In Reception, we often link our provision activities to the texts we are reading that week or across the term. A focus this term has been on the Polar regions. The children particularly enjoyed sharing the story 'The Blue Penguin' by Petr Horácek. We had lots of fantastic penguins painted, created or drawn by the children inspired by the main character in the story. The children learnt that penguins live in the South Pole and couldn't believe just how cold Antarctica gets. We read 'Curious Questions & Answers About Polar Lands' by Miles Kelly as our non-fiction text and the children were fascinated by what they learnt.

We used the theme of penguins to help with one of our maths focusses this term – representing numbers to 10, where the children had to feed the penguin a set number of fish. We also learnt about all the Arctic animals, and we even planned a trip to the North Pole, thinking all about what we would need and what we would hope to see. Again, we linked our learning about the Arctic to our maths, where we've been looking at arrangements of size (smallest to biggest), length (smallest to longest) and height (shortest to tallest).