EYFS – Newsletter – 29.11.24

Another fun-packed week has come to an end and we wanted to share with you some of what we have been up to in Reception.

We have continued with our topic of Toytown this week and focused on looking at ways that toys can move without the aid of battery power. The children have very much enjoyed playing with the wind-up figures and making them race against each other. We discussed how these toys involved interlocking gear-wheels and a coiled spring to power the forward movement and to explore further we took apart one of the wind-up walkers to get a closer look at the inner workings and better understand how they can move.

All children were also given opportunity to make a balloon-powered car toy too this week (thank you to all those that donated bottle-tops for the wheels!). We used a milk carton as the base before using straws and wooden skewers to support the wheels, before adding a balloon secured to a straw to the top of the carton as an engine to propel the car forward. We watched a video together and talked through how the physics worked by sending the car in the opposite direction to the air escaping from the balloon. 

There were also many children busy in our DT area making some fantastically imaginative robot toys for Santa and lots of busy fingers cutting out some paper dolls.

Continuing the theme of robots from our workshop, we all took part in a shared draw-along video of a cartoon-style robot. Each time we do one of these drawing sessions, it is fantastic to see the children become more careful and attentive as they create their pictures. We had some brilliant robots drawn and the children were very pleased with them too!

Phonics sessions this week have introduced the phonemes ‘f’ (fairy) and ‘l’ (lollipop) and given the children opportunity to practise hearing, reading and writing these letters in words and short phrases. We have also spent time becoming more familiar with the first set of ‘tricky’ words, which are words whose pronunciation does not match the phonic sounds typically taught so they cannot be easily read by blending the known sounds. These words are I, no, go and the and it is very useful for the children to recognise these words by sight as they are very common words that when quickly identified will help improve reading fluency.

Our Maths sessions this week have focused on the concept of one more and one less. The children have explored this idea of adding or subtracting one to numbers 0-5 in fun games and activities. By physically moving counters, tiles, multilink cubes and even themselves around to show the transactions of more and less in songs and rhymes (such as 5 Little Buns in a Baker’s Shop) the children build a concrete understanding of this fundamental mathematical concept.

Have a great weekend!

The Reception Team 

Dates for the Diary:

Thursday 5th December – School Christmas fair (3:30pm)

Tuesday 10th December – Flu Immunisations (information in recent notification – if the consent form is not completed your child will not receive the vaccine)

Thursday 19th December – Reception CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION – Parents invited to join us from 2:30pm for a performance of Christmas songs

Friday 20th December – School closes for the Christmas break