Welcome to Honey Bee Class – Reception 

 Welcome to Honeybee Class. We have a very supportive and fun crew of adults in Honeybee Class; consisting of Miss Edmondson (Class Teacher), Mrs Perkins (Teaching Assistant), Miss Williamson (Teaching Assistant) and Mrs Watt (Teaching Assistant). We are all so excited to work with you in your first year at school!

Our topic for the Summer Term is 'Bears'. 

We have begun by reading 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. We have enjoyed sharing and discussing different versions of the story, writing character speech bubbles and writing a sorry letter from Goldilocks!  We also had great fun painting bear faces with porridge in the paint and creating bear faces using collage. We tasted porridge in class and created a bar chart to show which flavour we liked the most; with the left over porridge oats, we made some delicious flapjacks! We have also looked at maps and using a huge piece of paper in our garden, drew a map of the woods to show where Goldilocks and the Bears live.      

 We have taken some time out of our Bear topic to celebrate The Queen's Platinum Jubilee. We have enjoyed drawing and painting a portrait of the Queen and decorating our classroom with bunting and paperchains!           

The ducklings that we had in an incubator in class hatched over the Easter holidays. We were very excited when they came into class to visit us for the day! 

After half term, we will continue with 'Bears' and look forward to sharing some favourite stories, including: We're Going On A Bear Hunt, Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? as well as some non fiction texts. We're also planning on bringing our teddies to school for a Summer teddy bears picnic! 

Spring Term

 Our topic for the Spring Term was 'Amazing Animals'. We have enjoyed reading some of our favourite animal stories, such as: Dear Zoo, Elmer, Handa's Surprise and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We will also  read some non-fiction books to learn more about animals. Our class book corner has become a 'Wild About Reading' jungle!

 In class we add our recent work onto our 'Class Learning Journey'. So far this term we have written animal lists, captions to say which animal the zoo sent us, animal descriptions, letters, invitations, rhyming sentences and facts! We are working hard to use our sounds in our writing as well as remember finger spaces. Some of us are also trying to show capital letters and full stops. 

Here is some of our fabulous writing:

We have been thinking about how different animals can be sorted; for example: pets, wild animals and farm animals. We have drawn pictures and painted our favourite animals as well as creating some careful handprinted animals too!

Spring is in the air! We have been lucky enough to be visited by some lambs. It was lovely to see them in our school garden and help feed them some milk! Miss Edmondson and Mrs Watt wanted to take them home! 

 We are also looking after some duck eggs. The incubator is keeping them warm and turning them every 45 minutes. We went into a dark cupboard with the eggs and a torch. We could see the chicks moving inside the egg - it was very egg-citing! We can't wait for the Cayuga ducks to hatch!

 We have also been busy planting. We have planted sunflowers, violas, carrots and cucumbers. We are growing some in our classroom and some in the garden. We know that they need water and sunlight to grow and we are enjoying looking after them. 

We are making great progess with our phonic knowledge, following the 'Monster Phonics' scheme. We are using our growing phonic knowledge in our reading and writing and have enjoyed reading some of our new Monster Phonics books!

In maths we are developing our ability to recognise and order numbers to 10 and 20. We have been practising 1 more and 1 less than a given number. We have learnt what the +, - and = symbols mean and have been writing our own number sentences. We have used lots of practical resources to help us with our work and recently have been using a number line to count forwards and backwards to find our answer. 

In class we use the 'Zones of Regulation' to help us identify different feelings.

Links below to practice the letter sound and names - sing along and learn!

Letter sounds and names -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmB3SIjNdQ

Phase 2 tricky words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvMyssfAUx0

Phase 3 tricky words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R087lYrRpgY

Phase 4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NOzgR1ANc4