As we look forward to Lunar New Year at the end of next week we were learning and acting out the story of the Great Race in RTH. We loved being the different animals of the Zodiac Calendar and making our own way across the river!
It has been an exciting week in Reception with some emergency visitors popping in to school. We knew the police were coming in as we had arranged them but this morning when a fire engine arrived on the playground we couldn’t believe our luck! Although the firefighters were here to talk to Year 5 when we popped out to say hello they kindly showed us some of their uniform and some bits of the engine – what an exciting day!
Our Friday afternoons are always given over to storytelling and last week was our first week with the story heroes. We loved telling our stories to our Year 6 buddies and some of them even read them out loud like a performance.
We finished our Autumn term with our beautiful Christingle service – we loved making our Christingle and learning all about the symbolism of each part. We sang our carols in the peaceful, candlelit hall with our friends.
To celebrate anti-bullying week this week we have been talking all about friends and kindness. We listened to some schools radio about this, read some stories and shared in circle time. We wrote our ideas onto Spring bulbs and planted these outside ready to flower in the Spring. We can’t wait to see our kindness bloom!
We’ve been dotty for Yayoi Kusama in the art area over the last couple of weeks. We learnt all about her art installations, sculptures and installations. We loved painting the pumpkins with big brushes and then choosing contrasting colours to add our dots. I’m sure you’ll agree they look fantastic!
In RTH we are always talking about our role models and people we can look up to. Sometimes it’s our friends who are amazing role models but we also read some of the Little People Big Dreams stories (sometimes the abridged or simplified versions…!) so that we can find out about lots of people’s success and achievements. During black history month we really enjoyed finding out about the story of Harriet Tubman and her daring escapes to safety bringing others with her. Rory loves this part of our day the best and always wants to know who will be our person the next day. “ It makes me so happy to know about these inspirational people!” he told us!
As Diwali fell just before half term this year we started our celebrations topic a little early! We loved dressing up in beautiful lehengas and kurta. In the art area we made clay diva lamps (manipulating that clay was tough for our little fingers!); we made patterns with both rangoli and with coloured shapes. We enjoyed reading the book ‘The Best Diwali Ever’ and even took part in some Bollywood dancing!
Autumn is here and the trees are looking fabulous! To celebrate, we’ve been working with all things leaf-related this week. We started the week with an exciting leaf hunt around the school grounds. We tried to match some typical British autumn leaves to the photos and looked for the most beautiful leaves.
We used our leaves to make wax rubbings and watercolour wash and also used charcoal and oil pastels to create observational drawings of our leaves.
In story time we looked at the story of ‘The Leaf Thief’ and lots of us enjoyed writing our own versions of this.
