Literacy is taught in very many ways in Reception, from our adult interactions in provision; the vocabulary we try to instil in the children; our talk for writing oral learning as well as the daily phonics sessions. However, one of our favourite ways to engage with stories is from our weekly storytelling sessions and subsequent opportunities for children to write their own visual story maps. As practitioners we are there to facilitate the children’s storytelling, to write down their ideas and capture their enthusiasm. I can’t wait to see what stories will be told this year!

We are currently training our own expert team of play dough makers. This week we are exploring smell and we made dough with cinnamon to explore. We’ve been making prints and patterns with cloves, star anise and cinnamon sticks and experimenting with crushing, stamping and rolling with these.

Adults at home are in for a treat when the children bring home their Robin calendars on Thursday. We learnt all about British birds during our time in Reception and many of us remembered lots of facts about Robins and birds in general.

Axel – My Robin is making a cheep cheep like the birdsong.

Roseanna – I know birds have scaly legs!

We’ve been back exploring 3D shape this week and we enjoyed building some of our 3D shapes out of playdough and lollipop sticks. So many good discussions about the difference between rectangles and cuboids and how best to support the ‘struts’ of our structures. Is it a cone if there’s nothing supporting the base?

This half term we have been looking at self-portraiture focused on the whole body and not just a profile image. We really enjoyed experimenting with making sculptures which were then squashed and remodelled. For some of us we quickly learnt about proportion when our very skinny legs could not support the pelvis! We practised rolling the clay into balls and sausages and compressing smaller pieces with our fingers. We also practised the slip and score technique using tools and water to help ‘glue’ the body pieces together.

In our revisiting of 3D shapes and as part of our traditional tales exploration we used different shapes to make Rapunzel’s tower. We only managed to get to 15 cubes, cuboids and a cone as a whole class but one group managed 18 shapes in their later provision exploration. Lots of good discussions about rolling on curved surfaces and stacking. When comparing ‘cones’ and ‘pyramids’ it helped us to think about which one might be nicer to eat an ice cream out of!

You might not have thought your children would be getting busy with their brick-laying this afternoon but as part of our Science, fine motor, pattern and attention work that’s exactly what they’ve been doing! Undoubtedly the most popular choice in provision this afternoon, the girls in particular have loved getting stuck into their bricks and mortar!

We loved our visit to the local library last Friday. We learnt all about joining the library, listened to a story and then had time to choose our own books to read. The children loved the huge choice of different books they had there and many children were enthusiastic to join if they weren’t already members!

We’ve been working on our fact families over the last 2 weeks. Can you generate a part-whole model and write the 8 sentences using the same 3 numbers?

Following on from our marmalade sandwiches it was time today to make soup ready for our next instructions writing. The children worked so well together to chop, grate and peel the vegetables for the soup. We practised our safe tripod grip when chopping. At the end we added vegetable stock, a pinch of salt and some water to make our soup taste nice. Finally, at the end we mixed through some coriander.