Welcome to Reception class DT at Allerton CE Primary School in Leeds. Here, under the careful guidance of Miss Duba and Mrs Turner, we will blog to the Big Wide World.
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We have had a fantastic year filled with amazing memories together! Each one of us has grown, flourished and achieved so much and the Reception teachers are so proud! It has been a joy to see each child’s individual learning journey throughout our time together as RDT.
Here we are on our very last day in Reception. Who better to share the highlights of our year as RDT than the children themselves!
Luca: My first day at school.
Elielle: Drawing!
Hudson: Playing with my friends and making sandcastles.
Zayan: Making with lego!
Bonnie: Playing with my friends.
Sama: When the Police visited!
Hooriya: Playing Mummies and Daddies with skipping ropes outside.
Wednesday: Playing with friends.
Zidane: Building bridges with blocks!
Barkot: Playing in the sand and mud.
Toby: The Colour Run!
Arthur: Playing outside.
Maria: Playing with blocks.
Dayton: Playing outside on the bikes.
Hayyan: Playing statues!
Aiden: Playing with my friend in the playground.
Adrian: Playing with cars.
Thank you to each child in RDT and their families for helping to make it a wonderful Reception year together. We have made so many fantastic memories together and we can’t wait to watch you all continue to flourish as you move through school! You are all ACE!
We have had a fantastic time in RDT getting very creative for arts fortnight! We have so many budding artists in our class who spend time each day creating fantastic masterpieces when exploring provision, so it was wonderful to see children, staff and families collaborate to share and create a wonderful display of art together at our final celebration!
We shared our memories of looking out of the train journey, using our experiences and ideas to create detailed and colourful drawings of the view from the Knaresborough train window. We then displayed them in our train station role-play area to enhance our play experiences.
We used sponges to print vibrant landscapes and then used oil pastels to add the viaduct, as well as some finer details that we had remembered from our trip. We thought carefully about the lines and shapes needed to create these details on our landscapes and some of us created multiple curves with the pastels to add movement and give form to our viaduct! Take a look at our masterpieces!
We really enjoyed spending time in the hall learning our locomotion dance, where we used movement to retell our visit to Knaresborough! The fantastic routine was choreographed by Miss Fraser and we all worked really hard to learn the sequences of movement. We had lots of fun and showed big smiles as we danced! The performances during the celebration were fantastic and we even got our families and teachers to join in with us! We also enjoyed looking at a slideshow of photographs from our visit, which can be shared again at home on Tapestry.
We had a lovely time creating our own photo frames with our families and teachers in the outdoor classroom! We used collage materials to bring our own ideas to life and added a photograph from our Knaresborough trip in the middle to make a keepsake of our special day out.
We spent time in the art studio creating our own mosaics with our friends, families and teachers! We used our creativity and imagination to put our ideas on paper, exploring with a range of colours as we arranged and glued the tiles. We then took our fantastic mosaics home to share!
Thank-you to our families who joined us for our arts celebration today! It was wonderful to celebrate the children’s amazing artwork, in addition to making some beautiful art together at our special event!
This week in RDT we have been thinking ahead to when we move into Year 1 and getting ready for these changes with our ‘jump up’ days, where we spent time with our new teachers in our new classrooms. Although this is a very exciting time, we have also talked throughout the week about how we are feeling, as change can bring out many different emotions. We all thought about our favourite parts of our jump up days and shared them as we came back together in our RDT classroom. You could spend time this weekend talking together about thoughts and feelings linked to our transition to Year 1.
We started our week with a very hot day, so we enjoyed exploring water play together in the outdoor area! Using paintbrushes with water on the bikes captured our interest and this quickly developed into our own ACE Car Wash! We worked as a team as we played cooperatively to take on roles within the car wash and lined up our ‘cars’ to be cleaned. We used different types of paintbrushes and rollers to wash the bikes as we continued to develop narratives together. It was wonderful to see the children so engaged as they used their imagination to bring their ideas to life!
This week, we spent time writing letters to our Year 1 teachers. We thought about the things that we wanted to share and made our own plans on spider diagrams. We then used our plans when writing, referring back to our own ideas as we put them onto paper. We sent them to our new teachers on the jump up days!
We all enjoyed visiting our new Year 1 teachers and classrooms on our two whole-school ‘jump up’ days. When we returned, we all shared our favourite moments about each day to reflect on our experiences as a circle time activity. “I liked playing outside, lunch and playing teachers. And tidying up!”, said Hooriya. “We played basketball outside and played with tennis balls”, said Aiden. Zayan shared, “my favourite thing was playing Mummies and Daddies with Sama”. Sama agreed that it was her favourite part of the day too! Maria said, “My favourite was everything! We played with animals!”. Toby added that they also played with minibeasts. Dayton said his favourite part was, “playing with a huge dice”. Over the weekend, you could spend time sharing the highlights of our jump up days together!
We thought that the children themselves would be the best at sharing what happened in our three Year 1 classes on the jump up days! Here is what they had to say…
“We drew a self-portrait and we did all the planets to show where they live in the night sky! We had bananas and carrots for snack. It was Year 1 and Year 2 at lunchtime. We told the teacher what we are good at and the things we like. We did some writing about Little Rabbit Foo Foo. We had a dog called Isla and we stroked her!”
“We played with lego and it had tyres that could move. We made fives… one and four, three and two! We had a snack on the carpet. We drew a self-portrait on black paper and white card and coloured paper. We had breaktime, we played outside. We drew black skies with moons, stars and the wind in colours. To get pink, we mixed red and white pastels together!”
“We did writing about getting a star. We drew aliens and coloured them in. We did drawing. Then we went outside. We did skipping and football. We had some new friends. We looked at stories and played with our friends. We sat together to do drawings. We went to lunchtime and had a snack!”
We will continue to think about and discuss our move up to Year 1 over the next two weeks. Please continue to provide opportunity to share these thoughts and feelings at home too, and speak to a member of the Reception Team if you wish to discuss your child and their transition. We are incredibly proud of RDT and the confidence they showed when introduced to new people, places and experiences this week!
This week, we have focused on collaboration with team ant as our learning behaviour as we continue to build and develop relationships with others. Many of us are enjoying spending time in the construction area, creating fantastic collaborative creations with lego and wooden blocks as our ideas and interests come to life! We extended this by inviting the children to join in with different collaborative learning experiences throughout the week. Here are some examples of RDT have worked together as team ant!
We worked together to build different collaborative lego models this week, using our communication skills to make suggestions, share ideas and negotiate as we played. We showed high levels of engagement as we concentrated carefully on what we were doing, persevering until our ideas came to life and our fantastically-detailed models were finished! We reflected on how we had worked with others to create something wonderful in response to one of our key questions.
We are really enjoying representing our experiences of going to Knaresborough within our play. This, week we have been busy creating structures with wooden blocks to represent the castle and viaduct. Building these models involved us focusing carefully on what we were doing and showing a good awareness of one another to ensure each block balanced as we constructed. We applied our focused maths learning, as this learning experience required us to communicate effectively about the position and placement of the blocks we were using. We collaborated well to create some incredible masterpieces!
As we continued to focus on team ant and collaboration, we developed our understanding of this by playing some class games which involved teamwork and co-operation. We really enjoyed playing ‘bug in a rug’, where one of us hides under the rug and the rest work together to identify who it is. As we practised, we became quicker at spotting who was missing from the circle and showed great excitement when we got it right! We also played a pass the message game, where we had to listen carefully as we sent different messages around the circle. We are yet to get the correct message around the circle, so we will continue to play this game to practise. However, we had lots of fun laughing together at what the messages turned into!
Many of us showed an interest in playing group games and we developed this further by inviting the children to choose board games to play. We showed fantastic negotiation and turn-taking as we played, remembering the rules of the game and applying our maths skills to count our steps and points within the games. Snakes and ladders was the firm favourite!
On Friday, our school council planned a ‘one colour’ day to raise funds for our four house charities. Thank you for your voluntary donations towards this. They challenged us to collaborate and create a rainbow, which we did!
This week we have been incredibly busy practising, developing and applying our skills as ACE Writers! We have many keen writers in RDT and it has been wonderful to see the children producing some fantastic writing with both adult direction and independently within provision as they explore their own interests.
Our big question for this half-term is ‘Where can my imagination take me?’ as we focus on developing our sense of wonder. This week, we achieved this by innovating our talk for writing text, ‘The Bear and the Piano’. For our focused writing activity, we took the story and used our imaginations to make it our own! We then applied our phonics and writing skills to record our story on paper. Finally, we enhanced our innovated stories with our own detailed illustrations.
Our learning behaviour for this week is ‘collaboration’ and we worked together as a team to create our own cards whilst exploring provision, showing open hearts as we wrote kind messages inside and gave them as gifts. On Wednesday, it was Mrs Duba’s birthday, which inspired many of us to make a birthday card for her. For ‘Thank a Teacher’ day, we thought about how the adults around school help us and made thank-you cards to show our appreciation. It was wonderful to see the children inspired by the special events taking place and highly engaged as they created their beautiful cards!
Some of us in RDT are showing an emerging interest in role-playing schools, which quickly caught the attention of more of our friends, who also decided to join in as the week progressed. We are particularly interested in role-playing our read write inc sessions, meaning that we have been busy applying our phonics and writing skills during our co-operative play. We enjoyed writing on the whiteboards during our school role-play games, as we took on the roles of teachers and pupils!
On Friday, the weather was hot and we were invited to explore bubble making as a calm outdoor activity to help us keep cool. We used pipe cleaners to create bubble wands, bending and twisting them to form the correct shape as a fine-motor activity. Fine-motor experiences help us to strengthen our control as writers. We showed great perseverance as we shaped our bubble wands and tried to blow bubbles. We didn’t give up, even when it proved challenging, and the delight as we watched our bubbles form and fly away provided us with a moment of awe and wonder! Many of us chose to take our bubble wands home to continue to play with over the warm weekend, which can be dipped into a mixture of washing-up liquid and water to make more bubbles.
Enjoy the bubbles if you use your bubble wand this weekend! You could keep cool in the heat by creating some writing linked to your own interests or making another card for someone special to you. We would love to see your ACE writing on Tapestry to share together!
RDT has had a very busy and fun-filled week this week! Our special event was our adventure to Knaresborough, which took place on Wednesday and Thursday. We had a fantastic time together, doing a variety of different activities whilst we were there, which included visiting Knaresborough Castle, having a picnic together and sitting by the River Nidd to enjoy an ice-lolly. To fit in with our ‘On the Move’ topic, we enjoyed exploring different ways to travel during our special day out. We travelled by minibus, train and using our feet (which walked over 100 steps up to the castle!) where we watched little rowing boats move across the river below. Thank you so much to our families who helped by joining us on our trip, it was so lovely to have you with us and your help was invaluable!
We will share many more photographs of our adventure soon at our upcoming Arts Celebration! For now, look at our big smiles at Knaresborough Station and Castle!
This week, we spent time making cards for someone special. We each created a neat and detailed pen portrait to go on the front of our card and then used our writing skills to add a message on the inside. We will give our card to the special person that we have chosen at the weekend.
Some of us got to visit the cute, fluffy chicks in Nursery this week. We handled them really carefully and used a gentle hold when it was our turn to meet them. When we arrived, the chicks were snuggled together and sleeping, but soon woke up when they realised we were here! I think that they enjoyed the cuddles as much as we did!
On Friday, we enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine whilst playing outdoors. We explored different ways to move and showed skill in using different types of outdoor equipment. We had lots of fun skipping, riding the bikes and climbing on the climbing frames!
On Friday, our storytelling centred around a magic train ride, as we were still incredibly excited about our experience of travelling by train! We let our imaginations take us to exciting places on our journey, as we continue to develop our sense of wonder, and we had a go at writing the place names too. You could create another magic train ride story at home this weekend. I wonder which way you will choose to tell it!
This week we began to explore our new talk for writing text, the Bear and the Piano by David Litchfield. We have all enjoyed getting to know this beautiful story throughout the week. We started by sharing the story together to become familiar with it. We then worked collaboratively to act out the story as a class, remembering the key events, characters and phrases as we performed.
Which events in the story are we acting out here? Which characters can you see? You could act out the story again at home for your family or find another way to retell it over the weekend!
Look at our masterpieces! We really enjoyed creating our own detailed bear and woodland drawings this week as an introduction to our new text. We confidently made marks, lines and shapes to create our drawings, thinking carefully about which crayons to use when adding colour to our artwork. Some of us were then inspired to create additional bear-themed drawings throughout the week.
Throughout the week, many of us chose to share The Bear and the Piano with our friends in the reading area. We enjoyed looking at the beautiful illustrations and talking about the events in the story together. We also enjoyed listening to the story as a class during group time, answering questions about the text and joining in with familiar phrases. We were invited to write about how Bear was feeling when accessing provision, a challenge which we relished!
On Friday, we created a bear-themed story to link to what we have been learning this week. The heavy rain had captured our interests and some of us talked about an impending thunderstorm, so we incorporated this into our storytelling too. We applied what we had learned earlier in the week to carefully create life-like bear drawings within our story squiggles! Our storytelling focus will support us in our learning next week, when we begin to innovate The Bear and the Piano story in our talk for writing sessions.
We have really enjoyed getting to know our new talk for writing text this week. Over the weekend, you could create a story map or booklet to write your own version of The Bear and the Piano. We would love to see your fantastic stories on Tapestry to share together at school!
A highlight of our week this week was our Reception Sports Day! We have been working really hard throughout this half-term practising the races with Mrs Turner. We were all really excited for the big day and arrived in our house team colours on the day looking extremely excited! Our House Captains for Sports Day were Maria, Pia, Dayton and Bonnie!
We lined up ready to walk out onto the race track! We stood in our teams and practised waving to our families who were waiting to watch us. Some of us even had an extra job to do! Thank you to the children who ran twice in the races to make up the numbers!
We did all did fantastically well at remembering what to do in each race. We participated in six different races which required us to use a variety of different movement skills. Our Year 5 helpers did a fantastic job at setting up the races for us and helping us to know when it was our turn. We all tried our best to run fast and supported each other by cheering for our friends.
For the beanbag race, we had to take turns to run and throw a beanbag into the hoop. The next teammate then had to run back and collect it. Our teachers noticed a fantastic improvement in our throwing skills since we began practising the races!
It was then time for the relay race and we worked well in our teams to pass the baton when needed. We ran as fast as we could and impressed our families and teachers with our speedy sprints!
Our balancing skills were put to the test in the next race, when we had to walk carefully whilst balancing a quoit on our head. We walked carefully across the race track and showed perseverance when it was tricky! We continued to cheer on our friends and teammates!
One of the first races that we practised was the hoop race. Our practice paid off and we were very confident at threading the hoop over our bodies! We also mastered finding the correct coloured hoop for our house team!
The egg and spoon race was a firm favourite in RDT! We all demonstrated careful control as we walked down the race track and back balancing our eggs. We all had a can-do attitude and didn’t give up when the eggs dropped off. Once again, we all cheered excitedly for our friends as they raced!
After a big cheer for each team, we waited for the results. Each house team had collected lots of points in the races and everyone did a fantastic job at participating. Sunningdale won both for RDT and for the whole of Reception! Well done! It was then time to greet our families and enjoy an ice-cream as a post-Sports Day refreshment. Thank-you to our families who joined us to watch our Reception Sports Day! What a fantastic end to our half-term!
This week in RDT, we used our writing skills to answer our big question for this half-term, ‘How have I changed?’. Throughout this half-term, we have explored many different learning experiences which have helped us to reflect and think of our own answers to the question. We began the week by sharing the story, ‘Peepo!’ by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, as a starting point for our writing activity. We talked together about what the baby in the story was doing as we made links to our own knowledge and experiences of what babies do. We then reflected on what we have learned to do now that we are 4 and 5 years old. From this, we then planned the responses that we would write in answer to our big question by talking them through together.
We all had lots of fantastic ideas to share about how we have changed. We talked about how and where we eat now, where we sleep and the toys that we play with. Hooriya’s response to the question was, “When I was a baby, I had no hair and now I have hair. I could crawl but now I can walk. I can climb!”. Dayton said, “I couldn’t sit up or walk. Now I can walk, speed walk, jog, run and sprint!” We have certainly been utilising all of the skilful ways that we can now move as we practise our races for Sports Day!
We recorded our responses to the big question in our ACE Writer books. We worked really hard to write in full sentences, trying our best to remember a capital letter at the start, finger spaces and full stops where needed. Here are some of our reflections…
On Friday, we drew self-portraits to think about ourselves now as we further reflected on how we have changed. We focused on adding lots of detail to our drawings to make them more realistic. Look at our masterpieces!
This week, we potted our bean plants now that they are growing well. We have really enjoyed closely observing them in the plastic wallets and now we are excited to watch them as they continue to grow. Planting and growing our own bean plants has helped us to consider how other living things change over time as they grow.
This week in RDT, we have continued to explore our learning focus for this half-term, which centres on growth and change within living things. We have noticed and made changes to different things throughout the week to help us develop our understanding of this. We are learning to see how change can be positive and reflect on our journeys so far to help us feel proud of everything that we have achieved as we have grown. Looking at change, as well as noticing similarities and differences between different things, helps us to develop our understanding of the world.
At the start of the week, we embraced change at lunchtime when we had our first visit to the large playground. We had lots of fun trying out new activities with our friends and Year 6 buddies! We enjoyed dancing to the boom-box music, exploring new spaces and playing ball games together. Spending time in the large playground will help with our transition to Year 1 as we become familiar with new places and routines in school.
This week, we made our own changes to our talk for writing text by innovating the ‘How to Catch a Star’ story. We began by reflecting on our model text and made suggestions about how we could make changes to it. We came up with some fantastic alternatives, which included butterflies, spiders from Australia and unicorns! We then created our own plans in our ACE Writer books, using our drawing skills to innovate the story in our chosen way. We used our plan as a guide when writing our innovated story down on paper and then read it back to an adult once we had finished.
This week, we spent time looking at how our bean plants have changed by closely observing them. We used talk to describe what they look like now that they are growing. We came up with words like “spikey”, “split” and “curled” to describe what we could see. What a difference to how they looked on day one!
On Thursday, we had a ‘red, white and blue’ day to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of VE Day. We came to school wearing those colours and learned that this was to represent the union jack flag. Some of us decided to create our own union jack flags and bunting in the writing area whilst exploring provision. We used a photograph of a VE Day street party to develop our understanding that it happened a long time ago. We noticed many similarities and differences between then and now, sharing our ideas during a whole-class discussion. We first noticed that in the photograph were lots of children just like us, who were smiling and happy. We made links to our own lives by talking about our own experiences of going to parties and having party food just like in the photo.
We then thought about what was different and how life has changed since the photograph was taken. We looked closely at the clothes that the children were wearing and talked about how they were different. We noticed that the party was taking place in the middle of a road which prompted a discussion about road safety and how there are many more cars on the road now than there were back then. We also noticed that the photograph did not have any colour and discussed how cameras and photographs have changed over time. Some of us came to the conclusion that the children were wearing red, white and blue for the party just like us, even though we didn’t know for certain. We had so many wonderful thoughts to share about how life has changed since VE day!
Some of us decorated red, white and blue paper and made party hats, just like the children in the street party photograph were wearing!
Next week, we will be using the story ‘Peepo!’ to help us answer our big question, ‘How have I changed?’. We will be using our baby photos to reflect on how we have changed since being a baby. For our Friday storytelling activity, we decided to create a story about a baby. We used what we already know about babies to choose what would happen in our story. Some of us talked about our experiences of having baby siblings, cousins, neighbours and friends. In our story we included things like what a baby eats, where they sleep and the things they learn to do. This will help us next week when we start to compare what we did when we were babies to what we can do now.
We enjoyed having our Year 6 Storytelling Heroes help us scribe our stories when they came to visit us. As well as modelling how to write in longer sentences, they helped us to use our phonics skills to write down words and phrases ourselves. Our storytelling hero sessions are always a highlight of our week!
We’ve had a really busy week of noticing and making changes in RDT! Over the weekend, you could continue to reflect on our big question, ‘How have I changed?’ by looking with your family at photographs and talking about how much you have grown. You could use things like teddies and toys or clothing that you have outgrown to help you think about how you have changed and anything which might still be the same. We look forward to hearing your thoughts next week!