There’s ‘snow’ such thing as bad weather in Reception this week as blizzards and ice became part of our learning experiences an
d the topic of conversation. We have talked about wrapping up warm and looking after our hats, gloves and scarfs so that they do not get lost and how to stay safe when walking around the school on slippy and frozen ground.
We have been very impressed at how many children have completed the rainbow challenges this week, 35 children in total. Fantastic! Let’s see how many more children can challenged themselves next week.
Our story this week has been “Spots or Stripes?” – a tale about two jungle animals (tiger and leopard) who upset the other animals by having a rather loud and messy disagreement on whether spots or stripes are better. To solve this problem and stop any animal bickering in the future the children discussed in small groups who could be King or Queen of the jungle and help restore order. For this they had to choose an animal (eg – Crocodile) and give reason why they would make a good king or queen (eg – they can snap their sharp teeth together to tell the animals to 
stop).
In maths we were measuring animals to tell a zoo keeper how long they are so that he/she can make a box just long enough. The children learnt to use non-standard measures to give their measurements a quantitative record.
Next week:
Our focus will be Zoo animals and our class book will be Zoology – a fantastic and large encyclopedia about animals.
Adult Led Group time: The children will be improving their observational drawing skills by looking closely at the features of animals.
Phonics: Our sounds will be ‘oo’ and ‘ar’. Please note the ‘oo’ digraph can make two different sounds – for example ‘oo’ as in ‘b-oo-k’ or ‘oo’ as in ‘z-oo’.
Maths: Our zoo animals are coming into the vet and need to be weighed so that the zoo keeper knows how much medicine is needed! The children will be practising to use balance scales and cubes to measure how heavy their animals are.
Rainbow Challenges:
Red: Making habitats (drawing or junk modelling)
Green: Constructing a model zoo. Thinking carefully about the size of enclosures and layout.
Blue: Measuring animals and other objects to see how long they are. (measuring with cubes, Dienes, jewels)
Yellow: Writing a fact page about an animal of their choice – we will collate all of these made to make our own class zoology book.
Purple: Outside challenge. Going on an animal safari. Spotting animal signs outside and moving as that animal.
This is a useful link that explains the rules for travelling with children in cars:
https://www.gov.uk/child-car-seats-the-rules