Emmaville Primary School

Newcastle Reception

Welcome to the Newcastle Reception Class Page.  Here, you can find out about everything that we've been doing this term.
Week Ending 7th February 2025
 
To celebrate National Storytelling Week this week, we have continued with our Talk For Writing traditional tale in English of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. 
The children are beginning to learn the story using the story map and actions. We have also retold the story by ordering pictures and using the language of first, next and finally.
The children have also made some fabulous Billy Goats and Troll puppets and a puppet theatre in choosing time to extend their learning.
On Friday, the children also took part in storytelling activities, using storytelling dice. They had three dice to scaffold and support them to think of a story - a character, a setting and an object. They also drew front covers for their stories and made headbands of their favourite story characters.
Week Ending Friday 31st Friday 2025
 
This week in Reception we have learned all about Lunar New Year.
Our activities included listening to the story of The Great Race and then re-enacting our own animal races.  We used the language of first, second, third, etc...to talk about who won each race.
We also made some fabulous lucky red lanterns, tricky but great practice for those cutting and sticking fine motor skills.
Our taste buds were challenged with some Chinese food tasting at snack time and then we learnt about dragons and dragon parades. Some children told us about their experiences of watching the Chinese New Year celebrations in Newcastle. The children then went on to make an amazing dragon, with many of the children helping to build, paint, and decorate.  
Week Ending Friday 24th January 2025
 
This weekend the RSPB carry out their annual Big Garden Birdwatch.
We therefore took the opportunity to learn all about garden birds, what they look like, what they are called, what they eat, why we might need to feed them, and what to feed them. 
All of the children participated in a busy morning, taking part in 'bird themed' activities; making bird feeders, listening to bird-themed story books, and drawing and labelling some super garden bird pictures.
Week Ending Friday 17th January 2025
 
This week I had the pleasure of taking some of the children to Gateshead Leisure Centre, to partake in a PE Festival hosted by Gateshead Schools Sports Partnership.
The festival was 'circus' themed and involved ten different activities, all practising different movement based skills, such as throwing, catching, running and balancing.
It was really lovely to see the children's confidence progress throughout the afternoon. They were fantastic at supporting each other in the individual events and worked well as a team in the team games.
Well done Team Emmaville!
Week Ending Friday 10th January 2025
 
The children have embraced the cold weather this week and it has provided lots of great learning opportunities too about ice, melting, wrapping up warm and Winter.
 
On Friday, we explored Winter in a bit more detail using the book The Snow Thief.
 
We talked about what Winter is and what you might see or do in Winter that is different to the other seasons. The children then all drew and wrote about their favourite Wintery things...snowmen featured very strongly!