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!