Diamond Class

Welcome to Reception 2022 - 2023 (Diamond Class)

Mrs Medhurst is your class teacher. 

Mrs Atkinson is your Teaching Support.

Summer 2 - Curriculum Information and Weekly Learning Updates

Please follow the link below to find out everything about what the children in Reception have been learning in Summer 2

Summer 1 Curriculum Information and Weekly Learning Updates. 

Please follow the link below to the Summer 1 page for Diamond Class.

Spring 2 - Week 5 Easter

This week Reception have been learning all about Easter.  Follow the link below to find out what we have been up to.

Spring 2 Week 4 - The very hungry caterpillar

Follow the link below to find out what Reception have been up to this week.

Mother's Day

In school today we learnt all about Mother's Day - the history and the tradition behind the day and why we still celebrate Mother's Day today.  We talked about how, although it is called Mother's day, it is a day to say thank you to the people who look after us and care for us and to say thank you for all the things they do for us.  We could make a huge list of the things they do for us from keeping us safe, to giving us the biggest hugs in the world to making the best sandwiches ever!  Out list would have been longer than the school we decided if we wrote everything on it!

Thank you

We spoke about some ways we could say thank you to the people who care for us.  Some of the things we said were that we could help, wash the dishes, be good, give big cuddles and give gifts.  We also said we could make a card.  In class this term we have had a flower shop so we decided to make cards with flowers on. we all took our time so our cards were super special and we write lovely messages inside using our phonics.

We also made a lovely picture for our grownups to put on their wall telling them how much we love them  - again flower related.

In our role play area for the past couple of weeks we have had our own flower shop.  We have loved making bunches of flowers and selling them and writing labels and giving them to people in school.  Today we were lucky enough to be able to make real bunches of flowers for our mammies for mothers day.  We loved it and the smiles from our mammies when we gave them our flowers was amazing.

Happy Mother's Day to our

amazing Mammies.

Our visit to Hall Hill farm - 14.3.22

Today we went to Hall Hill farm to learn about growing and changing through first hand experiences.  What a super day we have had.  The children have been amazing and they have had the best time.  The sun shone (till we got back to Hetton and it snowed) and we had so many lovely experiences. 

We met and fed lots of different animals and did so many lovely things.

We enjoyed a very bumpy tractor ride.

We met a giant turkey and we met hens and cockerels.  

We all had a go on the sledges - even the teachers!

We fed the lambs.

We eventually had lunch - the part of the day we were waiting for since getting on the bus - and then we got to have some fun in the soft play!  The giggles were so infectious!!!!

We met some chicks who were nearly 4 weeks old.  There certainly were not as cute and fluffy as the chicks we have in our class who are only 1 week old but they still enjoyed being cuddled.  We think we like our little chicks better though. 

We then met some cows and some larma and fed some goats and some sheep.  We were also totally fascinated milking a cow!

We then met some cute and fluffy guinea pigs and rabbits.  We loved giving them cuddles and strokes.

We have had the best day and we have made our teachers super proud!!!!  Some very tired little people came home on the bus!

Spring 2 - Week 2 Chicks, chicks and more chicks

This week we welcomed 10 living eggs into our classroom. We were fascinated! Very soon our eggs started to wobble and hatch and our eggs soon became cute little chicks. All 10 eggs hatched and we got 10 healthy chicks.  We loved watching them and looking closely at them through magnifying glasses and even talking to them. We knew we had to be calm and quiet around the chicks or we would scare them. We were very responsible looking after them.

We learnt all the about life cycle of the chicks from egg to hatching to being a chick and then a hen to laying more eggs and we can explain this to an adult using new vocabulary we have learnt and also using developing well formed sentences. We all ordered pictures to show the life cycle and then we all explain the life cycle in our own way using our own growing understanding of phonics and letter formations. 

Once all the chicks were born we all had a hold.  We were quiet and gentle and we used some lovely adjectives to describe them - soft, cute, fluffy, small, boney.  We washed our hands after we had touched them as we know this is very important.

We did lots of other things chick related too to develop our fine motor skills.

On Thursday we had planned to go on a signs of spring walk but our weather had other ideas and it snowed…..lots! So instead we had fun in the snow!!!!! Fingers crossed we can go out and spot signs of spring super soon. 

Next week is British Science Week…all about making connections. Reception have a busy week next week so we started our work on Friday. We looked at fingerprints and how they allow us to be identified because every finger print is unique and different. We looked at our finger prints and we worked out our finger print pattern and then we had a crime scene to solve using fingerprints.  Someone stole our chicks! By taking everyone’s fingerprints we could identify the culprit and we got our chicks back safe and sound. Would you believe it….Mrs Hill stole them because they were so cute and fluffy!

We also discovered we could use our fingerprints to make some amazing art!

Spring 2 - Week 1  Growing and changing.

This week we have started our learning on growing and changing.  We started by looking at ourselves and looking at how we have changed and grown since we were born. We were fascinated at the things that have changed and at what we can do now which we couldn't do.  We are also excited about all the growing we still have to do and at all the things we still have to learn.

We read a story called The Growing Story by Ruth Krauss and Helen Oxenbury about a little boy who thought everyone around him was growing but that he was staying small but when he tried on his winter clothes from the year before he realised that he too was growing.  We used this story to make us realise that we can't see that we grow as we grow and change very slowly but looking at our baby pictures and comparing us to how we are now shows to most certainly are growing and changing all the time.  We retold the story in our own words. We were so proud of our writing and our teachers were so proud of how we are using our phonics well to spell words and of our letter formation - our handwriting homework must really be paying off!

Linked to our growing and changing topic - we opened a flower shop in Diamond Class. We are having great fun learning to wrap flowers and write gift cards and labels and also learning to give money and change.  If you need any flowers for a special occasion then Diamond Class Flower Shop is the place to go!

This week - Thursday 2nd March - was World Book Day.  We celebrated in style with lots of super costumes and lots and lots of reading and sharing stories and books. We decided to read some of our favourite books in some unusual places in our classroom.  We also loved welcoming in some of our grown-ups to read with us.  

Spring 2 - Growing and Changing

Attached is a copy of Diamond Classes Learning Overview for the next half term.  This outlines the key learning we will covering up to Easter with some topics and learning focuses attached.  In Reception we can follow the children's interests to help develop engagement and effective learning therefore sometimes the learning contexts covered within class may differ from those shown on this plan but the key learning and skill development will remain the same.

Spring 1 Week 8 - Goldilocks and the 3 bears
This week Reception have used the story of Goldilocks to guide our learning. We have loved listening to the story, retelling it together and acting out the story in our home corner. Our use of the story language has been super and our ability to retell the story in order has really impressed our grownups. Our grownups complemented us on our use of different voices in our play when we took on the different characters. 

We used our maths measuring skills to make porridge using our understanding of full, empty and half full to follow our recipe and then we tried normal porridge like baby bear had. We then made salty porridge and sweet porridge like mammy bear and daddy bear had. We tasted all 3 porridges and then decided which we liked the best. We added our choice to a bar chart and we used this to talk about more and most and least and which we liked the best and which was the worst. We think some of our faces will let you know which porridge we were trying. 

This week our maths was all about weight and capacity. We loved exploring new equipment to learn about weight. We did lots of practical tasks to understand heavier and lighter and how to make the scales balance. We also used numicon on our scales. This was really good to understand why 4 was heavier than 3 and why 2 and 3 balanced 5. 

We also developed our understanding of capacity. We used the terms full, empty, nearly full and nearly empty and demonstrated our understanding using coloured water, porridge in the environment and also by following a recipe to make ‘porridge oats play dough’.

When we were talking about the story one of our children said ‘I think Goldilocks does not have a bed or a house or a chair of her own.’ We decided that within our Continuous provision it would be lovely if we made Goldilocks a bed or chair or a house of her own. We had some super creative and imaginative ideas.

We spoke a lot about what Goldilocks did and why she should never have gone into a strangers house, Reception are really good at explaining how to keep themselves safe. We used this as a basis for discussing safety over the half term holiday - hold our grownups hand when we are out, stop if they say stop, only cross roads with our grownups etc. 

This week was also Valentines Day and we had a lovely day celebrating those we love 💕💕

Spring 1 - Week 7 Space

The children enjoyed last week's text so much and wanted to know so much more about Space that we explored space lots this week.  We used 'Goodnight Spaceman' and 'Whatever next' as the texts to guide our learning.

5 4 3 2 1 BLAST OFF!

When we read Goodnight Spaceman we thought about what astronauts need so they can go into space.  We used our phonics to write a list for a spaceman so they were all ready for space!  Our phonics application was amazing! When you pick us up or drop us off next week as to look at our writing!  You will be amazed!

We think our super space list writing was so good because we are loving playing mini teachers in our learning environment and practising our phonics with our friends.

We have learnt lots about the moon.  We used Jaffa cakes to learn about the different shapes of the moon.

full moon - half moon - total eclipse

We loved doing this and had to have 2 goes to make sure we remembered what each moon shape was called!  We also learnt about how craters are made.  We experimented making our own moon craters thinking about how the size of the object and the height from which it fall changes the shape and size of the crater.

We also received a message from NASA!!!!!  They asked for our help.

We had super fun designing our rockets, making blue prints and testing out our rockets.  We think NASA will be very impressed.

This week we have also been learning to quickly recall our number bonds to 5.  We have made them with counters, numicon and with our overhead projector.  We have also been learning about one more and one less.  We made stairs of 5 to help us with this.  When we sang '5 little men in a flying saucer' we could apply our learning of one more and one less and how many more to make 5.

Check out some of the other things Reception have been up to this week.  Ask us what we know about space - we think you will be blown away. 

 Spring 1 -week 5     Aliens love underpants

When we came into school on Monday there was pants everywhere! We found them all over the classroom…..on the books, in the construction and even a huge washing line full! We had no idea where they had come from or why they were there but then we found a book which we thought explained everything. We found ‘Aliens love underpants!’

We loved reading the story. It really made us giggle! We loved the part at the end where the alien hides in the washing so mam doesn’t see him when she comes out for the washing. This made us think about where else the aliens might hide and inspired us to write our own part of the story.

We have all been practising our cutting skills this week. Cutting is really tricky but we are all working really hard to improve out scissor skills all of the time. This week we designed our own aliens and added their features - cutting them out carefully. We had great fun while also working hard on one of our core fine motor skills,

We did lots of other alien related tasks all aimed at developing our fine motor skills and our vocabulary and our ability to speak in full sentences about our learning and what we are doing. We have also been encouraged to start asking questions to find out more. One question which was asked was ‘Where do the aliens go in their space ships?’ I think this will guide our learning next week. 

This week one of the other things we have also really enjoyed doing is practising our phonics in our new phonics area and developing our speedy reading of our green words while also practising letter formation.

On Friday we came into school to a letter! It was from the aliens! They had dropped some things from their spaceship as they were flying over last night. They didn’t stop to get them back so have asked for our help! Everything they dropped was magnetic. We explored what this means and how we could help the aliens find what they had lost. We used words like magnet, magnetic, metal, attract and repel! We loved exploring the magnets first to learn all about attract and repel and we loved exploring our classroom to see if we could find all of the aliens lost belongings. We collected all of the metal things they had lots after testing them to ensure they were magnetic.

Friday was national number day so Reception did all things number. We showed how much we have learnt so far while doing super fun jobs with numbers. We also modelled some amazing number outfits which our grown ups at home helped us with. Thank you. 

Spring 1  - Week 4 The Gingerbread man.

This week has been all about The Gingerbread man.  Last week the children kept choosing the story from our reading corner so we decided to use the story to lead our learning this week.

We read the story lots of times and soon we could join in with the retelling.  We loved reading the story in both of our reading areas and 'Run run as fast as you can - you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man' could be heard around our classroom all week.  

We tried gingerbread men! We smelt them and we licked them and we tasted them.  Most of us liked the taste but we all decided it was a little bit spicy and hot and we needed a drink afterwards. We also made our own gingerbread men and decorated them.  They were delicious.  

We talked lots about the sly old fox and how he tricked the gingerbread man.  We thought about why the gingerbread man didn't just swim over the river. 

One of Reception decided that the gingerbread man should have used a boat and this lead us to exploring floating and sinking.  We explored materials which floated and those which sunk and then we used what we learnt to design our own boats which the gingerbread man could have used to cross the river.  We then tested out our boats with real gingerbread men.  If our gingerbread men got to the other side dry and not soggy then we could eat him!  We had such good fun and we were so excited when our friends boats safely reached the other side.  We decided that there should be a new story where the gingerbread man uses a boat and then he will be safe!

This week we also explored colour mixing.  We wanted to paint out gingerbread men brown but there was no brown paint.  We learnt that red + yellow + blue made brown so we made our own brown paint to paint our gingerbread men.  We then cut them out and added our own decorations. 

Look at some of the other amazing things Reception have been up to this week.

This week was also out final balance bike training week.  Wow!  Our confidence, balance and knowledge of bikes has really improved!  Look at some of go over the wobbly ramp!!

Spring 1 Week 3 - Chinese New Year

This week we have been learning all about Chinese New Year and it’s traditions. Initially compared how we celebrate new year to the Chinese celebration.

Then we learnt about lots of the traditions associated with Chinese New Year. We cleaned our home corner to get ride of the old and get ready to welcome the new and we made those we love a good luck red envelope with a golden coin inside to wish our loved ones good luck for the new year. Throughout Chinese New Year red and gold are prominent colours as they are a sign of good luck.

We read The Great Race and learnt why each Chinese New Year is named after an animal. We learnt that this year is the year of the rabbit. We used our observational drawing skills to draw pictures of Chinese representations of rabbits used for new year. We used this time to talk about everything we have learnt so far. Our teachers were impressed with what we remembered, the sentences we used and the vocabulary we used.

We also looked at the tradition of decorating homes for Chinese New Year. We made our own lanterns to decorate our home corner. We used red paper and gold ink to ensure our decorations bring good luck.

We also learnt about the food used during the Chinese New Year celebrations. We tried eating noodles and rice with chopsticks. We also took chopsticks home to use at tea time. We sent our teachers some amazing photos for our class floor book. We also had a special Chinese lunch made for us by our school cook. It was delicious. 

We did so many more learning tasks which helped our understanding of Chinese New Year develop and which also focused on the development of our core skills.

Over the week we looked at Chinese dragon dances and practised one of our own. We looked at how drums are used in the dragon dance. We explored playing drums and we made our own. We also made our own Chinese dragon head and costume ready for our own Chinese dragon dance which we performed around school playing our own drum music as we performed. 

Spring 1 - Week 2 Snow, snow and more snow!

This week Reception have been comparing where we live with places that are very different.  We used 'The little Polar Bear' and 'Lost and Found' as our texts.  Using these books we learnt all about how polar bears live in The North Pole and penguins live in the South Pole.  We learnt where these places where on the earth and what they were like and we compared them to where we live.  We learnt that they are very cold and covered in snow and that you need to wrap up warm to live there.  

We hoped it would snow here this week but unfortunately it didn't so this week we made out own snow and played with it as we loved experimenting with snow last week.

We learnt lots about igloos - what they are made from, how they are build and who would live in them.  We had our own igloo in the class and we wrapped up warm to go inside.  We also made our own igloos using lots of different methods to support our fine motor development.  

We also looked at pictures of people who go exploring to the North and South Poles and we talked about how they stay warm and sometimes how they cook.  We looked at pictures of campfires in the South and North Poles and we made our own.  We also had a go at cooking on our campfire.  It wasn't bad for a first attempt!  We also used this work to talk about fire and its dangers and how to keep safe around fires using our sensible behaviour and our senses.