Week Ending 21/01/22
Date: 20th Jan 2022 @ 1:51pm
Happy Friday! What another fantastic week of exploring and deepening our understanding of the beautiful world we live in. The children have really enjoyed finding out lots of new facts about crocodiles inspired by our text ‘Let’s all Creep Through Crocodile Creek’. Did you know that crocodiles are the biggest reptiles on Earth? Neither did we! We look forward to sharing our interesting facts about these creatures with you. It has also lent itself wonderfully to thinking about the difference between fiction and non-fiction books. I wonder if you can find any non-fiction books on your next trip to the library.
This week in Phonics we have learnt four new sounds; Y, Z/ZZ, QU and CH. We have also learnt some harder to read and spell words: WE, ME and BE. I sing the song ‘he, she, me, we, be all end with an e’ to help the children spot these words in their books and notice the hard part of this word is the 'e'.The children have applied the new sounds into their reading brilliantly but sometimes struggle to recognise harder to read and spell words in their books. A simple game to play with the online books is ‘I Spy’. Ask the children if they can find ‘we’, ‘me’ and ‘be’ on each page before you read, then go back and read the book together and see if they spot them without help! Another good game is 'splat'. Write the harder to read and spell words (include go, no, the, to and I) on post it notes and spread them out on the table. Someone shouts the word and the players need to tray and be the first to touch it with their hands. First person to 'splat' the harder to read and spell word wins!
We are moving onto learning lots of new digraphs in our Phase 3 journey where two different letters can make one sound. This is a really important phase in your child’s reading development as they begin to read more complex sentences. Spending 10 minutes a day reading with your child will hugely support them in their journey to becoming an independent reader. It is a key part of learning to read that children re-read words and sentences that they can decode (sound out) until they are fluent (read with ease and precision). By reading texts several times children have the greatest opportunity to achieve this fluency. This is why we encourage you read a book at least four times. Please do continue to record each time you read with your child in their reading record. You will find an arrow as their next step each time we read with them in school. I have attached the link to a video of how each sound in Phase 2 and 3 should be pronounced. Please listen to this carefully and model to your child to ensure they are not adding in a ‘schwa’ (weak, unstressed sound such as ‘ch’ instead of ‘chur’)
https://vimeo.com/642342878/59d233684c (Phase 3 pronunciations)
https://vimeo.com/642342878/641445921 (Phase 2 pronunciations)
In Maths, we have been focusing on applying our understanding of numbers six and seven to problem-solving and reasoning activities. We have consolidated our understanding of the composition of numbers 6 and 7 using a part-whole model and compared numbers using mathematical language such as ‘more’ and ‘less’. We pretended to be balancing scales using numicon pieces and found the bigger the number the heavier our scale would be on that side. We used language such as ‘5 is more than 3 and 3 is less than 5’. This is an important skill in Reception and something we actively encourage in each lesson. The next step in this process would get the children to ‘reason’ (justify/explain) their answers rather than just ‘I did it in my head’. For this we might say “5 is more than 3 because it has more blocks” or “5 is more than 3 because 5 is made up of five ones and 3 is made up of 3 ones”. We continuously ask questions for children to really delve deeper and have a greater understanding of mathematical concepts. I have uploaded a document of some reasoning activities that you may want to try at home which models the questions to ask your child in different contexts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08q4g7y/numberblocks-series-2-counting-sheep
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08r3p2x/numberblocks-series-2-fluffies?seriesId=b0bl5v3r
On Monday, the school nurse came in to teach us all about healthy teeth. We learnt how we need to brush our teeth for two minutes and even practised using a toothbrush. We finished with a story about visiting the dentist. Now our teeth are sparkly and clean!
On Tuesday, we continued to read Let’s All Creep Through Crocodile Creek and thought about the different adjectives the author uses to describe the crocodile. We wrote speech bubbles for the main characters and discussed the things they might say along their journey.
On Wednesday, we watched a video on crocodiles and gathered lots of facts. We then went on a word hunt and sorted the words we found into two groups whether they described a crocodile or not.
On Thursday, we had a special PE lesson on the apparatus and linked it to our story. We thought about how Rabbit, Mouse and Tortoise might travel across the creek using different parts of the apparatus. In French we consolidated our learning of numbers 1-10 and played some maths games.
On Friday, we created a non-fiction book on crocodiles in groups. We thought about where they live, what they eat, their appearance and their babies.
Reminder:
Each Thursday (instead of Friday) we will be visiting the library to choose our weekly Reading for Pleasure books. Please ensure the previous week’s book is back inside your child’s book bag to exchange it for another. We will send out reminders of the titles of books if you forget to bring it in. If you have two books at home unfortunately we cannot lend out another reading for pleasure book until these are returned. This is to ensure the three KS1 classes also can have access to a range of books.
Homework (optional)
The Year 6 school parliament have set us an exciting challenge. In school we have Good Samaritan Cards which the children can write to one another or even members of staff who show any acts of kindness. A postcard is written to the individual then read out in Celebration Assembly and sent home.
Task: Design a Good Samaritan postcard that shows kindness.
Please hand these to your class teacher for them to submit them in the competition.
Our mystery readers this week were Willow’s Mum and Harry’s Dad. Thank you for coming to share a story with us! Please speak to your child’s class teacher to put a date in the diary if you would like to be mystery reader.
URGENT APPEAL!
Both classes need a new mystery reader for this half term so please do come and see us if you're interested!!
Have a fantastic weekend!
Miss Selwyn and Miss Nicholas
