Reception Project: Where do I live?  – Autumn 1 2021

I am so pleased to welcome our new children and parents to Gipsey Bridge Academy! In Reception this term our first topic is ‘Where do I live?’

We will start by learning all about our families and homes. We are going to read ‘The Family Book’ by Todd Parr, and create a family display in the classroom to celebrate how each family is unique, valued and important.  

During the term we will also look at different types of houses, take a walk around our local community, explore maps and materials, build and draw houses and enjoy several familiar stories such as ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and ‘The Gruffalo’.

At the end of the term we hope to hold a Model Village WOW event to showcase and share our learning.

Week 1 

Wow! What a fantastic first week of school. We are incredibly proud of all the children. We have had lots of fun learning about each other's families and exploring the new classroom and outdoor area.

Reception also loved opening and reading Todd Parr's 'The family book', received from the children and staff at Spilsby Primary Academy and St Nicholas Primary Academy.

This inspired us to created our own family display board, to celebrate all of our unique and wonderful families. 

At the end of the week we voted for our first story from the 100 books to read, and learnt how to climb, balance and land safely in with PE. 

Week 2

Our Guided Reading book this week is 'On the way home'. We used toys and maps to learn new vocabulary and created a key to show the features that we might see. 

We then created our own large class map and used our new vocabulary to talk about the marks and pictures that we had drawn. 

During the week we have also been building houses with shapes and bricks, using positional language, naming and sorting different rooms in the house and learning about road safety. 

Week 3

This week Reception started by exploring and learning lots of vocabulary to talk about different types of houses. 

We used some thinking time to look at our junk model boxes and decide which box would work the best for each type of house.

This fitted perfectly with our Guided reading prepare session as we learnt new size vocabulary. We loved the words colossal, gigantic and miniscule best.

Our guided reading book this week was 'A Squash and A Squeeze' by Julia Donaldson. The children adored the repetitive phrases and asked to read the book over and over again during the week.

In topic we then learnt how to turn boxes inside out and how to use masking tape to join the edges together.  As the children created they used lots of our wonderful new vocabulary to describe their own house. 

Week 4 

This week in Reception we read The Three Little Pigs. We then received a letter from Penny pig who wanted help with building her own house. We explore different materials and learnt new vocabulary to talk about the textures and properties. 

We then investigated which materials would blow away in the wind and which materials would not. We used reasoning language to talk about which materials were the best and why. 

At the end of the week we watched a video all about how bricks were made and why we use them for our own houses. 

In maths this week we have been learning about size language, matching objects by size and working out which objects were the odd one out. 

In phonics we were very excited to start our first few sounds and take home our very first books. 

Week 5

This week the children have been learning about animal homes. We started the week by discussing where animals build their homes and sorting them into groups. We discovered that all animal homes need to be warm, safe from predators, dry and have air for them to breathe. 

We showed the children how to create animal homes out of natural materials and they have enjoyed doing this in play throughout the week. 

We then took a closer at the hedgehog homes and learnt that hedgehogs hibernate in the winter. The children created their own hedgehog homes in our outdoor area. 

Our Guided reading story this week was the Gruffalo. The children spotted several animal homes in the story and were able to talk about the different materials that were used and where the homes were built.  The children loved it so much that we decided to make our own Gruffalo crumble.

We talked about hygiene and keeping safe. We measured out the ingredients carefully, rubbed the butter into the flour and mixed all of the ingredients together. At the end of the day we ate our crumble while listening to the Gruffalo again.

In maths this week we have been sorting objects. We started by sorting by colour, size and shape and then began to use reasoning language to work out our own groups to sort a selection of autumnal leaves and bears. 

Week 6

This week the children learnt that we live near Gipsey Bridge, in Lincolnshire, England and on planet Earth.

We talked about our own homes and then decorated our houses to match. We learnt how to make dens and houses using lots of different materials.

The children are becoming really creative about using materials in different ways and enjoying problem solving in play to create slides, seesaws and tracks for balls.  

In Maths we learnt to make groups the same or equal and began to arrange groups of objects in different ways. 

Week 7

During the last two weeks of term the children have worked incredibly hard to finish their preparations for our Model Village WOW event, where we shared the models of our houses, played I spy and created pumpkin houses to take home. 

It was fantastic to see so many parents in school celebrating. What a wonderful end to the term!