“Give me the joys of summer…“
Winifred Sackville Stoner,
Week beginning 1st May
This week saw Henrietta deliver the story of the Train Ride by June Crebbin. We have been retelling the story in the small world tray, acting out our own train rides in the role play area and in Art we have been printing with different shapes to create pictures of trains. We made mini train tracks in the finger gym and used the bee-bots as trains to send on a journey to the beach.
In our Understanding of the World lesson, we continued to explore forces, by using marbles, sand and water with the guttering, wheels, pipes and tubes. We compared the different resources and how the marbles, sand and water moved through and down them.
This week we have been creating and writing our own stories based on Mr Gumpy’s Motor Car. First, we explored different settings in which the story could be set in and then we added different animals and a different vehicle to create our own story. We used our class story map to remind us of the story structure and used lots of the same wording, such as; ‘Alright,’ said Mr Gumpy, but it will be a squash.’ We were also able to be Creative Chameleons as we could create our own problem and resolution to the story. We have all worked really hard to write our stories and to write lots of sentences to innovate the story. We are very Proud Peacocks!
In Maths we have been comparing numbers up to 10, using concrete and pictorial resources.
We have also enjoyed our first story time of the summer term, with parents and grandparents coming into class to share and read books with the children.
Reception Class were very excited to find that Henrietta the hedgehog had finally come out of hibernation and delivered two books linked to our new topic of ‘Ticket to Ride’. The fiction book she delivered was Mr Gumpy’s motor car by John Burningham and a non-fiction all about different types of vehicles. In our continuous provision this week we have been painting pictures of Mr Gumpy’s motor car, retelling the story in the small world tray, in the finger gym we have been putting nuts and bolts together and carefully decorating a car picture using tiny buttons and beads. We have also been looking at photographs of cars from the past and we were amazed at how cars have changed over the years. 
In Maths we have been thinking about time and developing an understanding of what 1 minute and 5 minutes feel like. We read ‘5 minutes peace’ by Jill Murphy and then went and ran around the playground for 5 minutes. We then came back into class to see what we could do in 1 minute. We had to see how many times we could write our name, write our new tricky word – said, how many beads we could thread onto a lace and how many cubes tall our tower could be. We also worked in groups to see how far we could count in 1 minute.
In Science we started our new topic on forces and investigated different surfaces to see which was the best for the toy car.
After our lesson we enjoyed continuing to investigate with our friends.
On Thursday we went to Blessed Edward Oldcorne to attend a multi skills festival. We had great fun learning and practising lots of new skills and meeting new friends.
In our expressive arts and design lesson we started to explore ‘printing’. We started by exploring printing with our hands in dry and damp sand and then we went on to printing with different parts of our hands. We were amazed at the different shapes we created! Finally, we used a range of soft and hard junk modelling pieces to find out the different prints they created. Next week we are going to use our new skills and techniques to create our own pictures.
