Archived 2016-2017
Welcome to Sunshine Class. We are a Reception Class. Our teacher is Mrs McCoy and our Teaching Assistant is Mrs Caden. This year our topics are:
Autumn: Fabulous Food -We will share lots of stories related to food and will find out about different things we eat, including cooking and tasting foods from around the world. We are going to explore celebrations and food linked to them including Bonfire Night, birthdays, weddings and Christmas. We hope to take part in our own wedding ceremony at the local church, and have a wedding reception party when we return to school.
Spring Term: What’s the Weather? – We will explore the seasons and weather, beginning with winter. We hope to investigate freezing and melting using snow and ice. Our learning will also focus on the changes experienced in Spring, including growing and new life. We plan to read lots of related stories including Jack and the Beanstalk and may have a trip out to find out about different things that grow.
Summer term: Curious Creatures – Our children love animals and we plan to allow their interests to lead our learning. This may include dinosaurs, minibeasts, sea creatures, pets or even monsters! Our work will include lots of creative activities, often related to stories and we hope to arrange a visit to enhance our learning.
Useful Information:
- Your child will take part in a weekly PE session. Please ensure that PE kits are kept in school at all times.
- Library books can be changed every Tuesday and Thursday.
- Phonics homework is provided during the first half of the year. This consists of letter formation and letter recognition practise. Tricky words are provided regularly to be learnt at home.
- Maths homework is provided during the second half of the year. It is sent home on a Friday to be completed over the weekend and returned to school on a Monday.
- Home school learning books are provided to enable you to tell us about any interesting things your child does outside of school or how your child has been interested in extending their learning at home. You may wish to use a ‘Special Moment’ sheet. Books should be brought to school every day.
- Please ensure all items of clothing, including shoes, are clearly labelled.
We have enjoyed making toast in Sunshine class.
We wrote instructions together which we followed carefully. We talked about making healthy choices – would we choose white bread or brown bread? We had to be very careful when using the toaster and the knife to spread and cut! We also talked about how the bread had changed. The best part was eating our delicious toast!
Healthy Fruit Yogurts
This week we have enjoyed designing and making fruit yogurts. Have a look at some of our designs and photos! Perhaps you could have a go at making a different fruit yogurt at home!
Phonics Workshops
We had lots of fun practising our phonics skills with our grown ups. We learnt a new letter sound together and then had a go at lots of different activities including a penalty shoot out if we blended words correctly, writing words in sand, word skittles and reading words to climb the ladder. Thank you to everyone who came along to find out more about how we learn phonics in school. We hope it gave you some lovely ideas to try out at home!
Wedding Invitations
We have been very busy making invitations to our class wedding. We talked about our address and where to stick the stamp on the envelope. Can you say your address? Then we walked to the post box to post our invitations. We have been finding out about what happens to letters when we post them. Has your invitation arrived at your house yet?
We are really looking forward to our wedding. We do hope you can come!
Children in Need 2016
We had a very spotty day for Children in Need. We wore spotty clothes for school, made spotty Pudsey Bear ears, played tiddlywinks and practiced our skills using hula hoops. We also found out about some children that Children in Need will help. Thank you for your support!
Our Wedding
We have had a wonderful time at our wedding! We all dressed up in our party clothes for the special occasion. Some of us had an important role such as bridesmaid, best man and father of the bride. The bride and groom looked amazing and very happy on their special day! After the ceremony at the church, we returned to school for our fabulous wedding reception. A great day had by all! Congratulations to the happy couple. Also a huge ‘thank you’ to Mrs Winn for carrying out the wedding ceremony. We hope you enjoy looking at these photographs of our fantastic day!
Our Christmas Celebrations
What a busy time we have had in Sunshine Class. We worked very hard to put on our wonderful nativity play ‘This is My Gift’. We hope you enjoyed our performance. We certainly had a fun time learning the lovely songs and dressing up in the special clothes! Thank you to everyone who came along to support us.
We had a fun day wearing our Christmas jumpers and eating our delicious Christmas dinner!
Our Christmas party was lots of fun too. We played party games, danced and had a lovely party tea. We were also lucky enough to have a very special visitor! It was very exciting!
First Snow
In Early Years we never miss the opportunity to explore snow, especially when our theme is ‘What’s the weather?’ We have been finding out about Winter and were very excited when we woke up to snow! For some children, it was the first time they could remember having the chance to play in the snow. So off we went to the MUGA.
We enjoyed exploring what we could do in the snow – making footprints and patterns, writing, throwing snowballs and learning how to make snowmen. We had to work as a team as our snowballs became very heavy and hard to push. We worked together as we decorated our lovely snowmen. We also enjoyed watching the snow melt in our hands. We were very cold but what a lot of fun learning we had!
‘Maths is Fun’ Workshops
Thank you to everyone who attended our maths workshops today. We enjoyed exploring numbers as we took part in lots of fun activities! We hope you found the workshops useful and that they have given you some good ideas to try at home. Let us know if you give any a go!
Chinese New Year
We have been finding out about Chinese New Year and how it is celebrated. We listened to the Chinese zodiac story and found out that 2017 is the year of the rooster. We watched videos about the Chinese dragon dance, Chinese decorations, Chinese food and lucky red envelopes. The are some lovely video clips and a quiz on the CBeebies website if you would like to watch them with your child!
We really enjoyed following a simple recipe to cook a healthy Chinese stir fry. We had to be careful as we chopped the vegetables and stirred the food in the wok. Our stir fry tasted delicious, although the noodles were quite tricky to eat!
We also made some Chinese lanterns in red and gold which are lucky colours. We have been trying to copy Chinese letters and numbers and have been working in our Chinese restaurant role play area. We learnt how to sing a lovely Chinese New Year song too. What a busy week we have had! What can you remember about Chinese New Year?
Gung Hay Fat Choy!
Shine Day
We had a shiny day to relaunch our school mission statement. We came to school dressed in shiny clothes and we talked about how we all ‘shine’ at different things. We brought a huge range of interesting shiny objects to school and used them to produce a class shiny sculpture. We think it looks amazing! We also made a shiny wind chime for our outdoor discovery den. Please have a look at our wonderful work which is on display!
NSPCC Maths is Fun Day
We had lots of fun playing games in our maths session today! We played ‘higher or lower’ with cards and we played the caterpillar game in teams. It was a draw!! Some of us had a go at a QR Code Challenge where we had to hunt for the codes and count the animals. You might want to have a go at playing some fun maths games at home too!
Rainforest Explorers!
We have had a lovely visit to Sunderland Wintergardens to take part in a workshop all about the rainforest. We found out which animals live in the rainforest and we learnt some interesting facts about them. We had the chance to feel a real snake skin. It was four children long! We also looked at some plants which might grow in a rainforest. We noticed that some of them had huge leaves!
We enjoyed feeding the birds and looking at the plants in the park. We saw some lovely snowdrops. The park was lots of fun! We loved going on the swings, slides and climbing frames. What a busy day we have had!
Welly Day!
As part of our ‘What’s the Weather?’ theme we have been talking about rain. We had lots of fun when we brought our wellies to school, but sadly, there was no rain that day! We began by putting our wellies into pairs and talking about other things that also come in a pair. This was an ideal opportunity for us to practise our counting in twos. We had fifty two wellies altogether! Then we thought of different ways to sort our wellies. We really had some amazing wellies with lots of different colours and patterns on them. We decided to sort them by colour and then we sorted them into sets of wellies with pictures, sparkly wellies and plain wellies.
We made some rain shakers using different fillings. They made lots of different sounds. We sang a rain song as we shook our rain shakers and did a rain dance, hoping the rain would come in the afternoon! We also had a welly throwing competition. We measured how far we could throw Mrs Caden’s welly. It was very tricky but we all had a try. Riley was our welly throwing champion!
There was still no rain after lunch, so we made our own puddles and moved across our welly obstacle course, jumping, balancing and splashing as we went. We all had a great time and part of the fun was getting a little bit wet!
World Book Day 2nd March 2017
We all dressed up as one of our favourite story characters for World Book Day. We looked wonderful in our costumes! We brought our favourite books to school which we shared with our friends during the ‘readathon’. We also looked at the World Book Day website which told us a bit more about it and we watched a very funny video of a story all about a boy who did not want to go to bed! There are some lovely resources on the website if you would like to take a look with your child!
www.worldbookday.com
All children have received a World Book Day voucher which can be taken to a bookshop and exchanged for a free book! A list of books and bookshops is available on the World Book Day website. Alternatively, you can use the voucher for £1 off the cost of a book. Happy reading everyone!
Our Easter Parade
We have had great fun designing our own hats to celebrate Easter. We followed our designs as we made our hats and showed them off on the catwalk at our Easter Parade. We enjoyed singing songs about Spring and Easter. In class we have been finding out about the Easter story and why we celebrate Easter, as well as how Easter is celebrated. Happy Easter everyone!
Community Links
We are delighted to have received some fabulous new play equipment from East Durham College! The students from the college worked on a project with their teacher to design and make some resources for our outdoor area. They came along to school to deliver them. The children were so excited when they saw the wonderful new additions to our outdoor learning environment. They will provide endless opportunities for imaginative play and lots of fun. A huge ‘thank you’ to all involved at the college!
Easter Egg Hunt
We had lots of fun taking part in an Easter Egg Hunt on the last day of term. The eggs were hidden in some very strange places but we worked well together in two teams to find them. We counted all of the eggs we had found. It was very close! The white team found 38 eggs, but the pink team managed to find 46 eggs! Well done everyone for taking part!
