Foundation

Friday 12th July

We have had a busy week this week!

We continued making our African masks and now have collaged over them to make them smooth and ensure the features stand out – we are excited to paint them next week. In Understanding the World, we explored shadows and learnt that they are made when an object is blocking the sun. We had a go at drawing around shadows with chalk outside and then created our own shadows to block the sun.

We also had our transition day this week! We loved meeting our new teachers and spending time in our new classrooms. Ladybirds will be moving to Dormice, Bumblbees will be moving to Shrews and Caterpillars will be moving to Voles. We made mice puppets for our transition!

Friday 5th July

In our Understanding The World sessions this week, we have been thinking about India. We found out that India is a country in Asia and is home to The Taj Mahal, one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. We also found out that India is home to the Himalayas mountain range and some of us were very excited to find out that Mount Everest, one of the tallest mountains in the world is there! We talked about some different animals that live in India such as the Indian elephant and snow leopards! In our provision we enjoyed creating Rangoli suncatchers and exploring through small world characters. 

We also continued to add more detail to our African masks, focusing on building textures with masking tape to create facial features. 

In our Drawing Club sessions, we enjoyed looking at the story "Journey" by Aaron Becker. The book didn't have any words so we needed to use our imagination to tell the story. We had lots of fun creating our own adventures, thinking about where we would go if we could draw our own imaginary door! Some of our adventures took us to fairy worlds, space and the ocean! In our maths sessions we enjoyed linking map reading with creating small worlds. We needed to think carefully about using positional language to describe where the different characters or resources were. 

Friday 28th June

This week we have been exploring African masks, linking to our learning from last week about Ghana. We loved exploring pictures of some different styles of African masks and discussing what we liked and didn't like about them. We planned our masks and started thinking about what features we would like ours to have. In Maths we have been learning about positional language such as "under", "on" and "between" to describe where things are. We have enjoyed making our own small world scenes and describing the position of objects and characters. Linking to this, in Drawing Club we have read "The Naughty Bus" and have been writing about where the naughty bus went when he came to St Leonard's one night! The naughty bus was very mischievous it seems! 

Friday 21st June

This week we have been learning about Ghana, we loved exploring some of the traditional music from Ghana and used drums ourselves to try and copy the beat. We also loved following some traditional dances and dancing in time to the beat of the drums! We also had a go at creating our own Ghanaian flags, writing postcards from Ghana and learning all about some of the animals that live there.

In maths, we have been exploring patterns. We had a go at recognising and being able to talk about the rule of different patterns, as well as being able to create our own patterns.

In writing this week, we wrote about our favourite part of our beach trip. Lots of us wrote that we loved paddling in the sea, digging for treasure and chasing away the sea gulls!

Friday 14th June

What an exciting week! On Wednesday we travelled on a coach to Exmouth. At the beach, we enjoyed playing with our friends, building sandcastles, playing games, digging holes, singing songs, a picnic and paddling in the sea! 

We have continued with our pirate theme this week and enjoyed listening to more pirate stories, writing lists of items to take on a pirate adventure, making telescopes and creating parrots. We also tested which items at the bottom of the sea might be picked up by a magnets and explored floating and sinking. 

Friday 7th June

We hope you had a lovely half term! We have had a busy week back at school, learning all about pirates. We have enjoyed pretending to be pirates in our role play area, making, listening to sea shanties and making our own treasure maps! In Drawing Club, we heard the story "The Night Pirates" and wrote our own message in a bottle to Captain Patch. In Maths, we have been learning about sharing and grouping, making sure that the groups are fair and equal. We also had a therapy dog visit us called Henry.  We were very quiet, calm and respectful of Henry, making sure we used our kind hands and asked for permission to stroke him. We really enjoyed his visit and hope to see him again soon. 

Friday 24th May

This week we have enjoyed learning about minibeasts. We read the story 'Superworm' and then had a go at writing our own riddles for our friends to guess what our favourite minibeasts are. We also went on a minibeast hunt and discovered that most minibeasts like dark and damp places to live in. We also finished learning about the artist Yayoi Kusama this week by creating our own polka dot clothing - all of them look amazing!

We also had a visit from a guide dog this week! We met a lady called Di who helps train guide dogs to be ready to be matched with someone who needs help. We also got to meet her current puppy in training! We loved learning about all the things Di has to do to help the puppies get ready and the amazing, important job that they have.

In maths, we continued to learn about 2D shapes. We discovered how some 2D shapes can be made into other shapes and how we can rotate them in different ways.

We hope that you all have an amazing half term and enjoy the break. If you would like to do some extra learning, here are some ideas:

• find 2D shapes in the environment

•  go on your own minibeast hunt

• write a postcard to a friend

•  share stories with friends and family

• practice letter formation in sand, shaving foam or flour!

• help your family make dinner 

• spot numbers in the environment 

Friday 17th May

This week we have been learning about animals that live on a farm. We talked about the way that animals support life on the farm, e.g. cows producing milk for cheese, milk cartons and ice cream. We also talked about the differences between farm animals and pets. In our Drawing Club sessions we listened to "What the ladybird heard" by Julia Donaldson. We had lots of fun creating  "Wanted" posters for our own characters and writing sentences to describe their clothing. 

In our maths sessions we enjoyed learning how to rotate and manipulate 2d shapes to create tangrams and also used positional language to describe where a shape might be within a set. 

In our art lessons we continued to focus on our artist of the half term, Yayoi Kusama, and explored ways to paint dot patterns on fruit and vegetables! 

Friday 10th May

This week we have been busy learning about animals that live in cold climates. We learnt all about penguins, including their features and how they are adapted to live in Antartica. Our favourite fact was that penguins have tight feathers to help them keep waterproof and help them slide on their tummies across the ice! As part of our Drawing Club, we listened to the story "Penguin Huddle" by Ross Montgomery, and enjoyed writing to Pipsqueak the penguin with some ideas of how to defrost the penguin huddle! In Maths, we have been learning all about adding more, using 'first, then and now' stories to deepen our understanding. We have had a lovely week playing outside and hope the sunshine is here to stay so we can be outside more! 

Friday 3rd May

This week we have been learning about animals that live in hot habitats. We specifically learnt about giraffes and the ways in which they are adapted for their environments. We loved learning about their thick, tough tongues and lips so that they can eat thorny plants.

We also had a special visitor who came to talk to us about his amazing job of being an underwater animal videographer. We loved learning about all of the amazing animals he has seen and photographed across the world!

In Drawing Club, we read the story ‘Giraffes Can’t Dance’. We thought about how we could throw a party for Gerald the giraffe once he feels more confident dancing. The children drew some amazing pictures of their parties and wrote some shopping lists of things they would need for their parties. The children created some fantastic, independent writing using their phonics knowledge!

Friday 26th April

This week we have been learning about pets! We enjoyed talking about our own pets and thinking about the type of pet we would like. We also learned about some ways to look after a pet and some different ways that pets can help us. In our drawing club sessions we listened to "The Great Pet Sale" by Mick Inkpen and enjoyed choosing our own pet to write about. 

In our science sessions we revisited weather and enjoyed observing different clouds. We found out that a cloud becomes heavier when it is full of water and this can make the cloud become bigger and darker. We carried out a "cloud in a jar" experiment and enjoyed observing the way that the water was absorbed into the cloud (shaving foam!) and moved through the cloud into the jar. 

In our maths lessons we continued our focus on teen numbers. We have become teen number experts and know that they are made with a group of 10 and extra ones! 

 

Wednesday 27th March

We can’t believe that we are now at the end of the Spring term! It has gone by so quickly. Over the half term we have enjoyed learning about life cycles and seeing frog spawn grow into tadpoles and eggs hatch into chicks. We are sad to say goodbye to the chicks but know that they are going back to Miss Hazell’s Grandad’s farm to grow up and be egg laying hens.

We have also learnt about plants and all of the important things that they need to grow, some of us will be able to put this knowledge into practice next half term when gardening club starts. There are some amazing plans to add plants to our Foundation playground.

One of our highlights this half term, was learning about Yvonne Coomber. The children learnt some fantastic art skills, of printing, mixing and splatting and created some fantastic art work in the style of Yvonne Coomber.

We hope that you all have a fantastic Easter break and have a visit from the Easter bunny!

If you would like to do some home learning, here are some ideas:

Reading to your adult or having your adult read to you

Easter baking

Finding 3D shapes in our environment

Practicing counting to 10 and finding different ways to make the number 10

Going on a walk to find signs of Spring

Planting and looking after some seeds

Write an Easter card for a family member or a friend

 

Friday 15th March

This week, we have continued to create paintings of flowers, inspired by the artist Yvonne. We enjoyed flicking the paint using paint brushes, tooth brushes and paper straws! We painted a blue background, used glue spreaders and paint brushes to create the flowers and then had lots of fun adding the final touches to our pictures! We had to make sure the tools we were using were really close to the paper for it to work. We enjoyed sharing our creations with others and talking about the different techniques we had used.

In our maths lessons this week, we enjoyed exploring 1 more and 1 less. We used familiar rhymes and songs such as "one potato, two potato, three potato, four", "ten little aliens" and "ten green bottles" to help us think carefully about what was happening each time to the numbers. We also used stem sentences such as "8 is 1 more than 7" and "1 less than 5 is 4" to help us. After this, we moved on to number bonds to 10. A number bond is when two numbers join together to make a bigger number. We have a really strong understanding of number bonds to 5 and at the start of each lesson, focus on number bonds to 6, 7, 8 and 9. You can practise this at home by asking your child to put their hands behind their back and to show you one of these numbers with their fingers. You can then ask them to tell you the stem sentence to match. E.g. "7 is made with 4 and 3. 4 and 3 make 7" or a number sentence "4+3=7".  We are now going to have a big focus on number bonds to 10! It's really important to secure our number bond knowledge in Foundation, to help with our learning as we move through the school. 

In our drawing club sessions we listened to the story "That's my flower" and had to think of a way that squirrel could protect the flower he had discovered from the wind, rain and lightning. We thought carefully about sequencing our sentences using "first" and "next/then" and enjoyed thinking of our own ideas for the squirrel! Our ideas included building houses, making tents, using blankets and covering the flower with a canopy! 

We've had an exciting end to the week. Two of our chicks have hatched!! We can't wait to see what happens next!

Friday 8th March

This week we have been busy learning about plants. We’ve thought about what plants need to survive and set up our own experiment to see what happens to plants in different circumstances. We have set up two plants in the sun, one which will be watered and one which won’t be. We also have two plants which will be kept in the dark, again one will be watered and one which won’t be. We made predictions about what we think will happen and look forward to observing the plants over the next couple of weeks.

In Drawing Club this week, we read the story of ‘The Bad Seed’. It follows a seed who is very badly behaved and likes pushing into lines, not saying please and thank you and not sharing. In the end he decides that he would like to be a good seed. We really enjoyed creating our own bad characters. We had some bad ice creams, bad hot dogs and a bad potato! We used speech bubbles for the characters to tell us what they liked to do.

In maths, we explored the numbers of 9 and 10. We thought about how these numbers can be made and how we can represent them in different ways.

 

Friday 1st March

This week we listened to a story called "The Odd Egg" by Emily Gravett. We really enjoyed the story and were very surprised to see that a crocodile hatched out of the egg that duck had found! We have drawn a nest for duck's egg to go inside to stay protected and imagined that duck has found another egg and wondered what it might look like. We all wrote a special code which started with the phrase "The nest is..." to make duck come quickly so he doesn't miss the egg hatching and we also wrote some number double sentences to make the egg crack in a special way!

We have also been busy building on our prior knowledge of mixing primary colours to make secondary colours and explored using different materials to paint with to create texture. We have been learning about the artist Yvonne Coombes and how she uses materials to paint her beautiful textured floral art. We have enjoyed having a go of our own to finding out what works well and what doesn't! We are checking on our chicks daily and are very excited for them to hatch soon! 

Monday 26th February

At the moment we are exploring lifecycles! We have been introduced to the lifecycle of a chicken, a frog and a butterfly and have enjoyed exploring through role play, small world, fine motor and playdough. We had a big surprise when some real eggs arrived in school and we can't wait to watch them develop into chicks. We also went on a walk last week to look for signs of Spring and were very excited when we discovered some frogspawn in the school pond! 

In our drawing club sessions, we listened to The Hungry Caterpillar and enjoyed creating our own friend for the Caterpillar and thinking about what else could appear out of the cocoon. We also recorded sentences to describe our characters! 

In our maths sessions, we have enjoyed exploring length and height. We created our own obstacle courses with a long jump and also made some ramps to help us explore the distance a car might travel. We also enjoyed measuring height and used stem sentences using tall, taller, tallest, short, shorter and shortest. 

Friday 9th February

What a fantastic week Foundation have had! The children loved going on our first school trip, we went on a coach, which we found very exciting! The coach took us on a tour around Exeter and we had scavenger hunt for different methods of transport that we could see. We spotted buses, cars, bikes, a fire engine and boats! We then stopped at the Quay for a picnic lunch and some time in the play park. The children were exceptionally well behaved and were a credit to the school. After our trip, the children wrote some amazing sentences about what they saw and did on the trip.

In maths, we’ve been exploring odd and even numbers. We noticed that numicon with a flat top, is an even number and numicon with a bumpy top is odd. We were able to sort the numicon to show all the odd and even numbers.

If you would like to continue learning with your child over half term, here are some ideas:

• Reading a range of books and sharing stories.
• Can you visit some of the landmarks in Exeter and learn a bit more about them?
• Can you find numbers in the environment?
• Cooking using measuring.
• Bathtime capacity, what containers are full, empty or half full?
• Can you write a card for a friend?

Please share any of these (or any other adventures!) with us on Tapestry!

 

Friday 2nd February

We have had a great week this week learning about Transport. We learnt all about types of transport, how transport has changed over time and talked about what type of transport we would like to use to come to school. As part of our Drawing Club, we listened to the story "The Hundred Decker Bus" and enjoyed creating our own decks full of exciting things! Our Phonics this week has been focusing on longer words and chunking them to be able to read them. In Maths, we have been learning all about numbers 6, 7 and 8 and used a double dice frame to make them. We finished the week celebrating 'Robot Rock Day' where we all dressed up as either Numberblocks, rockstars or robots and had a wonderful time at a costume parade, completing a Numberblock themed Drawing Club and making doubles. 

 

Monday 29th January

Our focus for the last couple of weeks has been weather. We have been busy creating our own weather charts, forecasts and pictures. We have also made shaving foam clouds and weather jars. In our drawing club sessions, we listened to the story “The Little Raindrop” by Joanna Gray all about the water cycle. We then had lots of fun drawing where we thought the raindrop would land if it was windy and what it might see if it was sunny and raining.

In our maths sessions we have been busy learning to subitise objects from 1 to 5. We have learnt that subitising is “knowing not counting!”. We have been practising this skill a lot to develop our fluency and number recognition by looking at different representations. We have also explored mass and capacity, using phrases such as “greater than” and “less than” to describe mass and “more” and “less” to describe capacity.

 

Friday 12th January

Reception have had a great start to the New Year. We have been so impressed with how much the children remembered over the holidays and how keen they have been to show us all of their new phonic knowledge!

This week we have been learning about where we live and about homes around the world. We know that we live in Exeter in a country called the United Kingdom and loved sharing our photos of ourselves and our families around the city. We are able to talk about lots of the key landmarks in Exeter that make our city so special. We also loved learning about homes around the world, we loved finding out about Mongolian nomads and how they can move their homes around and also about how some people in Amsterdam live in house boats! 

In Maths, we recapped our knowledge of number bonds to five. We used part whole models to help us find different ways to make five and wrote the number sentences to go with them.

In our writing this week, we wrote about Jack Frost using our phonic sounds to write sentences such as 'Jack Frost is cool', 'He is cold' and 'Jack Frost zooms'.

 

Friday 8th December 

Foundation have been busy over the last couple of weeks getting ready for our Nativity performance. The children have enjoyed learning the songs and the story of the first Christmas. Our visit to the church was great fun earlier in the week, we loved seeing where we would be performing and having a go at practicing there.

In maths we have been learning about the number five and then adding one more and one less. The children enjoyed using the maths language in provision and played number track games to put into practice in their learning.

We have also read the story ‘Lost and found’ for Drawing Club. The children loved thinking of ways that the penguin could travel – we had sea plans, speed boats and bath tubs!

We are looking forward to seeing you at the church next week for our Nativity!

 

Friday 24th November

Over the last couple of weeks we have focused on two traditional tales. We listened to the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. We enjoyed retelling the story through role play and small world play. In drawing club, our new words of the week were “demolished”, “slumber” and “cramped”. We thought of some ideas for presents Goldilocks could give to the three bears (to say sorry!) and enjoyed drawing pictures of our ideas, then writing a sentence to match. We thought carefully about sounding out CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words, using finger spaces (spaces between each word) and full stops to show our sentence is finished. We also enjoyed creating maps to help the three bears find Goldilocks and used positional language (between, beside, on top, under, over) to support our map making!

Next we listened to the story of Jack and the beanstalk. We enjoyed retelling the story through role play, worked together to collage a giant's castle and created beanstalks with pipe cleaners and beads. In drawing club, our words for the week were "clambering", "ginormous" and "booming". We were also introduced to number 3 and 4. We have been exploring composition to 3 and 4, using Numicon and the part-whole model, then recording number sentences to match. 

 

Friday 10th November

We have had a great start to the new half term and have been busy learning about Diwali. As part of our learning, we have made diya lamps, learnt a Diwali dance, made rangoli patterns and learnt the story of Rama and Sita. 

Just a reminder, that each week we send home that weeks learnt sounds. This is a great opportunity for you to practice the sounds with your child, practice reading words with those sounds in and have a go at forming the sounds. We have had a big focus on reading CVC words recently, e.g dog, cat, dig. Please keep practicing these words as much as you can with your child, practicing segmenting and blending them.

In our maths sessions, we have been learning about the numbers 1-3. We have been looking at ways that we can make 3 and knowing that numbers can be switched around to make a number sentence e.g. 1 + 2 = 3 or 2 + 1 = 3. We have also practiced a skill called subitsing - knowing an amount without counting.

In our Drawing Club sessions, we have been encuoraging children to write CVC words using their phonic fingers to help them. We have encouraged them to sound out the words and then have a go at recording them. 

Well done for a fantastic start Foundation!

 

Friday 20th October

 

Well done to Foundation who have now finished their first half term of school! 

We have been very busy the last few weeks, greeting visitors from our school and community that help us. 

We loved meeting a doctor who showed us all the things they do to help us and also loved meeting a doctor who looks after our brains. We asked them lots of great questions!

We have also learnt about Autumn and the changes we may see around us as the season begins to change. 

If you would like to do extra learning with your child over half term, here are some ideas:

Reading and sharing stories

Phonics practice from our phonics homework sheets

Letter formation

Go on a walk and look for signs of Autumn

Cooking together and weighing out the ingredients 

At bath time, can we fill containers to make full and half full?

Can children create and find patterns in their environment?

But most importantly, have fun and rest!

 

Friday 6th October

 

Hello and welcome to Foundation’s blog!

 

Foundation have had a fantastic start to the school year and have settled in beautifully. We have been learning all about why we are special and who in school helps us.

 

Last week, we had a mystery guest each day from around the school. We had Mrs Slaven, our headteacher, Mr Bristow, our caretaker, Kerry and Vicky from the kitchen, Alison and Esther from the front office and Miss Ballam, our Assistant Headteacher. They told us all about what they do at school and we came up with some great questions to find out more about each person.

 

We have also begun to learn some of our new phonics sounds, so far we have learnt the sounds s a t p i n m d.

Important information:

 

Each week, children will bring home two books. One that they will be able to read to you and one that you can read to them. They will need to be returned each Monday so that they can be given new books. You will also receive a weekly phonics sheet for your child to practice the sounds learnt that week.

 

On Fridays the children will have PE and forest school, please provide them with a PE kit, wellies and a coat.