St Joseph's

We had a fantastic least week of term in school. We began the week in a very exciting way by jetting off on holiday to Spain. We boarded the plane, landed safely and then had an amazing day doing lots of exciting things. We played with sand and water, had our photographs taken, learnt some dance moves, tried some Spanish foods, had an ice lolly and finished our day by flying back to Pudsey just in time for the end of the school day! Throughout the rest of the week we all made a postcard and wrote about out favourite parts of the holiday. We also celebrated Easter by making cards and doing some Easter crafts. We also joined in with the morning liturgies where we learnt about the last days of Jesus and we thought about how he died on the cross for us.

Reception have been very busy this week learning about SpaIn in preparation for our Holiday Theme Day on Monday! The children enjoyed learning some Spanish words and about the Flamenco, a Traditional Spanish dance! They used our performance area to dance the Flamenco and enjoyed a Flamenco treasure hunt outside too! In Literacy the children made a passport ready for their plane journey to Spain and wrote luggage labels too! In maths we have been consolidating our learning on addition and one more/one less. The children enjoyed playing dice games and building towers. One little person was so tired they fell asleep Friday afternoon!

What another fantastic week we have had in Reception. This week in maths, we have been learning about 3D shape and using 3D shapes to build different structures. The children loved working outside with Mr Farmer to build 3D space rockets. The children also built ramps inside to find out if their 3D shape would roll down or not. The children were fascinated with the results! We have been doing some art work in the classroom - decorating animal pictures for our topic work and making Cross keyrings for St Joseph's day. Reception also came up with a fantastic prayer to ask for support from St. Joseph. We have really made the most of the sunny weather and have enjoyed having snack outside in the sunshine. We have been so busy this week, the children are so tired! We are looking forward to another brilliant week next week!

We are all finally back together in school! And we are so happy! We have had a really busy day getting back into our routines and we have been learning all about Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest. We loved dressing up on Thursday and we have all loved being back with our friends. We have been learning about personal hygiene and have been looking at brushing our teeth. We all had a great time using toothbrushes and toothpaste and cleaning the teeth!

What a wonderful week we have had! The children enjoyed tasting different fruits, exploring with them and describing them. They produced Literacy work about the fruit they tasted and in provision were challenged with feeling a mystery fruit in a box! In maths we have continued to learn all about building 9 and 10. The children enjoyed counting songs like 10 Green bottles & 10 in a bed. They also used 10 frames to count objects and say how many more to make 10. They enjoyed making a 10 frame from sticks and finding fruits hidden in the ouside area to complete it! The children have continued to enjoy our holiday shop and our home corner which is in the theme of an African home. We looked at Tinga art after reading How The Elephant got his Trunk and the children painted some very colourful Tinga style African animals.

What a busy first week we had! In Week 1 we started our new topic, Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot! In our literacy work we started reading the story 'Handa’s Surprise. We enjoyed the story and had lots of fun writing about what we thought Handa would say after all those cheeky animals had stolen her fruit! In our maths work we started thinking about the numbers 9 and 10. We had to count objects carefully and sort things into groups of that showed 9 or 10. The children counted really carefully! In our PSHE lesson we talked about the importance of washing our hands and why it is best to use soap to clean them properly. We had lots of fun doing other things such as fruit printing and paying in our role play area which is now a souvenir shop.

In Maths we learn through the scheme from White Rose Maths. Whilst we have been at home, we have been learning about the composition of numbers. We have also set challenges at home for the children to complete harder maths work. We are really proud of all the maths that has been done - we think we have some fantastic mathematicians.

This half term our topic has been learning all about cold places. Our literacy work has linked with this. We have read stories set in cold places, learnt about cold places in the world and used non-fiction books to learn about animals. We read the story of StickMan and we sequenced pictures of the story, made story maps and even made our own stick men. We read Lost and Found and we talked about how the penguin and the boy were good friends. We learnt about Antarctica and the animals we find there. We labelled penguins and wrote fact files about them. We also read the story Henry’s Holiday, where a little penguin dreams of a holiday in a sunny place, but when he gets there he soon realises he does not like it. We wrote letters to Henry to tell him about a different holiday he could go on to a cold place.

We have been learning all about animals from cold places. One morning we arrived at school and we had been given a special mission to rescue some animals trapped in ice! We had to melt the ice to get the animals out. We had lots of different things that we could use to hep us, including salt, oil, vinegar, soap, water, cocoa powder, food colouring and flour. Not all of the things were helpful. We managed to rescue the animals! Here are some photos of what happened.

Please find below our newsletter for this half term which tells you what we will be covering until October half term

• Foundation Stage HT1 newsletter.pdf
• Autumn 2 Newsletter Reception.pdf
• HT2 Newsletter Reception.docx

In this document are all of the early learning goals that your child has to get to achieve a good level of development. Use these as guidelines when working with your child during their literacy and maths lessons.

• Early Learning Goals.pdf