Welcome back to the spring term.  We had a bit of a chilly start to the term with the snow and ice! This gave us the perfect opportunity to explore and investigate the changing state of ice as well as play in the snow.  We used the sledges, painted and used colourful water to make marks, made snow confetti and had the best time. 

 We had a walk around our local area and visited to Pets at Home on our way we looked at landmarks we could see such as the garage and McDonalds.  We saw some different animals and used our phonics knowledge to help read some information about these. From here we  went on to Sainsburys. We made sure we were safe when crossing the roads - there were so many and there was a lot of traffic. We pressed the button and waited for the green man each time to tell us it was safe to cross. 

We made a shopping list to of ingredients we needed to make an experiment. We needed sugar, bicarbonate of soda, food colouring, and white vinegar. We each had a turn at finding and selecting the items we needed and put them in the trolley (we all had a turn at pushing the trolley too).  We had a look at the fruit and vegetables and chose a watermelon to have for our healthy afternoon snack. Finally we got to the till to pay - we each scanned an item and Miss Felgate paid at the end. 

Spring time changes........

As the term continues we have said goodbye to Winter and started looking for signs of spring to arrive.  We read the book "The little seed" by Eric Carle and planted our own seeds and watched them grow.  We planted sweetpeas, carrots, beetroot and cabbages.   We also wrote instructions on how to do this.  We took our IPads  and looked around the school grounds, taking photos of Spring flowers, listened to the birds and started to find insects visiting our garden more.   We also had a delivery of frog spawn - we have been excited to see how this changed, the tadpoles hatching and growing and learning about the life cycle of a frog. 

Other activities Reception have been enjoying this term are exploring Google Earth and Google Street View.   Using the book "Martha Maps it out" by Leigh Hodgkinson, we have been inspire to explore our journey to school and create our own maps.  We tracked our journeys using Google Street View, looking at landmarks and the local area that we pass on our way and added labels these on our maps. 

We have also been using our story recall and retelling skills using the story of "We're going on a Bear Hunt"  by Michael Rosen.  We explored the story in many ways, creating our own beat and rhythms, adding actions, making our own story maps, writing our favourite parts and then finally going on our own multi sensory bear hunt!  

This term we also developed our mud kitchen area where the children enjoyed making mud pies, potions and pizzas - the led to the children wanting to make their own pizzas, cook them and eat them for snack - so we did!

Maths

In maths this term we have been busy consolidating our subiting skills to five and exploring numbers to 10.  We have been exploring number bonds to 5/10 and  deepening our knowledge on the composition on numbers to 10, finding a number that is one more and less, adding two groups to find a total as well as being introduced to doubles. 

We have also been investigating and comparing through height, length and weight - extending our vocabulary and learning new words such as capacity, mass, volume, balance, equal to.