Badgers & Hedgehogs
Spring Term 1 2026 - We're Going on an Adventure
Week beginning 2nd February:
Our book of the week is 'Emma Jane's Aeroplane' by Katie Haworth, which describes a little girl's adventures across different cities, spotting famous landmarks on the way. The children did a fantastic job working in pairs to draw maps of where Emma Jane visited in her aeroplane. During Play and Learn, many of the children used the book to influence them to be 'Awesome Authors' and create their own adventure stories.
In Maths this week we are exploring regrouping parts to find the whole – which is the first step towards addition. We used dominoes to identify the parts and then count how many there are altogether in order to find the whole (total). The children helped to sort the dominoes into two categories, one which represented the number 7 and one which did not.
Week beginning 26th January: Pirates
This week we read 'Billy and the Pirates' by Nadia Shireen and looked at creating our own treasure maps. We worked together to create a large scale map, place obstacles and practise our use of directional language to navigate across the map. During Play and Learn, we used these skills to direct our beebots across the grids. Lastly, in our creative area, we practised our joining and sticking techniques to work in pairs to build boats out of junk modelling.
On Monday 21st January, Reception took part in a walk around our local area. We walked along the River Ver and then back to the Nunnery, using our senses to spot any signs of Winter along the way. Our Literacy this week is based on creating our own maps of the walk and selecting two or three key things that we saw. Thank you to all the adult volunteers who accompanied us on the trip.
This week we had a visit from Shirley at HCC who read a story about the road safety initiative ‘Stay Safe with Aya & Harry – Travelling by Car’
This term our PE topic is Gymnastics. We will be exploring making different shapes with our body.
Reception were very excited to experience a little bit of snow and frost on our first day back. This led beautifully into our discussions about describing the signs of Winter.
Our book of the week was 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' by Michael Rosen. We re-enacted the story and innovated our own settings using descriptive vocabulary. During Play and Learn, we explored different materials to make an individual and one group collage of different settings.
In Maths, we focused on positional and directional language and had a great time exploring the beebots.
Autumn Term 2 2025 - Let's Celebrate
The children loved performing in this year's Nativity production!
'Pumpkin Soup' by Helen Cooper
This story is all about taking turns, exploring what a good friend is and working as a team. Reception worked together to make a delicious vegetable soup! We had even more fun tasting it in the end – delicious! For our soup, we simply chopped butternut squash, potatoes and carrots and added them to a soup maker with some stock and salt and voilà!
Bonfire Night
This week we have been reading 'Firework Poem' by James Carter and exploring how we can use onomatopoeia to create our own poems by describing the different sounds that fireworks make. We have also been working on developing our attaching skills using different techniques such as glue or tape to build our own rockets out of junk modelling.
Remembrance Day 11th November 2025
Reception learnt a bit about Remembrance day and used collage materials to make poppies. Today we joined the whole school for a 2minute silence on the playground.
Diwali
This week we have been learning about the Hindu festival Diwali. We read 'The Best Diwali Ever' by Sonali Shah and learnt about how people celebrate during this time. We looked closely at Rangoli patterns and then used a variety of materials to make our own patterns. We used clay for the first time to create our own diya lamps. During a music session, we listened to traditional Indian music and experimented with playing fast and slow rhythms.
Autumn Term 1 2025 - Marvellous Me
Magical Tea Party
On Friday we had a Magical Tea Party; the children all dressed up, and we took part in lots of fun and spooky activities!
International Week
On Monday, Nursery and Reception learnt about Bangladesh. We then worked together to create our own Alpona street art on the path leading from Riverside road.
First few weeks.
The children have settled into Reception very well. Here are some photos of us enjoying our learning environment:
