In Year R

In Year R we are going into our second half term of big school! We will be using all of the key skills we learnt last half term, including relationship building, the first 16 phonics sounds and numbers 1-4 as a foundation in order to move our learning forwards. 

This term in Year R we are going to be learning about different religions and cultures and their special celebrations such as the Hindu festival of lights - Diwali, and the Christian celebration - Christmas! We will be doing lots of cross-curricular activities to fully immerse ourselves in this learning experience. This week we have been focussing on Diwali as this falls on Sunday 12th November. 

This week in writing we learnt all about the story of Rama and Sita and looked at some photographs of people celebrating Diwali and discussed the beautiful colours, lights and lanterns. Then we used our phonics knowledge to practise sounding out and writing some Diwali key-words like - light, glow and family.

In Maths we have been learning all about the number 5 - including how to write the numeral and word, counting objects to 5, ordering numbers to 5, thinking about where it fits on the number line (what numbers are either side of it - one more, one less), and thinking about number bonds to 5. We have done this through lots of hands-on activities such as sticking 5 stickers on a 10s-frame, counting 5 objects to put onto our dinner plate and using colourful sand- similar to that used in Diwali celebration - to write the number 5 with our fingers.

In our Expressive Arts and Design lessons we learnt all about primary colours and how we can mix them to make secondary colours! We explored mixing colours in different forms from food dye in water, paint dabbers, chalk and liquid paint. Then we made some colourful pictures to represent the colourful nature of Diwali.

This week in our Understanding the World sessions we have been focusing on Science. We have explored the properties of different materials, discussing which material would be suitable for making Diva Lamps linked to Diwali. We decided that clay would be the best material.

During Busy Bee time we explored our home-corner as this had a Diwali make-over in half-term. We applied our new learning about Diwali to engage in role-play activities such as setting up/tidying the home for Diwali. We also explored the art area and used paints to create colourful pictures using our new learning about colour mixing.