Reception Project: What is magic?  – Autumn 2 2021

This term we are exploring what magic is to us. We will start the term by looking at lots of different types of magical potions. We will be developing our imagination, following instructions, colour mixing and learning lots of new vocabulary. We will also be learning about the magic that is inside us and talking about resilience and kindness. As we move through the term we will read a range of different magical stories and learn a few magic tricks.

At the end of the term we will focus on the magic of Christmas and finally celebrate with our Christmas performance, Christmas party and trip to see the pantomime Sleeping Beauty at the theatre. 

Week 7 

What an exciting and magical final week of term!

This week we cooked real gingerbread men. We talked about changes, textures. We worked together to measure out the ingredients and worked hard to make sure that the numbers on the recipe matched the scales.

We did some shared writing as a class to ask the kindness elves to cook them for us. The children all signed their name and were very excited to eat them on our trip to see Sleeping Beauty Pantomime. 

We have also been busy making Christmas Cards, Calendars, we enjoyed a Movie Night, the Christmas fair, Christmas lunch, we had a house team Quiz, a Cultural afternoon and a visit from Santa on Friday afternoon. 

Week 6

This week we performed our Christmas nativity, "Angel Express". The children were fantastic! 

We enjoyed reading "The Gingerbread man" as part of our guided reading and enjoyed using our number skills to create gingerbread playdough with a spoon recipe. We were blown away by the independence, resilience and problem solving that took place in play to make sure that the mixture was the right consistency.

Our Magical forest grew again in Art as we learnt to add detail and using the correct colours. 

Week 5

This week we have had a big focus on kindness. We read 'The Kindness Tree' as part of our Guided reading and the kindness elves came to visit to give us kindness challenges throughout December. The children created kindness jars to show the magic kindness can create.

In Maths we have been consolidating our use of language related to time. Over the term we have learnt to use the vocabulary yesterday, today, now, next, after and this week we started learn the days of the week and talk about dates when opening our chocolate advent calendar. 

In art our magical forest is continuing to grow! This week we looked at the shapes of different trees and the different parts that we needed to draw. The children had a go at drawing their second sketch using the skills we had learnt. 

Week 4 

In art this week we read the story of 'The Magic Crayon'. The children then used their own magic pencils to draw a tree to be part of our very own magical wood. This is our first sketch and over the next few weeks our wood will grow as we learn to develop our drawings. 

In maths this week we have been busy counting with 1:1. correspondence, using STEM sentence to recall facts about numbers and then using them to subitise. The children were also very interested in number lines and enjoyed ordering numbers and creating their own staircase number tracks with blocks in play. 

In phonics the children have wowed us with their spelling and reading. It is lovely to see lots of children sound talking and blending more independently and beginning to segment words using their segmenting fingers. 

Week 3

This week we continued to learn about Diwali. The children took part in an online Diwali dance workshop with West End in Schools. We practised using facial expressions and actions to create a dance. The children in Reception at Spilsby Primary also took part and we are looking forward to sharing what we have learnt together over TEAMs on Monday.  

Our guided reading book this week was 'The Magic Porridge pot'. The children learnt vocabulary to describe the texture by playing with dry porridge and making and tasting gloopy, sticky porridge. We also talked about the volume of porridge in containers and LOVED making the pot overflow.

In art this week we have continued to look at colours. We sorted light and dark colours and then used white and black paint to change the shade in our potion bottles.  

In maths the children have been busy subitising, ordering numbers, counting with 1:1 correspondence and matching numerals to the correct amount by playing  games, retelling stories and role playing. 

Children in need

The children at Gipsey Bridge were very lucky to receive a visit from Pudsey on Friday. Pudsey visited the children at playtime, helped the teachers with jobs and visited the classrooms for cuddles and photographs.

Week 2 

 This week we have been learning all about Diwali. We watched two videos that showed us how children like us, celebrate Diwali with their families. Our guided reading book 'The Best Diwali Ever.' also helped us to remember how families celebrate and helped us to compare Diwali to our celebration of bonfire night. At the end of the week we read the story of Rama and Sita and worked as a class to act out the story. 

Continuing with the potion theme this week the children have been extending their play in our water potion shop outside. We cut up herbs, sprinkled in spices and enjoyed deciding what the potions might do. 

In art we have been continuing with colour mixing in play and started to talk about and sorting lighter and darker colours. 

In maths this week we have learnt about circles and triangles. We have talked about what makes them special, used them to make Kandinsky inspired art and started to create repeating patterns with them in playdough and in the potion shop.

Week 1 

This week we launched our project by exploring magic potions.  We learnt bossy words that we could use when putting ingredients into the potion, we imagined different things that our potions might do and loved playing in the role play magic shop. We learnt vocabulary to describe how our potion might taste and learnt how to turn our potion different colours by practising our colour mixing in art. 

Lots of our maths this term is also taking place in the magic shop role play. Children learnt about the numbers 1 and 2. We learnt write to these numbers, represent them in different ways and created our own number potions using only number 1 or 2 ingredients. 

In Guided reading we read the book, 'The Witches Cat and the Cooking Catastrophe.' This fitted perfectly with our learning and the children were able to use everything they had learnt in the week to imaginatively predict what might happen next and explain what difficult vocabulary such as scrumptious and catastrophe meant. 

At the end of the week we learnt about bonfire night. We shared our own celebrations and traditions and talked about ways that we could stay safe.