Weekly blog 26/01/24
Date: 19th Jan 2024 @ 3:19pm
Happy Friday! This week we've been focusing on new vocabulary from our story 'Let's All Creep Through Crocodile Creek'. These include knobbly, gnarly, lumpy, bumpy, pokey pointey, scritchy, scratchy, flippy, whippy and swingy, springy. We've noticed that each of these pair of words rhyme and identified the alliteration in each one. We explored the vocabulary by feeling different textures to match to the words such as bark, shells, pine cones, sticks and textured fabric. We thought about each part of the journey of mouse, rabbit and tortoise and acted this out through freeze frames.
Dates for the diary (Spring Term)
- Friday 2nd February - PTA School Disco (EYFS and KS1) 4-5pm. Please bring in your ticket money in a labelled envelope on Monday.
- Week beginning Monday 12th 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)
NELI Assessment
In your child's book bag you will find a labelled envelope with your child's NELI assessment in. If you are unsure as to what this is, please see last week's blog for more details. If you need any clarification please do not hesitate to come and speak with us.
Little Wandle (Phonics)
This week we learnt four new sound OI, OW, UR and the trigraph EAR using the new Little Wandle grapheme cards and phrases. We have learnt that a digraph is two letters one sound, but a trigraph is three letters one sounds. Have a look at some of these words which mean three - triangle, tricycle and triceratops. The mnemonics for these new sounds are very catchy so if your child is struggling to recall the grapheme ask them to recall the phrase to help them remember. We practised reading these words by decoding and then saying the sounds in our head to read fluently. We have also learnt the tricky words MY, BY and ALL. To help the children remember these we say 'my with a Y and me with an E' to support understanding the difference. The more the children can see these words and remember them without needing to sound out, the more fluent their reading will become. Please ensure you remember to log each read in your child's reading record.
In Kinetic Letters we have been practising the Slider Family letters (V, W, X, Z, K). For these letters, we need to avoid starting with ‘down bump’, rather ‘sliding’ making a diagonal line to the ground. The letter ‘K’ is the trickiest yet as the action requires sliding in two different directions in the same move. E.g. Start at Brave Monkey Branch ‘down bump, pen off, slide in from Scared Monkey, slide out (to the ground). The sliding in and out will take lots of practice. We want to avoid backwards sevens! It should look like a penguin’s beak as they seem to have lost them all in our ‘Slider Family’ book when Bounce and Skip visit the Antarctic. Keep practising your three friends hold pencil grip at home as this makes all the difference to your child’s writing.
In Maths, we met Numberblock Six which has been incredibly useful to deepen our understanding of subitising different arrangements of numbers 2-6 and not just like the pattern we see on a dice. Subitising is knowing a number without counting! We have been using part-whole models again to partition (split) number six into two parts. We have used our multilink cubes to make towers of 6 and physically split them into two to then recombine to make our whole (six). We even attempted to write our own number sentences to correspond with our part-whole models. This is an easy thing to replicate at home. All you need are three plates and six pasta shells or even sweets. Can your child write the matching number sentence? Be as creative as you can! Please remember to upload any home learning to Tapestry. We always love to see this!
On Monday, we looked at the different character traits of mouse, tortoise and rabbit. We worked together to read and match the sentences that best fit each character.
On Tuesday, we continued thinking about the personalities of each character and thought about what they might say. We introduced the children to speech bubbles and what this looks like in their reading books.
On Wednesday, the children were amazed by the invisible signs that had been left in the creek. We used water colour paints to reveal the hidden message and wrote our own signs to display in the creek.
On Thursday, we did some research by using non-fiction books and videos to create a non-chronological report for a crocodile. We learnt about where they live, what they eat, what they look like and their babies.
On Friday, after learning that crocodiles can have between 60-110 teeth and that their teeth can regrow, we learnt about the importance of our own oral hygiene and looking after our teeth with Mrs Line. We also conducted a science experiment where we placed eggs into different liquids and to see their effect on our teeth.
Congratulations to our Star of the Week, Maxwell!
Our Mystery Reader this week was Arthur's Mum. Thank you for coming to share a story with us!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Miss Selwyn
