Autumn 2011-2011

This year has been very busy so far. We have worked very hard on our topics 'Ourselves' and 'Light and Dark'. We had lots of fun during our first few weeks at school getting to know each other and learning each others names. We also had fun learning about our school and going on walks around the field, especially when we were looking for conkers for our Autumn display.

We have shown off our creative sides by painting self portraits. Having access to the painting easel during our child initiated play is great fun, and we have already made good progress with controlling our painting tools, which is great for our fine motor development!

For our light and dark topic we have been reading Owl Babies, using props to re-tell the story. We enjoyed learning about different nocturnal animals, and really enjoyed using torches with colour cellophane in the den we made in the classroom. Another favourite story from our topic is Can't You Sleep Little Bear? We made a light and dark display showing our colourful Elmer pictures and also our firework pictures. It was fun listening to each other talking about experiences of Bonfire Night.

We have also been doing lots of reading to practise blending our letter sounds. We are working on reading our Humpty word wall words, so that we can read the high frequency words for Reception. We have also started to write these words, and other words we can sound out. Soon we will be using these words to write sentences, which we are very excited about!

We are very busy during our numeracy sessions, learning to recognise numbers and then order them correctly. We also enjoy learning how to create repeating patterns. We began by creating 2 colour repeating patterns, and when we want a real challenge we are trying to create repeating patterns using colours and 2D shapes! We've also been using our beebots to practise using directions and use positional language. We're also developing our ICT skills using our digital cameras and metal detectors outside, lots of fun! We love searching for the magnetic letters in the sand and putting them together to blend and make words.

Here is a link to numeracy targets and activities to try at home for children in reception. ACTIVITIES

We have taken part in a Christmas tree festival at a local church in town. We each decorated a salt dough star to hang. Have a look, do you like it? What do you think we called the tree?

We have also changed our classroom home corner into a post office, so that we can link lots of areas of learning to our theme. We have lots of writing activities, and we love to could out stamps, as well as weigh various sized parcels to help Postman Pat.