We have had a wonderful couple of weeks in Reception; we have celebrated International day and our end of term topic ‘Trinidad and Tobago’ with a carnival.  In phonics, we have consolidated our knowledge of special friends ‘ay’, ‘ee’, ‘igh’, ‘ow’, ‘oo’ (‘Poo at the zoo’) and ‘oo’ (look at a book’). We are so proud of the children’s reading progress and their ability to apply this new phonic knowledge to simple sentence writing. In maths, we’ve been introducing new vocabulary such as ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’. The children have compared different quantities and used sentence stems to describe how many objects there are, such as ‘Sam has fewer trucks than Pat’. We have also used mathematical language such as ‘equal’ to say whether a group has the same number of objects or not.  

During International day, the children were put into groups and were able to move around the Reception environment to explore and enjoy a carousel of activities from Russia, Punjab, Somalia, and South Africa. The children thoroughly immersed themselves in biscuit decorating, learning dance moves, playing musical instruments, learning new languages and playing traditional games. During snack time, the children were excited to try some welsh cakes and learn some welsh words! The afternoon concluded with the whole year group learning a song from Texas and watching a performance of Indian dancing from two of our students at The Vineyard school. Thank you to all of the parents who volunteered last week - it was such an enjoyable afternoon! 

We concluded this half term with a steel pan workshop on Monday. The children had the opportunity to learn how to play the steel pan and also learn about the history of the steel pan drums. The children had lots of fun and put on a wonderful performance for us at the end of the workshop. We ended the week with a fun carnival to conclude our topic of ‘Trinidad and Tobago’. The children designed and created their own carnival headdress and we paraded around the whole school to show our brightly coloured clothes and amazing headdresses. 

Thank you for your continued support this half term. We hope you have a brilliant half term!

               

               

   

 

Key messages:

• A reminder that children are not allowed to play on the climbing frame or use the school equipment before and after school, including siblings.

• Please can you continue to give us donations of clean recycling to add to our junk modeling as we use it throughout the year - small boxes, toilet rolls etc. However we cannot accept anything that once contained nuts, eggs or fish.

• Please return any spare socks, pants, trousers that have been sent home previously for your child. We have no spare socks, pants, trousers/leggings left. Alternatively any donations are welcome!

• If you would like to be a ‘mystery reader’, please fill in this link here. 

• After half term we are starting our new topic ‘People who help us’. We would love for any parents who have a job such as a doctor, police officer, firefighter, dentist, builder etc., to talk to the children about the work they do and why it’s important. If you would be happy to do this, please email eyfs@vineyard.richmond.sch.uk 

• Lots of children are bringing in toys from home; we do not advise this as they get lost/broken and children get very upset. If children take them out of their bag, they will be confiscated until the end of the day.