RT

Welcome to RT!

We are sending you a big hello and welcome to our class page.

This is our first year in school and we feel very grown up in our uniforms. We are really enjoying coming to school. 

Our Reception class is a happy and caring place to be. We are having so much of fun with our new friends, exploring our different areas and learning lots of new things.

We hope you return to our class page to see how we are growing.

Friday was a very exciting day! We went on a trip to Blackpool Zoo!  We travelled to Blackpool by coach, it took us a very long time. 

When we arrived at the zoo, we went into a special learning room and one of the zoo keepers taught us all about animal colours and patterns. We learned a new, important word 'camouflage'. We found out why animals are camouflaged, it was very interesting. We felt real animal skins, they were "fury", "smooth" and "soft". We also held a real stick insect, it tickled our hands! We are very lucky.

We had a fantastic time walking around the zoo and seeing lots of different animals. We were amazed to see a real life lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, orangutans, gorillas, peacock, meerkat, sea lions, penguins and flamingos!

After a fantastic day, we travelled back to school on a coach. Some of us were very tired after such a busy and exciting day that we fell asleep.

Our world is a wonderful place and a beautiful gift from God.

This week, we have explored what we love and wonder about our world.

We have learned to 'wonder'. We know that wondering means thinking of things or asking questions which we may not have the answer to. 

We looked at photographs of God's special creations.

We wondered...

"Why are fish different colours?" - Logan

"Where does a rainbow land?" - Paige

"Why do giraffes have squares on them?" - Elanur

"Where does the sun come from?" - Olivia

"Why are flowers different colours?" - Lexi

"Why is snow white?" - Cole

We went outside to explore our wonderful world. We used the digital camera to take photographs of things we thought were wonderful...

We listened to The Creation Story. We learned that God created our wonderful world in     6 days and rested on the 7th day. We learned what God created on each day.

We decided to use our amazing art skills to create a collage of God's wonderful world.

We used sponges to print the sky and rollers to create the land and wavy sea. Each of us painted our favourite part of creation and added it to our collage.

This week, we have continued our adventure in the amazing continent of Africa.

Last week, we saw some very precious African jewellery, brought in by our special visitor Sue. We really liked the jewellery so decided to make some of our own.

We chose to make our jewellery from pasta tubes. We know African jewellery is usually made from beautiful, bright colours so we painted our pasta tubes in red, orange, yellow, green and purple. We threaded them onto pretty coloured ribbon to make necklaces and bracelets. We look fabulous wearing our African jewellery!

Sports Day

On Thursday, we had our first ever Sports Day! We were so excited to take part in all of the events! We had lots of fun running, jumping, balancing, throwing, racing through the obstacle course and falling over in the sack race!

It was great to have our Mummy's. Daddy's, family and friends there to watch us.

Miss Toole is so proud of how brave we were, participating in brand new activities.

We are all winners!

This week, we have packed our suitcases and jetted off to the amazing continent of Africa! We are learning lots about this places and its many, fascinating countries.

On Monday, we became super chefs and baked banana and coconut cake, which is a traditional desert all the way from Tunisia; a country in North Africa. We think banana and coconut cake was very easy to make. We were very grown up and used knives to chop up the bananas, poured orange juice on top, topped the bananas with small pieces of butter and sprinkled coconut on top; we had lots of fun.

When it was ready we ate our delicious desert, some of us enjoyed it but Lexi thought it was "too sugary" and Olivia said it was "very sweet".

On Tuesday, some very special visitors came to our class; their names were Ron and Sue. We learned Ron and Sue are very kind, they run an important charity in Tanzania which helps children go to school, as well as build schools.

Ron and Sue have visited Tanzania many times and bought some wonderful objects, all the way from Africa, to share with us. It was very interesting to see beautiful African fabrics which is used for clothing, jewellery and masks. Ron also taught us an African folk song. We enjoyed tapping our knees to keep the beat and singing along.

In P.E. we have learned an African folk dance, our dance was from the country Senegal. It is a party dance so we had to put on our best smiles whilst performing. It was fun to bounce and clap along to the beat. Next week, we are going to perform it for the whole school.

On Friday, we were very lucky to have a man named Brian come to our school. Brian is from an organisation called 'Bash the Trash'. He taught us how to make music out of anything! It was amazing! We created rhythms out of bowls, spoons, recycle bins, wall brackets and old tins. We loved making lots of noise and dancing a long! What a fantastic experience!

Wow! What an exciting week we have had!

This week we have put on our dancing shoes and got into the groove, as part of our whole school 'Dress Up and Dance Day', to help raise money for Macmillan cancer charity.

We choreographed and learned a dance routine to the Y.M.C.A. We are such talented dancers! Miss Toole was amazed at how quickly we learned the dance and how much effort and attitude we put into our performance. We had such fun wiggling our hips and even singin along to the song.

We know the Y.M.C.A. is sang by a group called 'The Village People'. On Friday, we came to school in costume. We dressed up as a police officer, Native American, construction worker, cowboy and sailor. We looked fantastic! We love dressing up!

We stood on the stage in the hall and performed our Y.M.C.A. dance to all of the boys and girls in school. We are so brave! We had lots of fun dancing on stage, we smiled all the way through our dance. It was a wonderful morning; Miss Toole is so proud of us!

Our school raised a huge: £178

We are so kind and generous. Thank you to all the boys and girls in St Francis of Assisi.

Our Daddy's and Grandad's are very special to us. We know Father's Day is an important day when we celebrate how much we love them. We decided to make our Daddy's and Grandad a card, to remind them how special they are. We hope they like them!

Percy's slimy challenge...

Wow! What a very exciting week we have had in Reception.

On Monday, we received a video message from Percy the Park Keeper! Percy told us all about a cheeky creature in his park which is eating his plants!  Percy doesn't know which creature it is and asked us to find out. He told us he wants to keep the creatures in a special place, in his park, where he can feed them different plants. Percy gave us a very important clue "the creature eating my plants leaves a slimy, silver trail."

We are amazing detectives and know it is a snail eating Percy's plants!

We wanted to find out more about snails so we could help Percy. Miss Toole gave us some snails to keep snails as class pets. We are fascinated with our snails. We have spent lots of time using magnifying glasses to observe them closely. Some of us have even been brave enough to pick up the snails and hold them in our hands and let them slither up our arms! They left a shiny, silvery trail on us too!

We wanted to tell Percy it was the snails eating his plants. We knew to find the snails, Percy needed to know what they looked like, how they felt and how they moved. We dressed up as detectives to investigate this further. We used our senses to explore the snails and have written some amazing sentences describing them. We are going to send our wonderful writing Percy! We hope it helps!

Kobie explained the shells on our snails are "swirly" - Wow what a super word!

Lexi noticed the shells on our snails are "curly" - A great description!

We have had lots of fun in our continuous provision, recreating the swirly, curly design on a snail's shell.

In Maths, we have explored 3D shapes. We are learning to identify cubes, cuboids, cylinders, cones, pyramids and spheres.  We have had lots of fun showing off all we know, when playing a game of shape bingo. We have really impressed Miss Toole with our shape work and are now learning about how many faces each 3D shape has and what shape the faces are.

This week, we have had a special focus week on 'shelters'. We talked about what we already know about shelters. Cole explained a shelter "covers you", Rocco said "shelters have a roof to keep you dry" and Tayla told us "shelters keep you warm". Lexie recognised "a house" is a shelter and Kobie suggested "you can keep shelter under your trampoline". Wow, we are so clever!

We have learned about different types of shelters, we recognised a lot of shelters have a roof and walls. Miss Toole de-constructed our role play area and provided us with different materials so we could explore building our own shelters; we are very inventive! We had lots of fun taking our shoes off and playing inside our shelters, Olivia enjoyed it so much she asked "Can I sleep here over night?" Miss Toole was so impressed with our creations!

      Den building

On Thursday, we went on an adventure up to the Beacon Country Park.

We wanted to show off our super shelter skills and build dens outdoors so that is exactly what we did!

We ventured into the forest, it was great walking through the trees, we had to jump over the muddy, we thought we might see a bear!

When we were in our clearing, Miss Toole divided us into groups. We had to work with our friends to decide the type of shelter we wanted to build, what materials we would need and how we were going to build it. Miss Toole said our team work skills were amazing! We used the big trees as a structure for our dens. We worked together, collecting logs, long branches and twigs - we are very strong! We arranged everything we had collected around our trees; we used rope and string to tie everything together, we didn't want our shelter to fall down! It was a very sunny day, we understood our shelter had to give us shade so we collected lots of foliage to cover it with.

The shelters we built were amazing! We are so proud of all our hard work. Our cooperation and thinking skills really made Miss Toole smile.

But our adventure up the Beacon didn't stop there. We all enjoyed a yummy picnic lunch on the field, afterwards we went back into the forest for more fun.

Some of us chose to go on a bug hunt! We searched under logs and rocks, on the trees and under rocks to find lots of creepy crawlies. We found a millipede, centipede, woodlouse, spider, beetle, fly and a worm. Miss Taylor found a huge worm! It was so long we thought it was a snake! We collected our mini beasts in containers and used magnifying glasses to look closely at them.

Our other friends chose to be amazing artwork and create pictures using natural materials.

We went into the meadow, the grass was very long it was nearly as tall as us! We collected different coloured flowers and leaves from the meadow. We took them back to the forest and arranged them on one side of a piece of cloth; we folded the other side of the cloth over the top. We were so grown up using a hammer to gently tap the flowers and leaves inside the cloth. When we tapped it with a hammer we noticed it was making a print! When we opened our cloth we found out we had made a symmetrical picture. Wow, we are wonderful natural artists!

We finished our adventure with a camp fire. We gathered around to toast marshmallows and sweet, chocolate chip bread, it was delicious! We had a fantastic den building experience and a very fun day. Miss Toole is so proud of our behaviour and all we achieved at the Beacon.

On Friday, the whole school decided to gather together, on the school field, to show off all we had learned, throughout the week, about shelters. Each class worked together to construct their shelters. After 45 minutes a village appeared!  We loved working alongside the bigger boys and girls. We are so proud to be part of St Francis of Assisi. 

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Wow, what a wonderful week we have had to end our first half of the Summer term.

We are still very enthusiastic about mini beasts so this week, we have decided to find out all about caterpillars!

In Literacy, we have read the story 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar'; we have loved listening to this classic tale and were fascinated to see the tiny caterpillar turn into a big, beautiful butterfly. We have shown off our super, duper writing skills and written all about 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar', we even included special words from the story such as 'cocoon'. We blew Miss Toole's socks off! She is so impressed with how much we have progressed in our writing.

We were so captivated by the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies, in the story of 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar', we decided to get some caterpillars of our own and keep them as class pets! We have used magnifying classes to observe the caterpillars, it has been so exciting watching our tiny, fury friends turn into big, fat caterpillars and spin their cocoons! We can't wait for them to turn into butterflies!

 Tick tock on the clock...

We have started to learn all about time. We are beginning to recognise features of a clock face, we have learned some new important words, 'clock face', 'hands' and 'minute hand'. We decided to explore how much we could achieve in one minute. We tested how many times we could jump in one minute, it was hard work! We clapped continuously for one minute, this made our hands tingle! We also walked around for one minute. We decided one minute isn't a very long time.

We then used construction materials and explored the types of models and patterns we could create in one minute, three minutes and five minutes, it was lots of fun!

  Coffee and cake

On Friday, we hosted a 'Coffee and cake morning' to raise money for our trip next term.
We invited our friends and family to come into class to enjoy some yummy scrummy cakes, biscuits and a warm up of coffee. We would like to say a big thank you to everybody who joined us, we really appreciate your donations.

Here are the beehive,

But where are the bees?

Hidden away where nobody sees.

Watch and you'll see them come out the hive,

One, two, three, four, five!

There has been a buzz of excitement in class this, as we have learned all about bees!

On Monday, Miss Toole left a plate of something very peculiar in our class.

I wonder what it was?

We used our senses to explore the strange substance on the plate. Olivia said it felt "sticky", she was right, it stuck Cole's fingers together! Rocco said it smelt like "coffee beans". Liam explained it was "brown" and Lexi said when it moved it was "runny".

We found it was honey! We have learned honey comes from bees. We tasted the honey, soem of us thought it was very yummy, however some of us didn't like it, Paulie explained to was "too sweet."

We decided to create a zig-zag book explaining all about how honey is made. We learned some new, special words: nectar, Queen bee and hive, we used these in our writing. Miss Toole was so impressed with our amazing writing skills.

We have also been busy bees in our creative area. We have shown off our super art skills and created mod-roc bees. First we scrunched up newspaper then we wrapped it in plaster, it was very messy but lots of fun! We noticed bees have a yellow and black stripy pattern on their bodies so when the plaster was dry, we painted it the bees with this pattern. Afterwards, we glued on wings, which we made out of coloured netting, and googly eyes; they look brilliant!

"I'm going to make a silly soup,

I'm making a soup that's silly,

I'm going to cook it in the oven,

So it's nice and chilly!"

On Monday, we had a very special visitor in our class, his name was Chef Jeff.

Chef Jeff came to ask for our help. He wanted us to help him make a silly soup, however Chef Jeff could only cook with ingredients which rhymed. Chef Jeff didn't know what rhyming meant, we told his rhyming words "sound the same".

We helped Chef Jeff choose the rhyming ingredients to cook in his yummy, scrummy soup!