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.