Weekly Blog 01/12/23
Date: 24th Nov 2023 @ 3:27pm
Happy Friday and the start of December! Brrrrr! As the cold weather kicks in we expect the children may wish to wrap up nice and warm with gloves, scarves and hats. Please encourage your child to carefully look after these things in school (and label where possible) as they can tend to get lost especially this time of the year. Please try to avoid sending in umbrellas with your child, thank you.
It's been another busy week learning about 'The Three Little Pigs' as they embark on their journey to build their own homes. We challenged the children to use the materials that they could find to build their own homes which couldn’t be blown away by the big, bad wolf. We made sure they were safe and strong!
Dates for the diary:
- Christmas Jumper Day – Thursday 7thWe will be taking part in Christmas Jumper Day. Your child must still wear their school uniform on this day.
- Nativity Dress rehearsal –Tuesday 12th If you are in the village and would like to volunteer to walk us down to the church (or back) we would greatly appreciate it.
- Nativity –Wednesday 13thDecember at 2pm at St Helen’s Church. We will also need some parent walkers please!
- Christmas Dinner Day– Wednesday 20th Christmas jumpers can be worn and please bring in a Christmas cracker for the children to pull at the table with their friends. Thank you.
- Last day – Thursday 21stChildren can bring in toys to have fun with on the last day. PLEASE NO ELECTRICAL TOYS OR GADGETS. We often suggest bringing a toy which can be shared with others such as a jigsaw or board game to encourage playing together.
Little Wandle – Phonics
This week we have learnt our final Phase 2 sounds by learning the sounds SH, TH (voiced and unvoiced), NG and NK using the new Little Wandle grapheme cards and phrases. We have also learnt four new tricky words 'SHE', 'HE', 'TO' and ‘OF'. Similar to last week, we’ve been teaching the tricky bit in the words ‘she’ and ‘he’ is the ‘E’ because it makes the ‘ee’ sound. We learnt the rhyme ‘he, she, me, we, be, all end with an e (ee)’. Please continue to use the tricky word pack in your child’s reading folder to support them.
Over the next two weeks we will be completing this half term’s phonics assessment. Your child's results will be recorded in their reading record and a percentage will be given. 80% is on track. Please see me if you require any support for home learning. In the assessment your child will be completing four activities:
- Grapheme recall (letter recognition) These include S, A, T, P, I, N, M, D, G, O, C, K, CK, E, U, R, H, B, F/FF, L/LL, J, V, W, X, Y, Z/ZZ, QU, CH, TH, NG, NK.
- Oral blending (c-a-t = cat)
- Decoding (by applying taught sounds to simple CVC words)
- Tricky words. These include put, pull, full, as, and, has, his, her, go, no, to, into, she, push, he, of, we, me, be, is, I, the.
In Kinetic Letters, we have started to learn the ‘abracadabra family’. (c, a, o, d, q, g, s) which follow the ‘pull around and push along the ground’ action. We always start our letters from one of two places; brave monkey branch (top of the line) or the ‘scared monkey branch’ (middle of the lines). No letter starts from the ground. Please encourage your child to hold their pen/pencil using their ‘three friends hold’ when forming their letters. These are very tricky letters which can be made easier by simply remembering to start with the ‘c’ letter shape. If you can confidently write ‘c’ then you will crack the abracadabra family! Don't forget that we start Kinetic Letters at 8:45am each day so please make sure your child is walking into school on time so they don't miss any learning, we open the doors at 8:40am each day, thank you.
In Maths, we have been continuing with partitioning numbers 1-5 into two groups and recombining them (finding the inverse) to make the whole again. We have introduced the concept of 'First, Then, Now' simple maths stories to represent an addition number sentence. Can your child use a story to help with the addition number sentence 2 + 3? First, there were two people on the bus, then three more people got on, now there are 5 people altogether on the bus. I have attached a document which gives visual representations of simple maths stories. Model one of the stories to your child using 'FIRST, THEN, NOW' then ask them to tell you another. This can be used in lots of different contexts! Remember to upload any of these 'WOW' moments to Tapestry for us to see.
On Monday, we continued to read our story ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and cofused on the new vocabulary and discussed its meaning (beware, chuckled, warning). We used the magnetic letters to build words and experimented with changing initial phonemes.
On Tuesday, we discussed what we knew about wolves and described the wolf in the story using adjectives. I took on the role as the wolf and the children asked insightful questions to find out more information about Mr Wolf. In the afternoon, Jack the Dog told us about a special waiting time called 'Advent'. We thought about our own Nativity and the hope that this time of year brings.
On Wednesday, we had a fun-filled time with Mr Elton by creating shapes in gymnastics.
On Thursday, after meeting the wolf we decided to make a wolf poster and added labels to describe what he looked like.
On Friday, we enjoyed learning about the Christingle and what each part of it symbolised. The Christingle Service is at 4pm on Sunday at St Helen's Church if you would like to join.
Our Mystery Reader this week was Elsie Ledwards’ Mum, thank you for coming to share a story with us!
Congratulations to our Star of the Week,
Have a wonderful weekend!
Miss Selwyn
