We are beginning to explore Autumn and have enjoyed our art activity exploring Pointillism!

We used Autumn colours to paint some leaves using dots by carefully dipping a cotton bud into paint and creating colourful patterns!

​Watch this space for our completed art work!

Rainbows have had so much fun this week making different sounds with instruments and singing different songs!

We have been practising our Good Morning song and are learning to accompany the song with Makaton signs! We have been singing lots of different Nursery Rhymes and songs and our favourites have been Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, The Hokey Cokey. I am a Baker Man and I can sing a Rainbow!

We have been exploring different sounds using claves and made loud, quiet, fast and slow sounds! We have been making quiet, fast sounds together and slow, loud sounds together! We have been tapping back rhythms and using claves to make a beat while we are singing!

We have continued to explore this during provision time in our music area and have enjoyed making different rhythms and sounds!

Our topic this week has been “My Family.” We have enjoyed sharing photos of who we live with and our extended family as well! Our learning has been based on two different stories this week; Owl Babies and Five Minutes Peace.”
 
Our activities have included drawing pictures of members of our family and sharing this with the class, exploring colour mixing and painting pictures of family members and the three owl babies from the story, making a home for the owl babies using construction resources and retelling the story using the book and puppets in the reading area! We made some repeating patterns using Compare Bears and used Lego characters with sounds on to write words!
 
During Welly Walk we continued to identify patterns and used natural objects to make repeating patterns. We could confidently explain our repeating pattern and some of us began to use more than two objects!
 
This week we have also been learning about different emotions. We met some Mood Monsters who told us how they feel with their facial expressions. We learnt lots of different emotions including happy, sad, surprised, shocked, excited, angry, calm, tired and worried. Some of us made mood monsters in the dough area and drew mood monsters using chalk outside. We learnt what to do if we feel certain emotions such as if you are happy you can help someone feeling sad, and if you are calm you can help someone feeling worried.
 
In maths we have been learning about number three. We have been really confident at identifying the properties of triangles and know they have three straight sides and three points. We can pick triangles out of a group of shapes, even if their sides are different lengths and their orientation is different. We have been counting three objects out from a larger group and can identify if there are three or not three objects in a group.
 
In phonics we have continued to learn new sounds and the corresponding handwriting phrase. Some of us have continued to blend to read words and used magnetic letters and boards to write words. We have been practising Fred Games and following instructions such as “go and get your c-oa-t.”

Our learning has been out friendships this week and we read The Rainbow Fish.

We have been learning what it means to be kind to one another and have shared times when people have been kind to us and when we have been kind to other people. We have been doing acts of kindness this week, not just for our close friends but for children who we don't know as well and for adults too! We have been drawing pictures and giving them to children and adults to surprise them and see their reaction. Some children have been helping others when they are finding learning tricky and we have even been helping to keep our friends safe when they are learning to climb on the climbing frame! Our classroom has been such a lovely place to be and the Rainbows have all agreed that being kind makes people very happy!

We had lots of fun learning about number 2 this week! We have been making two in different ways with sounds, actions and pictures. We are becoming more confident singing our number 2 song and can make two on a tens frame, dice, domino and with pictures!

We have been keeping very fit and learning to dance this week! We have been practising new movements and pretending to be different characters and move in different ways to music! We had so much fun and can't wait to try again!

We have enjoyed learning new sounds in phonics and some of us have begun to write words by segmenting (Fred Talking) sounds in words and moving magnetic letter tiles into place! Some of us have been putting our hard work in phonics into practise by writing the sounds we know on our order form in our outdoor café!

​Our learning this week has been based on the theme All about Me! We began the week by reading the story “What Makes Me Me?” Our activities have included making dough faces and describing how we are different and the same as our friends, using loose parts to make a face or body and making birthday buns with our age on. We also designed birthday cards and decorated them, played bingo to name parts of our body and painted pictures of ourselves! We have also taken part in mindfulness activities to help us give our brain a rest and help us feel calm.
 
We made a block graph to show the Rainbows hair colour. The most popular colour in our class was blonde! We also chose our favourite colour and created a tally chart and counted the tally marks so we could show the answer on a block graph. Our favourite colour was pink!
 
In maths we have been learning about number 1. We learnt how to show one in different ways on a dice, domino, tens frame, our fingers, picture, tally marks and a number line. We sorted a variety of objects that show one and not one and counted one object out from a larger group. Next week we will be learning about number 2!
 
Mr Smith has played some listening games during our sports session and we have taken part in “Beat Baby” which helps us to listen carefully, follow instructions, tap and clap to a beat and sing.
 
In phonics we learnt the sounds m, a, s, d and t. We have begun to recognise the RWI pictures associated with each sound, to say the “pure” sound, (“t” instead of “tuh”) to write the sound saying the handwriting phrase and to blend sounds in words to hear a word. This week’s homework is recapping “m.”
 

We are all set up  in class and looking forward to welcoming you to school tomorrow. 
If you are unsure of any information then feel free to ask a member of staff. If you need a reminder of who is who then have a look at our transition booklet, which is on our class page and transition powerpoint that gives lots of information about routines and things to remember for school in Reception class.

We will blog here each week to keep you updated on what learning has happened in class.

We will also use our Class Seesaw learning platform for homework, weekly class newsletter, learning links as well as notices. This learning platform is private to our class and has proven to be an excellent way of communicating between school and home. You will receive your logons shortly from school.

We are trying to cut down on our use of paper and so will put links  and letters on Seesaw so you can access them electronically.

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