Weekly Blog 02/02/24
Date: 26th Jan 2024 @ 4:05pm
Happy Friday! This week the children have been inspired to become ‘Courageous Advocates’ through our class book all about crocodiles. This simply means ‘speaking out against injustice for those whose voices cannot be heard’. We believe this develops resilience, teamwork, courage and independence and an understanding of the wider world and how we can help make it a better place. In class we discussed why crocodiles have become endangered and believe we can make a difference to save them. No act is too small. We planned to raise money by sponsoring a caiman at Chester Zoo by holding a cake sale run by our children themselves. This will be held next week after school outside our door so please bring some coins and help us save the crocs! I will send an email the day before. We look forward to continuing our hard work and championing different causes which are special and meaningful to us.
Dates for the diary (Spring Term)
- Monday 12th/ Wednesday 14th February – Parents Evening (face-to-face in school)
- Tuesday 13th February – Chester Zoo trip (Whole School)
- Thursday 7th March – World Book Day
- Wednesday 27th March – Dormice class assembly (9am – school hall)
Little Wandle (Phonics)
This week we learnt four new sound ER and AIR using the new Little Wandle grapheme cards and phrases which concludes all the sounds we will be learning this year. We have also learnt the tricky words ARE, SURE and PURE.
For further information on how to support your child with phonics, please visit the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds website: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
You will find a grapheme information sheet to help you with pronunciation in your child’s book bag. It is really important that you pronounce the sounds correctly at home if you are supporting your child. Please see videos on the link provided.
If you have any questions regarding phonics, please speak to your child’s class teacher. Thank you for your continued support.
Kinetic Letters
Kinetic Letters is the first thing we do each morning as the children come into school. We focus on teaching the children letter formation and aim that it becomes automatic as soon as possible. This reduces the cognitive load when writing. Once we have rehearsed our letter of the day (based on ongoing assessments) we look at some spelling patterns and sentence structure. This session usually lasts 15-20mins. Please can you ensure that your child is in school by 8:45am so they are not missing out on this important lesson.
In Maths, we have continued looking at the composition of number 6 and thinking about how we can begin to record this. We have consolidating our understanding of how the number system looks like a staircase and how each number gets one block bigger each time. Riddles are a great way of practising one more and one less. Can you say 'my number is one more than 3, who am I? and your child reason about how they know. E.g. "I know that one more than 3 is 4 and one less than 5 is 4'. You may want to write numbers on pieces of paper and turn them face down, can your child pick up the card, read the number and say one more and one less? It's one thing knowing numbers by rote, but to deepen our understanding of these numbers it's all about developing of why!
On Monday, we continued to add to our non-chronological report on crocodiles. Each child has contributed a piece of writing to our book and it has taken pride of place in our reading area.
On Tuesday, we finished the story and created a story map as a class to support our retelling. You might want to ask your child to tell you this story at home or create their own!
On Wednesday, Jack the Dog told us the story of the Wise and Foolish builders where we built two houses, one on the sand and one on the solid ground. Once we had finished building Mrs Line got into character by mimicking the storm with lots of water. The children were very excited about this! But first we made our predictions on what we thought would happen to each house. They all thought the house on solid ground would be the strongest and the house on the sand would fall! So we put their predictions to the test! And sure enough the house on the sand did fall down, it wasn't strong at all. Meanwhile the house on solid ground didn't budge!
On Thursday, we delved into the past and learnt about the Mottershead Family and Chester Zoo in the past. We looked at pictures from the past and now and noticed the similarities and differences between now and then. We learnt different facts about the zoo, now adding in our knowledge on crocodiles in preparation for our school trip in two weeks. We are super excited!
On Friday, we discussed how crocodiles are endangered due to traders sing their skin for shoes and handbags. We thought of different ways to raise money and settled on a cake sale! We then made posters to help save the crocodiles!
Congratulations to our Star of the Week, Sullivan!
Our Mystery Reader this week was Maggie’s Mum. Thank you for coming to share a story with us!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Miss Selwyn
