bright red because of all the lights! We played interactive computer games that were projected onto the walls and the floors, such as splat the frog. We also programmed toys to move forwards, backwards and to rotate. Then we used the computers to create a picture – our children in reception are very good at using the computers and sometimes taught the grownups what to do! We have put the children’s amazing pictures into their special books, so please do come in to have a look at their creativity!

Reception B have been learning about the names of our body parts and our five senses – such as our sense of smell which we used to investigate paints which smelt of things like washing up liquid, orange and strawberry! We then talked about how to keep our bodies healthy and which foods are healthy and non-healthy. The children were good at giving reasons why we shouldn’t eat too many sweets or cakes such as our teeth will rot and we won’t be able to run or play. To celebrate healthy eating, we made banana and strawberry smoothies!

Reception G also made a healthy snack of pizza pitas with mushrooms, tomato puree and cheese which were very tasty – yum yum! This week Reception G were really interested and excited about Halloween, they decorated pumpkin faces and made up their own very scary and spooky stories about ghosts, monsters and witches. Please come and read their stories and be spooked! Boo!

Sophie and Miss Goulden

30th September

Wow what a busy few weeks we have had! Last week we went shopping in small groups to North End Road to visit the market and the supermarket. We bought food to use in our cooking and art activities. We squeezed the oranges we bought and tasted our home made juice, we have made fruit salad and we learnt how to use tools safely, such as a peeler, knife and grater to make some fresh salad.

We sat around our ‘talking table’ and drew pictures and wrote labels and talked to our friends about our trips.

We have learnt that some food grows on trees, such as apples. oranges and bananas and that some food grows underground, such as carrots and potatoes. We have planted some cress and we are looking after herbs in the classroom.

Come and have a look at our interactive topic table and our fantastic ‘yum yum’ display.

Please have a look at what we will be learning over the next half term. Our topic is called ‘Yum Yum’. Click here to see this.

Friday 9th September 2011

WELCOME BACK EVERYBODY!

I hope you all had a lovely summer holidays and did lots of fun and exciting things to keep you busy. We have had a lovely first week back at school and well done to all the children in Reception who have settled in so well.

Our topic for this half term is called Yum Yum! We will be talking about our favourite foods and discussing our likes and dislikes, we will be finding about where our food comes from and we will learn about healthy foods that are good for our bodies.

This week we have been reading the story of ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and have talked about all the different foods the caterpillar ate. We have used lots of different materials to make a caterpillar collage and we have used shapes to print our own caterpillars using repeated patterns. We had a messy time using touch and smell to explore different food, such as jelly, rice, spaghetti and pasta and we mixed dough to roll out long and short caterpillars.

Watch this space and we will put up photographs to show you how busy we have been!

Miss Goulden

>;Thursday 16th June

Wow Reception, it sounds like you are learning lots. Your rumble in the junge sounded very exciting. Did you have any scary tigers hiding in your book corner or slippery snakes in you sand tray? I hope not! Also, the painting ‘Surprised’ is one of my favourite and I remember taking my first ever class at Sir John Lillie to see it at the National Art Gallery in Traflagar Square. Keep up all the brilliant work!

Mr Duffy.

Click here to view Reception’s topic web for Splish, splash, splosh!

Friday 10th June

Welcome back everybody! I hope you all had a fun and busy half term. In Reception we are just finishing our ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ topic. We have loved our jungle role play area and camouflage cover, where we have been busy retelling and making up stories using the jungle animal puppets and small world animals. We are able to talk about and describe different animals, looking at the patterns on their fur and identifying features, such as claws, whiskers, trunks and horns.

We have talked about the painting ‘Surprise’ by Rousseau and we used the painting as the starting point for our class story about Jeff the tiger, who ran away from the jungle and came to Hammersmith! We then made up our own stories and wrote captions and drew pictures about different jungle animals.

We have also looked at lots of different information books. We know that we can use information books to help us learn new facts and we know that they have contents pages to help us find information quicker. We can use the contents page to say which page number we need to go to.

We have also been busy with our Maths learning. We are getting much better at using our fingers and objects to help us solve addition and subtraction problems. We have been buying items in our role play shop and we can add together the cost of two items, by counting the total number of coins.

Our new topic is called ‘Splish Splash’. We will be learning all about water, including finding out about the seaside and ponds, investigating floating and sinking and exloring melting and freezing. Let us know if you have any other ideas of what we can learn about to do with water.

Friday 1st April

This week we have been listening to and reading the story ‘The Gruffalo’. We can talk about and describe the characters and we have made booklets to draw and label the different characters in the story. We have also made a large group collage of The Gruffalo, using lots of different materials, including tissue paper, furry fabric, sacking, paint and leather. We are even learning a Gruffalo song as well.

We have also been finding out about other creatures that live in woods, including all the tiny mini-beasts and creepy-crawlies that might be hiding there! We have been looking at non-fiction books about insects and using the contents page to find out new facts and information. We even had a visit from Mrs. Allen’s giant snails and used magnifying glasses to look really carefully. Next week is our Early Years show and we will be singing our new song and showing some of our work, so come along and watch us!

Friday 18th March

Reception G have had such a busy start to the term! Our new topic is called ‘In the Deep Dark Woods’ and we love our new forest role play area where we have puppets and toys of woodland animals. We have read the stories ‘Oliver’s Wood’ and ‘Owl Babies’ and have been learning about nocturnal animals that only come out at night. We are getting really good at listening to stories and we can talk about the characters, settings and main events.

This week we have dressed up and acted out the stories of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’, why don’t you come and have a look at all our work in the classroom and in our special books.

Friday 11th February

Well done to everyone who has been learning their keywords at home, I have been really impressed with how Reception G are getting on with their reading!

This week Mrs. Carpenter has been taking out groups to go shopping on North End Road. They have come back with bread, rice, pasta and lots of different fruit and vegetables, which we have been trying at snack time this week. Everyone was really brave trying new things, we especially liked the dragon fruit. We have also been learning about where food comes from before it reaches the shops. We know that lots of food, such as wheat, milk and eggs comes from a farm. We have even had a go at making our own bread!

We have also had a visit from Zoe, our school nurse and she has been talking to us about how important it is to wash our hands properly!

Monday 7th February

This week we have been learning about food from around the world. We have read and acted out the story ‘Handa’s Surprise’ using masks and food props and we made our own fruit salad, which was delicious!

We have been talking about different celebrations and discussing what we celebrate with our families. We then learnt lots of interesting information about Chinese New Year and we tried eating some noodles and bean sprouts using chopsticks. Reception G made a fantastic Chinese dragon and we listened to Chinese music and played instruments and did a dragon dance!

Friday 28th January

We have had a very busy week in Reception G, we have been talking about how we need food to help us grow and to be healthy. We have drawn around ourselves and labelled parts of the body, we have also measured different parts of our body to make life size stick people, come in and see them in our classroom. We have also made a lovely 3D display of a vegetable patch and talked about vegetables that grow under the ground and vegetables that grow above ground. We can even name some foods that are good for ourselves.

Yesterday we went to the i-space on Kingwood Road and explored their interactive ICT space as well as using a paint programme to draw pictures. Reception G were absolutely brilliant on the walk there and back and made both myself and Mrs. Carpenter very proud!

Thursday 20th January

Please find attached our learning plan for this half term. Click here to view this.

Also, see some of our pictures which we have taken of our classrooms.

We have really enjoyed the story of the Hungry Caterpillar and made a collage of a caterpillar using different media and made caterpillar prints using circles and rectangles. We made butterfly paintings, which we folded in half and we noticed that the butterfly was symmetrical with the same pattern on both sides.

Friday 14th January

Welcome back to everybody after the holidays and a special welcome to all our new children and families. Reception G have settled in so well to their new class and have made Miss Goulden and Mrs. Carpenter very proud.

Reception G’s topic is called Yum Yum and we have had lots of fun exploring messy food such as jelly, rice andcold spaghetti as well as talking about what food we like and dislike. We have been reading the story The Hungry Caterpillar and even made up our own dance showing how he changed from the caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. We have made fruit and vegetable prints and have been collecting the pips from our fruit at snack time. I wonder what will happen if we planted them!

Read our blog again to find out what we will be doing next week. Miss Goulden

Thursday 20th May

Yesterday Reception J went to the butterfly house at the Natural History museum.The children really enjoyed themselves and their behaviour was excellent. The butterfly house was really hot and we saw some amazing butterflies. When we got back to school we had packed lunch and then we released our class butterflies

Thank you Reception J for a lovely day out!!!

Jane Llewellyn

Friday 7th May

We have had another busy week. We made some Very Hungry Hungry Caterpillar Books. We have some caterpillars in our class room and we have been watching them grow and change. They have turned into cocoons now and we are waiting for them to turn into beautiful butterflies.

Here is our topic web, which details the activities and learning that will be taking place in our reception classes.

Click here to see Reception J topic web

Click here to see Reception C topic web

Jane and Jagdeep

Wednesday 31st March
The children in Reception J brought in some teddy bears to play with. The children also enjoyed cooking with Jagdeep and they made yummy Easter nests out of chocolate

Thursday 25th March
Yet another busy week. We have been learning some new songs for the musical extravaganza next week. Today we had a parents meeting so our parents and carers could find out how to help the children with phonics and reading.
Jane Llewellyn. Reception J

Tuesday 16th March

Last week our story book was the Three Little Pigs. In our class we had some straw, some sticks and a brick. We huffed and puffed and we could blow the straw and the sticks off the table, but we couldn’t blow the brick off.

Tuesday 2nd March

Its great to be back after half term. This term our topic is “Traditional Tales”.

We have been doing lots of great art work and our classroom looks fantastic, we love working and playing there.

Jane and Jagdeep

Monday 25th January

Reception J had another busy week. Mrs Carpenter read one of the “Funnybones” books and everyone made a skeleton. On Wednesday the children had their school photos taken and everyone looked really smart in their uniforms. Our homework was to find out who are the tallest and shortest people in our families.

Mrs Llewellyn

Monday 18th January 2010

Our topic web for this half term.

Friday 15th January 2010

This week in Reception C the children have been learning about the story ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

They have been printing leaves to make their own beanstalks which will be displayed in the classroom.

The children have planted their own seeds in groups and we will be looking forward to them sprouting, they have also worked very hard making their own book of instructions for growing a plant.

Last week the children discussed the story ‘The gingerbread man’ and made them this week in cooking. Many of the children were worried that they were going to run away which was very sweet.

The children have been learning how to log onto the computers at school and have been using the paint programme very well.

Have a good weekend

15th January 2010

Reception J are settling in well and Jagdeep and Jane are are really pleased with ALL the children. Our topic for this half term is “All About Me”. We will be finding out about how to stay healthy. We will also be finding out about our families and the different ways we celebrate with our families.

Hello and welcome to Reception’s blog page.

Miss Campbell, Mrs Llewellyn and Jagdeep are our teachers!

At the moment in Reception we are learning ‘Festivals, light and colour’.

This week Reception have been learning about different sources of light and enjoyed hunting around the school to investigate.

The children have painted some beautiful sunset pictures which we have displayed very proudly around the classroom.

We have been discussing nocturnal animals and how they differ from animals that are awake during the day. The children drew pictures using chalk and black paper.

This week we changed our role play area to a ‘party land’ which the children are respecting and thoroughly enjoying

M