Diamond Class
Welcome to Diamond Class.
I am Mrs Fearby, your child's Reception teacher and I am also the Early Years Lead, your children will also be supported by Miss Ashcroft, Mrs Atkinson and Mrs Finlay throughout the week.
We are a happy Hetton family!
Remember to follow the links below to watch the parent videos to support your child in reading at home, using Read, Write, Inc. These are different to the Virtual Classroom videos that you will receive each week with your child's specifically taught sounds. Please let know if you have any questions.
Happy watching! Mrs Fearby
Transition Week
Last week, Reception spent three days in Year 1 with their new teacher, Mrs Morris. We had lots of fun and did lots of different activities but my favourite activities were exploring all of our new core texts and getting the opportunity to read lots. We read The Lighthouse Keeper's Lunch and decided for our lunch we would make jam sandwiches and biscuits. See the photos below. They were delicious! Mrs Morris was very impressed with how well we settled in to Year 1 - she is looking forward to September.
Our Medium Term Plan for Summer 2: Let's Think Big!
Week Beginning 10th June…More Pirates, Cricket, writing number sentences, using Rekenreks, and most importantly….Play!
International day of play: Early Years doing what they do best!
The Pirates take over! Pirate Thursday. Pirate costumes, crafts, dances, tattoos, face paint, walking the plank and pop up pirates!
Literacy: Learning actions to support the story of The Night Pirates and drawing our own story maps. We are getting really good at knowing the story off by heart.
That’s Cricket! Reception practising their foundation cricket skills.
Here Comes the Summer...and The Night Pirates...Shiver me Timbers!
Our last half term in Reception: week beginning 3rd June 2024
Literacy: The Night Pirates have arrived and left us some treasure! Instructions for yummy pirate biscuits. We also had a pirate ship to build and decorate.
Drawing ourselves as Pirates and writing about what we would say. ''Ar! Dig for that treasure!''
PSCHE: I’ve got a body, a very busy body!
RE: Sharing Special Stories
Maths: Sharing Fairly, and Mastering Number - counting accurately.
Week beginning 20th May 2024
Here come the Very…Hungry…Caterpillars!
World Bee Day 20th May 2024: Playdough, drawing, writing, building homes...Save the Bees!
Our visit to Butterfly World: exploring the park, Caterpillars, Chrysalis’s, Butterflies, Meerkats, Spiders and lots of information, the children had an amazing day!
Week beginning 13th May 2024
PSCHE: I can use ‘Calm Me’ time to manage my feelings. Drawing in response to calm music, and learning strategies to help support me to manage my feelings.
The Wonderful World of Worms! Digging for worms for our new wormery, stamping on the ground to get our worms to come to the surface!
Brush your teeth, burnish your teeth, give them all a treat! Starting our tooth brushing project.
Primary PE: Football Fundamentals. Stopping the ball with the sole of our foot, Dribbling, and Striking with the Paw Patrol!
Literacy: Writing instructions about How to Plant a Seed. Fantastic independent writing!
Mastering Number: Using the Rekenreks and fast fingers to show ‘5 and a bit!’
Child initiated play: practising our skills in our own time. Painting outdoors, digging, independent drawing and labelling, showing things we have brought into school, being proud of our friends for their achievements, and making beanstalks!
Week beginning 6th May 2024
Not-so Tiny Seeds, Mastering our numbers within 10, Very Hungry Caterpillars, practising our skills, reflecting on the year, bible stories and making up with our friends. Growing and learning together.
Welcoming our new class members: Very Hungry Caterpillars!
Gaining confidence and skill through play...model making, developing our gross motor skills, drawing, dominoes, digging, role play and planting, all in a weeks’ work!
Reflecting on our learning across the year: looking through our class floor book and writing what we remember.
Practising our fine motor skills, building shapes with straws and balls.
Digging for Dinosaurs...Understanding how we find out about the past.
Understanding the World: Learning about the parts of a Flower and looking after our plants.
Outdoor Learning: Practising our Skills on our new equipment. Trip to Disneyland, anyone?
RE: Features of a Church. Learning about Bible Stories, Stained Glass Windows and making our own.
Mastering Number: Showing 5 and a bit!
PSCHE: Make friends, make friends, never ever break friends...the impact of our words - role playing falling out with our friends, and how to make up when we do.
Week beginning 29th April 2024
Growing, Counting, Shapes, floating and sinking and dribbling!
Another busy week for Reception.
Watch us grow in Reception this week!
In Literacy we have been continuing with our story of The Tiny Seed, writing about our plants we are growing, and captions about our favourite part of the story. We have done some fantastic work using our Fred Fingers to segment words for spelling!
We have become true mathematicians in Reception. This week we showed off our knowledge of 2D shapes by spotting the odd ones out, talking about the features of shape, and then using familiar shapes to copy and create pictures. We have also really developed our skills of grouping, counting in 2’s, recording numbers and counting in our counting collections session on a Friday morning, we are skilled at subitising and finding numerals to match amounts on number lines and tracks….amazing!
In PE we are using our brand new PE scheme to learn about Football Fundamentals, we dribbled the ball between cones (NOT using our toes, no,no,no!) then we tried to hide the ball from the ball thief using our bodies. Lots of fun and new skills learned, fantastic skill progression even in the lesson, we have gained lots of control now!
In RE we continued with learning about which places are special and why, we looked at different churches and drew the features we could see, such as graves and stained glass windows. We learned a lot of new vocabulary and we are starting remember that different faiths have a different name for their God, and read different books.
In Computing, we are using the Purple Mash scheme of work, and we are learning how to build the perfect boat. This week we experimented with floating and sinking to see which materials are best to use, next week we are going to design our boats, we decided plastic and wood were the materials that floated best.
Literacy: Keeping track of our plants and writing about our focus story The Tiny Seed.
RE: Which places are special and why? What are churches like? Drawing what we can see in a church and talking about why they are special to Christians.
Maths: Counting our Collections. Now we are grouping, skip counting and subitising as well as recording the numbers! Wow!
Computing: Building a Boat - Exploring the best materials that float before we plan how to build our boat.
Maths: Identifying the odd shape out, and making pictures with shapes we know.
Our new PE scheme Primary PE: Football Fundamentals. Dribbling, Striking and Balancing over a ball. So much fun!
Week beginning 22nd April 2024
Meeting the Dental Team ready for our big tooth brushing project!
Oliver’s Vegetables: Vegetable tasting just like Oliver in the story, some we liked, some we didn’t!
Understanding the World: Checking on our Plants, drawing a dandelion clock in Art, and looking for signs of Spring.
Understanding the World: A Sense of Place
Maths: Correcting and creating our own number lines in Mastering Number, recapping on Positional Language, and working out the rule for a 3-unit pattern!
RE: Special Places. PSCHE: I know how to make friends to stop myself feeling lonely.
Week beginning 15th April 2024
Planting, Climbing, Counting and Writing…growing from Tiny Seeds.
A busy first week back for our Reception children!
Maths: we have been continuing our Counting Collections journey by exploring grouping our collections, skip counting to make it faster to count, then matching the amount to the numerals on the number track and number lines. We have also been recording our learning on part whole diagrams and ten frames. In Mastering Number we learned the song ‘Ten Sizzling Sausages’ to help us work out numbers to 10, and we used our fingers to work out, when some of our ten sausages are burned, how many do we have left?
Literacy was an exciting part of our week this week. We were introduced to our new focus story The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, and we looked at different types of seeds, and planted our own. We learned about what a plant needs to grow, and drew and wrote about it. We are excited about looking after our seeds and helping them to grow!
In RE we finished our learning about the story of Easter. We learned more about Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, and why the cross is such an important symbol to Christians. We also learned about the El Salvador Cross and created our own, using symbols that are important to us.
In PSCHE, we started our new topic, and we learned about what a family is, different types of families and the jobs we do in our family. We had lots of good ideas, including playing with our brothers and sisters, and stroking our pets. Some of us said we tidied our room, but some of us only had the job of playing and watching TV!
Mrs Atkinson very kindly went on a mission over the Easter Holidays and found us an amazing climbing tower complete with a pulley, a drawing screen and ladder to use, and Mr Wright built up our brand new climbing frame. We are having so much fun pushing ourselves to the limit climbing and hanging, learning so many skills!
Another fun filled week, watch this space next week to see what we get up to.
Mrs Fearby and the Early Years Team
PSCHE: Learning about the jobs I do in my family.
Indoor and outdoor play: Showing off our skills and enjoying our new climbing frames.
Maths: Skip Counting in Twos, Part Whole Diagrams and using ten frames.
Maths: Counting Collections, grouping them and finding the numeral on number lines and tracks.
The Tiny Seed: Our new focus story in Literacy. Planting our own tiny seeds, and learning what a plant needs to grow.
RE: Creating palm leaves and El Salvador Crosses to learn why Christians have a cross in their Easter Garden.
Week beginning 25th March 2024
An Easter Egg hunt with a Maths theme: find an egg and order the numbers to unlock a chocolate reward! So much fun!
English: Story Maps, Maths: Making 7 and Counting our Collections
Egg-citing Easter Crafts. Cards, Printing, Spring Watercolours, Decorating Rabbits!
Week Beginning 18th March 2024
Another busy week for Reception, working hard, playing hard and everything in between!
We have been having a few technical issues with our website page, including getting photos and text on to the page, if you’re struggling to view photos please let a member of staff know and we will try and help.
Maths: In Maths this week the children have been recalling their learning on skip counting in twos, as well as learning about composition of number in Mastering Number.
In their own time, the children have been using our Counting Collections library to explore their own mathematical fascinations and solve problems, including comparing numbers and amounts on 100 squares and number tracks.
In RE this week, before we learn about the Easter Story, the children have built on their previous learning about belonging; being part of something, such as a club, or a school, by learning about how new babies are welcomed into different faiths, such as Christianity and Islam. We re-enacted a Christian baptism, and some of the children carried this on in their play.
In Literacy this week, the children have begun writing their own story ‘mountains’ busy using ‘Tell me a Story’ boxes to recount the story of Little Red, our alternative version of Little Red Riding Hood. We have also been thinking about how Little Red is similar to Little Red Riding Hood, and how it is different.
You can listen to the read aloud of the story online here:
https://youtu.be/42mbDDXc9OY?si=7Et1Tn5YpEVPOZhs
In Reception we focus on changing seasons and also some of the celebrations that we might typically hold at different times of year. The children have been looking forward to Easter, and they have been playing and learning, creating Easter themed crafts and themed art work, using lots of different skills in the process.
As always, the children have been working hard in their play, we have introduced some new ‘wheels’ to the outdoor provision, the children have been building, printing, painting and writing in their play, lots of new and important skills in practice!
Thank you for your continued support, we have a fun packed week coming up, and you never know, the Easter Bunny may leave something for the children to find!
Please remember we break up on Thursday for Easter, with our return to school on Monday 15th April.
We will need all book bags in by Wednesday at the latest so that I can change all books and folders ready for the half term, dig deep to see if you can find any books or bedtime story bags that you need to bring in!
Mrs Fearby and the Early Years Team
Maths: Skip Counting and Recording. Choosing to use our learning from Mastering Number and Counting Collections in our play.
Playing and Learning: Independent writing, building, outdoor play, creating pictures using tools, printing.
R.E: Being Special and Belonging. How do we welcome babies into the Christian Church?
Spring has sprung and Easter is near! Seasonal themed crafts and play.
Week beginning 11th March 2024
Here Come the Chicks!
English: Creating our story maps about Little Red
Maths: Counting by 2’s and Part Whole diagrams - what makes 5?
RE: Being Special - Where do we belong?
Spotting signs of Spring, building, drawing, learning through play.
Eight Fluffy Chicks to look after! Reading stories to them, being careful with them, and learning about the life cycle of a hen.
Week beginning 12th February 2024
Pancakes, Lent, and a whole lotta love!
Maths: 3D shape. We continued to learn the features of 3D shape this week, and we began to identify what 3D shapes we can see in everyday objects. We noticed cylinders are fire extinguishers and pencils, and cubes are dice! We then played a game to match 3D shapes to their names.
Understanding the World: the children in Reception learned a lot about our world this week, with two special celebrations, Shrove Tuesday and St Valentine’s Day, we learned about the connections they have to Lent, and to religion. Pancake Day is celebrated because people used to use up all of the things that we might give up during Lent and make pancakes, and St Valentine, married people in secret and passed secret love notes between couples in love who were in jail, a long time ago. We made love potions, cards and sent messages to each other, and on Pancake Day we voted on the toppings for our pancakes - whipped cream, sprinkles, and chocolate chips!
English: This week we pretended to be Shen from our story the Magic Paintbrush, and designed our own Monsters to scare away the evil Emperor. We then labelled our pictures using our phonic knowledge.
We had lots of our own time to practise our learning, and play and learn indoors and outdoors, and we hope everyone has a fantastic half term week. Stay safe, relax and enjoy!
Mrs Fearby and the Early Years Team
Maths: consolidating our knowledge of 3D shape by building towers, matching shapes to names, and going on a shape hunt!
Shrove Tuesday - enjoying Pancake day with some special treats and learning about Lent in RE.
Valentines Day: Cards, messages, and love potions!
Learning through play: Indoors and out.
Week Beginning 5th February 2024
Chinese New Year, Computing, History, Independent Writing and Staying Safe on the internet. All in a week’s work…
Understanding the World: The Lunar New Year. This week Reception have enjoyed tasting different kinds of Chinese food, (some we liked, some we didn’t!) learning about Chinese crafts such as lantern and fan making, , learning about Chinese culture, writing, and how the lunar new year was decided, renacting the story with masks. They also did a dragon dance to end the week!
Our Wider Community: As part of Children’s Mental Health Week as a whole school we decided to wear ‘What Makes You, You.’ The children enjoyed wearing different clothes to show what they liked. We also practised some mindful techniques such as ‘calm me’ time, we talked about who we could talk to if we weren’t feeling great, and for Art we coloured our drawings from last week, when we took a line for a walk. We played calming music and focused for as long as we needed to. A very chilled out week!
Expressive Art and Design: Every Friday Reception has a dance party, we listen to the Friday song and dance until we feel happy! We then usually play a song that the children have requested. This week was ‘Sweet Dreams’ by the Eurythmics. If you have favourite song that you like to listen to at home, send me a message on Class Dojo and we will include it on our playlist.
In Maths this week we started to learn more about 3D shapes. We looked at five common names of shapes, the features of the shapes, and we learned some songs to help us remember. When we were more confident we completed experiments to work out how the different faces of the shapes move on a surface, we made predictions - does it roll or does it slide? Then we used everyday objects that we could spot shapes within, and we tested if they moved as we had noticed with the shapes themselves.
We practised indoors then again in our play when we were outside….we decided any shape with a curve would roll, and any without would slide, a cone does both!
Reception have been following the Purple Mash scheme of work for Computing this term, as well as learning about how to use a tablet, and how to code a. Bee-Bot programme so that it gets to the end of a track, we have also learned how to keep ourselves safe on the internet with the help of a song.
’Ask your grown up, ask your grownup, ask for help, ask for help, use your tablet safely, use your tablet safely.’
We learned that we should not play anything with an age rating that is over our age, do not download anything without asking a grown up first, and also if we see anything that makes us uncomfortable, stop looking and tell a grown up. We also coloured in pieces of a jigsaw with the messages we learned.
Understanding the World; History. The children really enjoyed looking at the photos of when they were a baby! We read the story ‘Once they were Giants’ and compared what we could do then to what we can do now.
Remember to check your Class Dojo messages for the new virtual classroom links for Read, Write Inc. and have a great weekend!
Mrs Fearby and the Early Years Team
Learning through play: Physical Development, Communicating, Role Play, independent reading and writing, Maths, Art, Architecture, Cycling stunts, Photography and Physics!
Maths: 3D shape. It’s a cube, it’s a cuboid it’s a cylinder, it’s a sphere or it’s a cone!
Improving our wellbeing: Art, wearing what makes us happy, and dancing and laughing until we can’t any more!
Art and Calm Time: Reception get focused on filling in their ‘walking lines’.
Dance until you feel good!
The Lunar New Year: Food Tasting, learning about Chinese culture, painting Chinese numbers, dancing like dragons, and lots of crafts!
Purple Mash Computing, programming BeeBots, and Staying Safe on the Internet.
Week Beginning 29th January 2024
Maths: Time. Learning how much we can do in one minute, and ordering the days of the week.
Expressive Art: Taking a line for a walk.
RealPE: Moving like animals to warm up, then balancing using our core muscles!
Literacy: Thanking Shen and Labelling our Monsters.
ICT and Maths: What can you see, how do you see it?
A lovely surprise from Nursery: Whatever Next?
Phonics: practising reading our ditties, playing teacher to help our friends, and forming our letters.
Week beginning 22nd January
Magical Painting, Making Marks, Writing, and Comparing Taller and Shorter…another busy week.
Literacy: In literacy this week we have been inspired by our focus text The Magic Paintbrush. We drew what we thought would be a useful thing to help people, and then used beautiful watercolours to paint it and bring it to life. We then thought together as a group about what we could paint to use to release Shen from prison, and then we drew and wrote about what we would use. We have also been inspired to paint in our play, using watercolours and block paints, just like Shen in the story.
Expressive Art: We have been learning about different kinds of marks and how to make them, we looked at spirals, dots, zig zag, cross hatching, and so much more! We decided to have a go at three different ways to make marks by ourselves, we really took our time and thought about how to hold and use our pencils, and we enjoyed talking about it with our friends. We loved it!
In Maths this week we have been learning again about our special maths word ‘compare’ and we have been comparing who is taller, and who is shorter in our class, as well as ordering objects from shortest to tallest. We had lots of fun, and we made a height chart of all of our children to then measure ourselves again at the end of the year. We also read a story called ‘Titch’, which showed us that no matter how short we are, we can make a big difference!
In our Mastering Number session, we have been learning about the composition of 7, which smaller numbers make the number. We have also been learning how to recognise what is 7, and what is not 7. We were inspired by the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and decided to build our own beanstalks in our play - look how tall they got!
In our play, we have really demonstrated our learning, and practised as much as wel can! We have developed our fine motor skills using playdough, the superhero girls rescued their friends, and some of us developed our own maths game with the dice and cubes, writing number sentences and adding them together.
Another fun filled week, the children have started making accelerated progress across all areas of learning, and with your support from home this can only get better!
Please remember to bring book bags with books in back to school every day, and return the bedtime story book bags by Wednesday.
Thank you and have a good weekend from Mrs Fearby and the Early Years Team
Inspired by The Magic Paintbrush: Our writing and painting.
Playful Maths: Thinking of our own problems, and challenging our friends!
Maths: Taller and Shorter, comparing our class, and building the tallest beanstalk.
Mastering Number: 7 and not 7.
Expressive Art: Making different marks.
Learning through play: showing off our skills. Saving the world, making the dinner, building the tower, using all of our senses with herbs we like the smell of to make a playdough ‘salad’, investigating the signs, sounds and smells of Winter. Deep learning at it’s best!
Week beginning 15th January 2024
Being Useful, Measuring and Comparing Length, Reading, Creating Beautiful Things, and Challenging Ourselves Outdoors!
Outdoor Learning: Climb Every Mountain! Risk Assessing, Fighting the Frost, Painting with Ice, Building and using resources to solve a problem.
Physical Development: Bounce and Play, building those muscles for learning!
Inspired to Write: Playing in role and independent writing using our phonics skills.
Literacy Comprehension: What useful items were in our story?
Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Learning about the colour of our skin - everyone is different and unique!
Maths: I Can Only Draw Worms! Comparing and ordering by length.
Mastering Number: A Stairway to Counting and is it 6...or not 6?
Week beginning 8th January 2024
Happy New Year from Diamond Class!
Welcome back and Happy New Year to all of our families.
This week, Reception have been straight back on it. New phonics groups, a new focus story, learning even more about Winter and seasonal changes, a new Maths topic, and lots of play and learning about personal, social and emotional development to settle us back into our routine.
Winter is here: In our Understanding the World group time, the children enjoyed learning a song all about the changes in the seasons, and we talked as a class about the signs of Winter, and how they are different to Spring, Summer and Autumn. We remembered lots of vocabulary we have already learned, and learned some new words together. Here is the link to the song if you’d like to sing along at home!
https://youtu.be/8ZjpI6fgYSY?si=Pb5ORqrBig7v38Ls
English - our new focus story: The Magic Paintbrush. Reception were amazed to find a delivery for our class. A girl called Shen had heard how much we love to help people and she had sent us a magic paintbrush and a brand new story. We learned about what things can be useful. And why people would need them. We also learned about the difference between wealthy and poor, and then we researched the different types of food that Shen and the people of her village ate. We all agreed we would probably eat Shrimp and fish, but no one said they were brave enough to touch an oyster!
To help Shen, we decided to draw and paint our very own useful objects, and label them. We thought a house would be useful, and other things such as jackets and ladders. This inspired us to paint our own pictures in our play time, and we investigated poster paints and watercolours. We also painted outside and mixed our own colours in the rain.
Heavier and Lighter: In Maths this week we have been investigating how to use balance scales, and how they don’t show what is heavy or light, but they COMPARE what is heavier and what is lighter. Vocabulary is very important in our Maths sessions, so we know the right words to explain our thinking.
First, Mrs Fearby turned us into human balance scales, then we used some for ourselves, making predictions and testing them, and then we used the giant balance scales outside to investigate things that were heavier. We found it a little tricky to understand that bigger things aren’t always heavy!
In our Maths Mastering Number sessions we have been
earning about the composition of 5,6,7 and 8, by breaking them done into their smaller parts, and learning about ‘one more.’
Phonics and independent writing: we have enjoyed our new phonics groups this week, and we are really taking off with our writing. Some of us showed off our skills on the board by writing the words we’d learned (you can see us using our Fred Fingers independently!) and we played
a game to remember our ‘red’ words, words that can’t be ‘sounded out’, such as ‘the’ ‘to’ ‘I’. In our play we have been fascinated with writing to label our drawings. We drew fruit and labelled it independently, and we were also inspired by our new focus story to paint our letters and words with watercolour paints.
As always, we played in the environment indoors and out to support our adult led group learning, and also to develop our vocabulary skills and personal and social development.
Please remember to bring your reading books back into school, and update the reading record to say that you have read the book with your child.
Thank you for your continued support, Mrs Fearby and the Early Years Team.
Here we go, oh-oh, seasons of the year. Winter is here!
A special delivery...a magic paintbrush?
Maths: Mastering Number and counting our collections.
Maths: Balancing. Heavier and Lighter.
Putting our phonics into practice. Games and independent writing.
Learning more about our school values and our Jigsaw PSCHE: Working together and Resilience - keep trying!
Let the children play...independent reading, model making using our fine motor skills, role play, making maps of Hetton with blocks, drawing our own maps, creating new worlds, and delivering the mail!
