Squirrels' February blogs
Date: 18th Feb 2024 @ 12:50pm
Dates for the diary - Spring Term
- Wednesday 14th February and Thursday 15th February– Parents Evening. This will be held face-to-face in the school hall on Wednesday and virtually through schoolcloud on Thursday.
- Tuesday 13th February – Whole School Chester Zoo trip
- Thursday 7thMarch – World Book Day (children can dress up as their favourite book character or in cosy pjs)
Parents Evening
Next week is pupil progress meetings. I will talk through how much progress your child has made and give you an idea of their next steps in reading, writing and maths. I will give you an idea of how on track they are to be at 'expected' level by the end of the year as well as talking to you about how lovely your children are! Meetings will be 10 minutes long and I'll be using a timer to make sure I stick to schedule. If you have any concerns or questions, I’ll give you a chance to raise these at the beginning of our conversation as a priority. If you have any unanswered questions, we can schedule another meeting to discuss anything in more detail after half term.
Chester Zoo Trip
Children will need to bring a packed lunch. Please order a school packed lunch on ParentPay or tick packed lunch from home. All children will need to carry a small backpack for their lunch and water bottle. They will need to be able to carry this themselves while walking around Chester Zoo for the whole day. Children should wear full school uniform and comfortable footwear suitable for the weather. Please send them with warm coats, hats and gloves as we will be outside for most of the day. We can't wait to spot the animals from The Lion Inside and I'm sure we will have no problem finding our 'roars' like the mouse!
We will be travelling by coach from the Community Centre and children should arrive at school at the normal time. We plan to return before the end of the school day.
Happy last week before half-term!
Miss Jones
Thursday 8th February
Hurray for fantastic February! I’m sure February is met with lots of exclamations of “finally!” after a cold wet January. Our focus this half term has been reading and writing our own version of The Lion Inside, getting to grips with numbers past 10 (Y1) or learning how to multiply and divide (Y2), learning about the seasons and weather changes (we’ve used cloudy and raining a LOT on our class weather chart, when will it be sunny?!), learning how to navigate spreadsheets in computing, practising our animal dance moves in PE on Fridays with Miss Jones (the Jungle Book soundtrack has been a crowd pleaser), learning about maps, continents and China in Geography, and learning about different beliefs about how the world was made in RE. Our brains are seriously growing every day!
In phonics, we have been playing a new game called where in the word? Now we’ve grown our brains and the phonic ‘code’ we now know more GPCs for the same sounds (ee, ea, e-e, ie, y, e). Our focus this week has been to sound talk each word and tell our talking partners where in the word is the ‘ee’ sound. We then group words with the same GPCs and this helps us remember new spelling rules (Penny has the ‘ee’ sound at the end so it could be an ‘y’, ‘ie’ or ‘ee’). This can be a fun game to play together while reading with your child at home to get them spotting patterns in words that have similar spellings and sounds. We have also encountered tricky words with quad graphs (4 letters, 1 sound) in! We’ve been learning how to read ‘thought’ and ‘through’ and trying our best not to be tricked by them. Little Wandle call it 'tricky' because they have not been taught that part of the code yet so any words used to be tricky because of the grapheme 'a' being the phoneme 'e' and the grapheme 'y' being the phoneme 'ee'. Now of course we know about the GPC 'y' as 'ee' so that is no longer a tricky part. Hurray! Ask your child to read tricky words in their reading book (there is a tricky word box at the beginning of every Little Wandle reading book) and tell you what part makes them tricky. Squirrels have been fab at explaining this to each other and trying hard to remember in our writing, we won’t be tricked! This week is a Grow the Code revision week before our half termly assessment so keep reading daily please.
Speaking of reading, we have new days for our reading lessons. Our days are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We will change Little Wandle books every Wednesday. Please make sure your child brings their reading record to school every day and their reading book ready to change every Wednesday. Library books are changed every Friday.
This week Squirrels have been busy writing their own version of The Lion Inside by Rachel Bright. Safe to say we are more than excited to be going to Chester Zoo next Tuesday to find our own roars!
In maths Year 1 have been learning about place value to 20 (What does a number really mean? What makes that number? How do we write that number accurately every single time? Have we learnt all its number bonds so we don't need to use our fingers for 8+ 1 or 6+ 3 or 4+ 5, we just know these are number bonds of 9). We are into teen numbers now. Here are the misconceptions that Squirrels might make when learning:
- say 'ty' instead of 'teen'
- hear 'ty' instead of 'teen'
- confuse the ones and the tens number (eg understand '16' but write 61 because of the 'six' then 'teen')
- confuse 61/16 in understanding, not 'seeing' that the tens number dominates the ones number in amount.
- be working so hard on one element of the maths (writing the numbers accurately in formation, understanding which number to write due to its place value, knowing its 'teen' not 'ty') that some other elements will get lost and wrong.
- they don't see that the 0 gets covered up by the ones number and write 106
- we say the ones number before the tens number for 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 unlike any other number above 20
- we have to learn to spell these numbers (think eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen)
A fun game we have been playing in class is called X-Ray vision. It’s a 2-player game that uses digit cards (make your own at home with paper!) 0-20. The players put the cards in order and player 1 closes their eyes while player 2 turns a few cards face down. Player 1 has to use their ‘x-ray vision’ to tell player 2 which numbers have been turned over. Knowledge of number order and tens and ones should come into play when reasoning which numbers are missing e.g. I know 18 has been turned over because it’s one more than 17 and one less than 19.
While Year 1 have been busy learning about new numbers to 20, Year 2 have been busy learning how to multiply and divide numbers! A letter will be coming home about TTRockstars this week as a way for your child to practise their times tables while rocking out.
Don’t forget its parents evening next week! I look forward to talking to you about your lovely children and the progress they’ve made so far.
We’ve been grateful for our marvellous mystery readers so far, we don’t currently have any booked in for the rest of the term. If you would like to be a mystery reader, please contact the office.
That’s all from me!
Miss Jones
