Growing Big Learning: Our Enormous Turnip Adventure!

Week of 23rd June 2025

What an absolutely magical week we’ve had in Reception! We dove deep into the wonderful traditional tale of The Enormous Turnip, and our learning activities were truly bursting with creativity, collaboration, and hands-on fun.

Our Focus Story: The Enormous Turnip

This beloved traditional tale took center stage in our classroom this week. The children explored themes of teamwork, perseverance, and problem-solving as they followed the characters who worked together to pull up that stubborn turnip! The children recalled the story with excellent accuracy!

Maths

Creative Learning Activities

Throughout the week, our different ability groups excelled at:

• Using colorful paints and ten frames to show various combinations that make 10.
• Creating shopping lists inspired by our story characters – we had some very creative vegetable combinations suggested!
• Drawing and labeling their own “enormous” vegetables – some were truly enormous indeed!
• Working with Numicon tiles to explore number partnerships – the collaborative discussions were fantastic to observe

Phonics

Our phonics journey continued with exciting symbol searches and sound manipulation activities. This week, we focused on:

• Consolidating sounds like /sh/, /ch/, /tch/, /th/, /wh/, /ng/, and /qu/
• Building confidence with these trickier sound combinations
• Practicing reading and spelling through engaging word-building activities

The children particularly enjoyed our “symbol search” games, where they hunted for specific sounds in words – watching them become phonics detectives was absolutely delightful! Their determination to find those tricky sounds was truly impressive.

PSHCE & PRE
Learning to Say “No”

One of the most important parts of our week focused on Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship Education (PSHCE). We helped children understand:

• How to share toys and equipment fairly
• The importance of being able to say “no” politely when needed
• How to be more assertive when the situation required it
• Who to turn to for help when they need support

Through role-play and guided discussions, we gave children practical tools they can use in their daily interactions. It was heartwarming to see how naturally they took to practicing polite ways of asserting themselves, and several children mentioned how they’d already used these skills at home!

Mud Day!

Our classes loved getting muddy throughout the week, please see tapestry for some wonderful photos of the day!

These sessions allowed children to connect with nature while reinforcing classroom learning in a different environment. The joy on their faces as they learned outdoors was simply wonderful to witness.

Forest school will be back to normal next week, children will need to ensure they are either wearing (or kept in their bag) their forest school clothes: long sleeved trousers, t-shirt and ensure that they have welly boots in school.

Have a lovely weekend,

The Reception Team