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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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!
Our talk for writing text for this half-term is ‘How to Catch a Star’ by Oliver Jeffers. This week, we have been very busy getting to know the story in many different ways. By doing this, we have really developed our understanding of what happens in the story, as well as introducing ourselves to the key characters, events and phrases within it.
We started by looking at the book together as a class and listening to the story during carpet time. It was familiar to some of us and a new story for others, but we all enjoyed sharing it together. We then began to learn how to tell the story ourselves…
We then retold the story using our class story map as a prompt. As we talked through the sequence of events, we worked together to think creatively about how we could use body actions to represent the words within each sentence. In each talk for writing session, we added more to our story and came up with actions to represent what was happening. Our story map is displayed on our class washing line to remind us of our story and inspire us to retell it again. You could follow the map to remember our actions and retell the story to your family over the bank holiday weekend!
Which words in the story are we acting out here?
This week, we recalled events from the story as a writing activity. We used the illustrations from the book to help us recall and sequence the events correctly. We formed our sentences using colourful semantics, applied our phonic knowledge to write down each word and tried hard to remember finger spaces between words and full stops at the end of sentences. Some of us had a go at using capital letters at the start of our sentences too! We used our drawing skills to add an illustration to our writing and practised reading our own work once we had finished.
When exploring provision, we were invited to create our own detailed star and rocket drawings. We used our fine-motor skills to form careful lines and shapes when drawing. We were incredibly proud of our artwork and decided to put them on display in our classroom. Many of us continued to create more fantastic star, rocket and space themed drawings throughout the week!
We have really enjoyed getting to know the ‘How to Catch a Star’ story this week in RDT! Next week, we will apply what we have learned as we begin to make changes and innovate the story. You could start to imagine how the story could be changed over the weekend and retell it to your family with a new character, setting or event. This week we have learned how the boy caught a star – how would you catch one?
This half-term, our learning theme in Reception is ‘Growing’! This week, we started our exploration of this through a variety of exciting learning experiences! We will continue to discover much more about our new theme throughout the half-term. By looking at how ourselves and our friends have grown and changed, in addition to discovering how plants and other animals grow over time, we will develop our understanding of the world. We will develop a sense of time as we reflect on our own past and present experiences, as well as learning more about the natural world around us as we look at how different plants and animals grow.
At the start of the week, we each planted our own bean, which we will closely observe as it grows. We put our beans into plastic wallets to help us see how the entire plant changes over time and learned that our plants will need water from a wet paper towel to help them grow. We stuck our plants on our classroom window as we also learned that they need sunlight to grow. Here are our bean plants on day 1! We are really looking forward to noticing how they change over time.
We extended our interest in how plants grow by spending lots of time in our new ACE Garden Centre this week! Whilst exploring our new role-play area, we had lots of fun taking on the role of shopkeepers and customers; counting coins, writing receipts, making price labels and reading signs as we played co-operatively. We also had plenty of opportunity to engage in sensory experiences and fine-motor activities through exploratory play with a variety of different seeds, beans and tools.
Over the holidays, we asked for our RDT families to send in baby photos to help us reflect on how we have changed. Sharing these wonderful photos has certainly been a highlight of our week! We enjoyed playing a ‘guess who’ game as a circle time activity, where we guessed who the babies were. We were quick to spot some of our friends and others were trickier to recognise! Our big question for this half term is, ‘How have I changed?’, so during the game we began to share our thoughts and ideas about how we have all changed since we were babies. We also thought about how much we have grown and all of the things that we have learned to do over time. If you have not yet sent in a baby photo of your child and would like to, please upload one to Tapestry, email one to the school office or speak to a member of the Reception Team if you require any help with this.
RDT have had a very busy week! We can’t wait to see how our bean plants will change over time as they grow. We are also looking forward to thinking more about how we have changed over time, as we reflect on our own past and present experiences. We will continue to have lots of fun in our ACE Garden Centre, applying what we learn in our play as we discover more about how plants grow. What an exciting start to our half-term and new learning focus!
We have been very busy exploring ‘journeys’ as our learning focus this half-term in Reception! In week 1, we were introduced to our RDT explorer bears: Scott Bear, Oates Bear and Cook Bear. We then had a very important job to do! We spent our half-term taking our explorer bears on exciting journeys around the local area and beyond. The bears have had a fantastic time going on adventures with RDT each weekend!
Cook Bear had a fantastic time going on car journeys and a trip to the local cinema, as well as having a delicious picnic lunch! He also visited Roundhay Park, joined one of our friends on their swimming lesson and rode a horse at the National Coal Mining Museum! One weekend, Cook Bear helped to do the supermarket shopping followed by a relaxing trip to a coffee shop for hot chocolate and muffin! He also visited Almscliffe Cragg and had dinner at a chinese restaurant on the way home! One night he enjoyed the warmth of a bonfire. What a busy time he has had!
Some of us drew maps to show Cook Bear’s travels with RDT. Follow the map to work out where he went on this journey with one of our friends!
Scott Bear had a very busy time with some of our friends in RDT! He visited some a local shop and a dentist to learn more about places within our community. He also had a fantastic time joining in with some new activities which included a football training session, a swimming lesson and a ballet class. Cook Bear also travelled further afield to Harewood House, Valley Gardens in Harrogate and Almscliffe Cragg! He shared stories with Cook Bear about the breath-taking views from the top! He must be feeling very tired now after going on so many exciting journeys over the half-term!
Oates Bear enjoyed a walk in the woods, a dip in a swimming pool and a visit to see some exotic animals at Tropical World! He also had a very special job in preparing one of our RDT friend’s home for Ramadan! When Oates Bear returned to our classroom, he did a fantastic job at helping our friend to explain what Ramadan is and how many families prepare for this important event. Oates Bear has one more journey to make over the Easter Holidays and we can’t wait to hear all about it when we return to school!
Thank-you to our RDT friends and their families for taking our explorer bears on so many exciting journeys this half-term! They have had a fantastic time and we have all loved sharing their adventures in class together. The explorer bears are now very tired and in need of a rest, but they are looking forward to hearing all about the journeys and adventures that RDT will go on during the Easter Holidays!