Reception – Children’s Mental Health week – St Adrian's Catholic Primary School

09.02.24

Hello children, parents and carers
It’s been a lovely week of thinking about feelings, emotions, mental health and wellbeing. Lots of the activities that took place were closely linked with this year’s theme ‘My voice matters’. We played games and enjoyed our time together on the carpet to help the children build a bank of ideas on how they can express themselves.

‘Are you listening carefully?’ This was the question we’ve asked the children. We played ‘The whisper game’ where everyone had to pass the message around the circle from child to child. We made string telephones working in pairs and noticed that when the string gets loose we can’t hear that well.
We also talked about how important eye contact is and played the ‘Eye signaled game’.

In PE this week we danced and did yoga and the children truly enjoyed both activities. They all commented on how well and refreshed they are feeling after the dancing and how calm and content after the yoga:

We also did wonderful writing thinking about our likes and dislikes. Here are some of the examples for you to enjoy 🙂

And finally we began reading a wonderful book called ‘Ruby’s worry’. We all learnt from Ruby. She’s a perfectly happy little girl, until she discovers a worry. The worry – depicted as a scribbly yellow shape – is hardly noticeable at first, but starts to grow and soon it’s with her all the time, stopping her from doing the things she loved.

We made a chart of how Ruby was feeling before the worry and how she was feeling after the worry and discussed the importance of sharing your worry with someone you can trust. That can be your friend, teacher or family, anyone you feel comfortable with. Next week we will create our worry box and the children will be able to draw or write their worry and share it with the rest of us. We all know that if we do that the worry will just disappear :)!

On Tuesday we talked about how to stay safe while using the internet. Smartie the Penguin was very supportive and he helped us understand the importance of never clicking on websites we are not sure of. We watched his story and created posters to take home. We also learnt his internet safety song.

In Little Wandle we started reading very, very long words like picnic and magnet, and even longer ones like bedroom and carpark. We’ve been revisiting phase 2 and phase 3 digraphs and some of the tricky words. In your orange books this week you will find your first longer words. Please practice them at home for building confidence and fluency. In class, when we read the longer words, we use the term ‘chunk’. For example the word bedroom can be chunked into two smaller words ‘bed’ and ‘room’. That really helps the children hear all the sounds in those very challenging phase 4 words.

In Maths the children were introduced to the concept of doubling and they learnt that this means ‘twice as many’. We had plenty of opportunities and the children had to answer very tricky questions like: ‘What does double mean?‘ or ‘Where can you see a double?‘.
We also practiced physically making doubles, using manipulatives and mark making.

In RE we created a wonderful ‘Mary and Joseph are taking baby Jesus to the Temple’ drawings. We also practiced tricky words and ‘igh’ trigraph by writing ‘He is the light!’ Have a look at our wonderful display. No doubt that you will love it 🙂