Week 20 in Class Ra

Class: Reception Year: 2023 - 2024

Good afternoon everyone,

This week it has been Children's Mental Health Week. This year's theme is 'My Voice Matters'. My Voice Matters is about empowering children and young people by providing them with the tools they need to express themselves. During Children’s Mental Health Week we want all children and young people, whoever they are, and wherever they are in the world, to be able to say – and believe - “My Voice Matters”.

In Maths this week the children have continued to engage with activities that draw attention to the purpose of counting. We have revisited the concept of cardinality – the idea that the last number in the count tells us how many things there are altogether. They have had opportunities to hear, join in with and develop their knowledge of the counting sequence and to become secure enough with their counting skills to be able to count out a set of objects from a larger set, remembering the ‘stopping number’ and knowing that this means they have selected the correct number. We also practised counting beyond 20 and spoke about the pattern we notice as the numbers go up. The children worked as a class to create their own number blocks and we noticed how each time the tower gets taller. Some of the children said it looked like a "staircase" as we added more blocks each time. I was very impressed with all the children's counting this week. Well done Ra!

In Literacy this week we have been looking at "You Choose in Space" by Pippa Goodhart and Nick Sharratt. The children have been describing aliens from the book and using adjectives to write the sentence "The alien is...". We have also looked at "The Colour Monster" by Anna Llenas and we have been discussing our emotions. The children have independently written sentences this week about how they feel. On Friday we spoke about how we can feel lots of different emotions at once. We used a bottle with glitter inside to show how our emotions can be mixed up. The different colours of glitter link to our emotions (for example yellow is happy and red is angry).

On Friday we spoke about what makes the children special as part of Mental Health Week. We spoke about what our favourite things are and learnt makaton for "My favourite animal is..." The children drew a picture of themselves and drew their favourite things around them. We practised mindfulness and had a go at some mindful looking. We spoke about the importance of listening and noticing the smaller things in life. We also spent some time with our Year 6 buddies. We had a go at some space yoga. We also designed and drew aliens with our buddies. We had a fantastic afternoon drawing, playing and reading with our buddies.

This week’s VIP has been Molly. Molly is a kind and popular member of our class. She always has a big smile on his face! We enjoyed looking at the yellow teams show and tell on Friday.

Have a lovely weekend and we will see you next week.

Miss MacWilliam