Reception - Home learning

Hello everyone,

As we are getting well and truly stuck into our current school-wide topic of Fairtrade Fortnight, I thought it would be appropriate to put some home learning ideas onto a blog for you to have a go at! We will be continuing to explore what Fairtrade is and what it means. Our special focus food to look at is honey!!

• Can you think of 3 things you would use honey for/in? Write them down.
• If you were a farmer, what would you like to grow?
• When you next go to the supermarket, spot how many foods you see with the Fairtrade logo on!
• Find out some information about bumble bees - present this any way you like!
• How many rhyming words can you think of that go with bee or honey?
• Solve this maths question: 10 bees went out to get necter, 6 bees came back. How many bees are there left to return?

As always, we love receiving any home learning! We look forward to seeing what you bring in!

Reception team

Reception - Awards and Reading Eggs

Hi all,

A couple of things came home on Friday. If your child came home with a reward and/or certificate then congratulations! These awards are given out every half-term for children that the adults working in reception feel have been working particularly hard or showing good progress in a particular area. These certificates are for you to keep. The trophies are for you to keep for this half term. You will receive a letter asking for the reward back towards the end of the half-term. 

Also on Friday children will have come home with their Reading Eggs login cards. Reading Eggs is an online resource that we use across the school. It's primary objective is to help support the skill of reading and later on, spelling. The link to logging in is on the pupil links section of the school website: http://www.3x3links.com/?open=f13cb7852abb7fd310ddb07bc7264613 

Children have been shown how to access this and had a go at the first few activities! Please feel free to use Reading Eggs at home. We always encourage children to follow the e-safety rules that are outlined in our e-safety policy. 

Reception team

Reception - Growth Mindset

Hello everyone,

A bit of an explanation blog! Over the last week we have been introducing and thinking about a Growth mindset. We have explored a Fixed Mindset - this is someone who believes that intelligence is fixed and that no matter how much effort you put in, you will never be good at some things. So you may as well give up! Then we looked at a Growth mindset... This approach believes that anything is possible! Although it may not be immediately. You will have to put in some hard work and to an extent everything you know, you have had to learn and at some point in you life you did not know it!

We then linked this with our Learning Powers that we use at the Prince of Wales. We have covered Resilience and reflectiveness. These are personified by a tortoise and a monkey, respectively. Within each of these learning powers are specific skills that can be practiced and honed, like perseverance, planning ahead, managing distractions amongst others. 

To aid this, we are currently using Class Dojo. This allows us to reward children for the specific skills that they are showing. All children have an avatar that is then awarded points. Please ask your child about this as they have been incredibly keen and proud to share what they have achieved and why. We have watched several videos exploring how your brain is a muscle and just like any other muscle, needs exercise. The brains exercise is something challenging! Hopefully this acts as a small introduction to how we are going to be 'Growing our Brains' in the coming months! If you have any questions please come and ask.

Reception team

Fairtrade and Growth Mindset

Hello everyone,

Welcome back to the 2nd half of the spring term!  We are officially half way through the year! For the first few weeks we are going to be participating in 'Fairtrade Fortnight' this is a national event that the whole school is participating in. Throughout the next 2 weeks we'll be exploring what Fairtrade means and what it can look like. We'll also be taking a specific food and tracking its journey from origin to the shop floor. Our particular food will be honey. 

We are also going to start exploring 'Growth Mindset'... this is training your brain to allow it to succeed and accepting that with some hard work, anything is possible. More will follow on this. 

Finally, if you haven’t managed to book yourself a slot for parents evening, please come and see me and we can arrange a time.

Reception team

Reception - Learning Journey morning tomorrow!

Hello everyone,

Just to remind you that tomorrow morning the learning journeys will be out on the tables for you to have a look through with your child, if you are available to stay then that is fantastic! There will be a sheet on the table also, asking for your views on the learning journeys as well as your child's. We appreciate that not everyone will be able to stay, so we have scheduled more opportunities for this later on in the term - these will be on different days! We look forward to seeing you all tomorrow!

Reception team

Reception - Sound pots and Big Write

Hi all,

On Friday we carried out our first 'Big Write'! The children all responded very well and had a go at independently writing about their dragons! We got to put 2 pebbles into our jar! We will continue to do these on a half-termly basis to increase children's confidence with writing independently.

Also on Friday children will have come home with a sound pot! This is for you to keep at home until the end of the school year! I have posted some potential uses on a previous blog but will continue to pop up things you could potentially do with your sound pot! Some children also came home with a tricky word fan. Again, this is for you to keep and if you did not receive one of these on Friday, you will get yours this coming week! 

Reception team

Reception - This week...

Hello everyone,

We have had a very busy week in reception! On Tuesday we had a joint morning with the pre-school children. The reception children took part brilliantly and took on board the responsibility of helping other children. It is remarkable to see how much change can occur in a year! During the morning we had a good try of some Chinese food (everyone now knows what crispy seaweed is!), we made some Chinese lanterns and played some games from China outside! Overall, a successful morning!

Tomorrow we are going to be carrying out our first 'Big Write'. We have been working with the children all week on giving them the strategies to be successful, thank you for any discussions you have had at home with your child about their Dragon! Some brilliant vocabulary coming out.

Also this week, the children have been introduce to Reading Eggs. This is a wonderful online resource that all children can use. The children will be bringing home their log-in soon for you to use at home! We have had a discussion in school about e-safety and how we can keep safe online. As well as this we have spoken about how much time should be spent on a device and what can happen if you spend too long playing games!

Finally, we are desperately hoping that the sound pots will be ready to take home tomorrow. Mrs. Howell is hurrying to finish them all off. If they are ready for tomorrow, we will put them into your child's bookbag.

Reception team