Reception Project: What makes me special?

Spring 1 - 2022

Developing self-worth and confidence is always essential. We felt that this year it was particularly important, so we have dedicated our first Spring project to discovering what makes us special.

We will begin by learning about our senses and discussing our likes and dislikes. As the term goes on we will learn about our bodies, how they work, how our brain works and how to make healthy choices. We will talk about what we are good at and what we find hard.

We also know that our children have very little experience with other cultures and so we are excited to make extra time in this project to have early conversations about race and religion, to expose the child to different disabilities and ways of life, and importantly to challenge stereotypes.

Finally, in this project we will be looking at how love and friendship is celebrated around the world and create our very own Love Day WOW event to celebrate all of the wonderful things we love about ourselves and each other.

Week 6

This week we celebrated the end of our project with a Love Day Party. Before the party we looked at how love is celebrated on Valentines Day and as part of other celebrations around the world. The children came up with a list of ideas about what they wanted to do for their party; cake, chocolate and flowers were among their favourite ideas.

We were so pleased to welcome lots of grown ups into school today. We also played pass the parcel, ate cakes that we had decorated, finished the final parts of our special canvases and showed off our art gallery.

Week 5

This week the children looked at their abilities, we talked about things that we found hard when we were little and what we can do now. We also talked about what we are good at and what we would like to get better at. 

We continued our discussions about the brain. We learnt how the neural pathways get stronger the more we practise and how important resilience is for learning something new.  

We also had a discussion about disabilities. We talked about how this could be visible or invisible, that everyone should be allowed the chance to join in, be treated kindly and has their own strength and abilities too. 

In music this week we continued to learn about volume and started to change the sound of our instruments to create musical patterns. 

Week 4

This week in Reception we have learnt about special clothes. We talked about the different uniforms in our trust that help us to belong, we talked about the special uniforms that different people wear to protect them while they work, we looked at our favourite outfits and how they make us feel and we read the book "Hats of faith" that showed us different clothing that is worn for religious reasons because of their beliefs.

In play we have enjoyed designing and making our own outfits in the role play, we have even created our own shoes!

In maths this week the children have been learning about and comparing numbers 6 and 7.  We looked for patterns on ten frames to help us subitise and used STEM sentences to explain how we knew if the number was 6 or 7.

The children also enjoyed reading "Six dinner Sid." and creating rainbows with 7 colours in play.

On Wednesday, author Holly Ryan joined us on TEAMs to read her book "Never Mess with a Princess Pirate."

Week 3

This week the children have learnt about the way their body works and how this makes them special. We started by learning about our skeleton and understanding what our bones do. 

We then talked about our heart and our lungs. We loved finding our pulse, exercising to make our heart beat faster and having a go at belly breathing and square breathing to feel our breathe. We learnt that exercising and resting are both important to keep our bodies healthy. 

At the end of the week we began to learn about our brain and all of the wonderful things it can do. 

Our topic homework was to create a model or collage of ourselves. Take a look at some of the incredible art work that has come in!

Week 2

This week we have learnt about what we look like.

We created a whole class pictograph to show the different eye colours and hair colours of our children.

We learnt the vocabulary 'diversity' and 'respect' and used these to talk about our class books, "Our Skin" and "All Are Welcome". Both were really useful books to begin discussions about discrimination. 

In art we created self-portraits using transient art and then later in the week  sketched our faces, remembering to use shape and spaces to represent different body parts.

In maths this week we learnt about measure. We used the vocabulary 'short', 'tall' and 'long' to talk about and compare objects, our height, and the length of our feet. We also learnt to order and measure length. 

Week 1  

This week we learnt what the vocabulary 'unique' and 'special' means and began to talk about the different things we would be learning about this term.

Throughout the rest of the week we have been exploring our senses. We know that our senses help us to make sense of the world around us. We can use our senses to help to decide what we like and don't like. 

The children used their senses to describe popcorn, went on a sense hunt, sang the senses song, and shared their opinions on different sensory experiences. 

In maths we have been learning to compare numbers to 5.  We have started our Spring 1 phonics and have been excited to welcome the JB balance bikes in school for our very first session.