Welcome to Life at KPS for Reception

Mr Sembhi and Mrs Morgan warmly welcome you to Reception.

The aim of this page is to highlight some of the fantastic learning that has been happening in Reception, this page will be updated monthly, with photographs and information about the learning we have completed during the month.

We hope you enjoy looking through these updates and do discuss your child’s learning with them to celebrate their success. We look forward to any suggestions you may have to make your child’s learning a pleasant experience.

March 2022

Communication and Language

Our teachers have been reading stories just before home time. These have been fantastic. We continue to engage in discussions of characters, settings, making predictions and asking questions. Some times we have to anticipate the ending of a story till the following day! These stories are helping us to develop new vocabulary in our daily talk. We are also learning to connect experiences and ideas from the discussions we have when listening to the stories. Mrs Stoker our Music teacher has been busy teaching us songs that include rhymes. She has been challenging us to listen to clapping patterns which help us to be great listeners.

Personal, Social, Emotional Development

We have been focussing on how we feel about stories, friends and our relationships with others during our learning time both in groups and independent learning. This is helping us to share our feelings about ourselves and others. We are also learning to say kind words to each other. The topic ‘Identity and belonging’ helped us to identify who our friends are. We learned to make new friends. Learning about the 5Ks has helped us to put some of them in practice. For example, the ‘Kara’ silver bracelet is helping us to use our hands gently and kindly.

Physical Development

This month we have been getting better at handling and controlling bigger tools so that we can use equipment such as the bats, rackets, balls and bikes. For example, we have been working at aiming a ball towards each other.

Our garden is continuously looking great. We have been digging, finding worms and other creatures.

We are using a variety of tools such as a rake, trowel, shovel, fork and a hoe safely in the digging area.

Activities such as baking, playdough, jelly bath, slime, cutting have support growth in our fine motor skills. Our teachers are happy with our handwriting as we continue to develop.

Literacy

This month in Literacy we have been working really hard at applying our phonics set 1,2 and 3 sounds. We have been working on writing sentences independently using a capital letter, finger spaces and a full stop.

We really enjoyed learning the Gruffalo. We used the story map to re-write the story and some of us even went on to change the characters to make it their own. Some of this work is proudly displayed in our classroom.

Our reading is getting better and we are getting more confident each day. We enjoy our daily reading both at school and at home.

Maths

In Reception, this month we have been focusing on sharing, grouping, doubling and halving.

When learning about sharing and grouping we used concrete objects to help understand the concept. We sang the song, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ to help understand sharing equally. We shared out objects with the Master, the Dame and the little boy. This helped us understand the concept of equal and unequal groups.

When learning about doubling, we used a variety of cubes to understand that doubling means to add the same amount again.

When halving, we learned to share objects into two group and we had to make sure that they were equal. During independent play we created cakes using playdough and halved them between our friends.

Understanding the World

This month has been super special to us here at KPS. The whole school has been learning about Identity and belonging focussing on Vaisakhi.  In Reception, we learned about the 5Ks. Mr Singh, our Sikh coordinator visited us and explained what the 5K are and what they mean to the Sikhs. Now know whY Sikhs have the 5Ks. We joined the rest of the school celebrating Vaisakhi in the gurdwara where we sang and listened to the Vaisakhi story. We finished off by watching the changing of the nishan sahib by our office entrance. We also talked about different types of people and religions and the importance of respect each other.

Expressive Arts and Design

Since the Vaisakhi assembly, we have been roleplaying being in the gurdwara. We have been using bricks, blocks and planks to build our own gurdarwa where singing of shabads and chanting of prayers has been taking place. We have been using our performance stage to sing our favourite songs to each other.  As part of our topic ‘Identity and belonging’, we drew portraits of ourselves using oil pastels. This was challenging to some of us, but we kept on practising and finally got it! These will be proudly displayed in our Early Years corridor for everyone to enjoy them.