‘We are made to reach for the stars!’

This week has flown by and it’s been a week of non-stop learning and excitement in Reception where the children have certainly challenged themselves to push their understanding further and further!

In particular, we have been amazed by their genuine love of learning to read and the pure joy on their faces when they realise just what they can achieve. We have taken this learning even further this week by introducing literacy books and applying all of that knowledge to our mark-making, writing and story telling. We have been thinking about the book Rosie’s Walk, and have used our creative imaginations to build on the story with our own ideas, twists and turns! We have talked about how we can be Lizzie ladybirds to reflect on our work and fix any mistakes using our special purple pencils! We know that mistakes are ok and that fixing them helps us to learn. We also explored some new vocabulary from the book such as ‘creeping’, ‘oblivious’, soaking’ and ‘scarper’.
Reception… I wonder if you can show your grown ups the actions we used to help us remember what the words mean?!


What have we been learning this week…

Phonics: This week we have been using our knowledge of sounds to write simple CVC words. We have used ‘Fred Fingers’ to help us segment the word so we can hear how many sounds we need to write. We have also been finding and reading these CVC words all around our classroom. Our brains are definetly growing and we are really enjoying learning to read!

Maths: This week we have been thinking about capacity. We explored and compared containers with different capacities and used language such as empty, full, nearly empty and nearly full to describe them. In our number lessons we have been exploring numbers to five and have used square counters to make towers from one to five, we thought about what we could see and noticed that, when together, the towers looked like a staircase and to make the next tower we needed to add ‘one more’ each time. We then challenged our friends by hiding one of the towers so our friends had to work out which tower was missing!


Kid Safe

KS came to visit us again this week and he spoke to us about the difference between actions / words that are ‘kind’ and actions / words that are unkind. We discussed how those unkind actions would make others feel and how we would feel if they were said or done to us. We also discussed what we should do if somebody is doing something that we don’t like, that makes us feel sad or that hurts and we practised holding our hand in front of us and saying “STOP” with a loud and clear voice and then to speak to a trusted grown up straight away.'


Let’s Celebrate!

Curious Clara Clownfish: Olivia He
Olivia, it is wonderful to see how much you are enjoying learning to read and write and how curious you are about letters, words and print around you. You recognise that by asking questions and being curious you can grow your brain even more! Learning to read and write is such an exciting journey, keep being curious and asking lots of questions! Well done Olivia!

Brave Tommy Turtle: Henry
Henry, during our phonics lessons you have been thinking carefully about your letter formation and sounds that you can hear in words. It is wonderful to see how you becoming a brave learner and recognising that mistakes are ok; we can reflect on them and that is how we learn. Having a go, taking risks and learning from mistakes is a great skill and is a great way to grow your brain. Keep being a brave learner Henry, well done!


Important Notices & Polite Reminders:



Just a big thank you for all of your support with reading at home!

As always, if you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact via email - s.hartley@ourladystarofthesea.lancs.sch.uk

Have a wonderful weekend,

The Reception Team