Week Ending 17/05/24
Date: 14th Apr 2024 @ 11:58am
Happy Friday! Though the weather has been up and down this week, we have made the most of our learning with all things dinosaurs through non-fiction videos and books. This week we have continued to read our story of 'Gigantosaurus' by Jonny Duddle. Fun fact, Miss Selwyn’s mummy taught Mr Duddle’s children a few years ago and went to Miss Selwyn’s primary school. We told the children about a fun game we used to play when we were little and this was the card game, Top Trumps. Some children had played this game before and so we all set out to create dinosaur ones. We worked hard to write our own versions and enjoyed exploring the dinosaurs we met in our story.
Transition
Some parents have been asking about transition for next year. We tend to not talk to the children about transition to Year 1 before half term as we still have so much learning to do together and it can be an unsettling time for some children in the build up. Please be encouraged that we will have plenty of opportunities for your child's transition to Key Stage 1 next half term, including a meet the teacher afternoon, full handover with their next teacher and tours of their new classroom. We also have a Pathways unit which will run in the last two weeks to support their move and any worries they may have.
Dates for the diary this half term:
Tuesday 21st May - Class Photos - Children to come in their smartest uniform please including a jumper/cardigan.
Wednesday 22nd May - Instinct Wellness Challenge (normal PE kit needed).
Sports Day – (Friday 24th May 9am – 10am)
Next Friday we will be holding our EYFS Sports Day where your child will be working towards helping their team win the Sports Day shield. The gates will close at 8:55am so please make your way around through the gates to the right of the main entrance and a member of staff will let you onto the field to find a seat. We ask that your child come to school in either a yellow, red, blue or green top, this is dependent on which coloured house your child is in.
Beeston – RED
Cholmondeley – BLUE
Peckforton – GREEN
Chester – YELLOW
Normal PE shorts/leggings/jogging bottoms and trainers to be worn with your coloured top. If the weather is warm we ask that you apply sun cream in the morning before school and bring a sunhat and a labelled water bottle.
The PTA will be running a tea, coffee and cake stall if you would like any refreshments during the races.
Fingers crossed the weather will be on our side!
Talking Point – A Good Friend
In the story, one of the dinosaurs tricks the others into believing that Gigantosaurus is coming when he isn’t, which makes for an exciting end when he does show up! We have been thinking about telling lies and why being honest is better. So our Big Question this week is ‘Was Bonehead (the dinosaur) a good friend? What makes a good friend?’ We see daily kindness from our Reception children so perhaps next week you could use one of the things on your list to be a good friend to someone in your class or at home.
Little Wandle (Phonics)
This term we move onto Phase 4 in our phonics journey! The children do not learn any new phonemes or graphemes. Instead, they are taught to further manipulate the phonemes and graphemes they have already learnt. They will begin to explore more polysyllabic words (words containing more than one syllable) and read and spell words containing adjacent consonants. E.g. string, milk, brush, scoop etc. Phase 4 requires the children to blend an increasing number of sounds together. These words are often referred to in relation to how many vowels and consonants they contain.
E.g. CVC words (consonant / vowel / consonant) such as sad, net, him.
This week we have been focusing on word endings such as -ing, -ed and -est such as swimming, printed and freshest. We has also been looking at words that end with -ed but sound like /t/. For example, bumped, blinked and helped. We will be doing lots of consolidating of these as we transition the children to Year 1. We have also learnt the tricky words out and today.
As always, please see the downloadable attachment below to practise the phase 4 words and tricky words we have been learning this week.
As we have been learning about the suffix -ed this week, we've been helping the children to develop their speech through using the past tense. Offering choices is one of the best ways to promote speech in children. It creates opportunities for us to model the correct word in certain contexts. For example, a child might say "I goed to the park' We don't want to correct them but by giving them a choice of two words and them choosing between them, it gives your child a greater degree of success. You may reply by saying "goed to the park" or "went to the park". "I went to the park." Keep practising modelling past tense verbs, especially with the suffix -ed by giving two choices that your child can choose between. Remember practice makes permanent!
Reading
By now you will be familiar with the Little Wandle reading sessions that we do here in school. The children have three reading practice sessions a week.
Session 1: Decoding (sounding out the words and blending to read)
Session 2: Prosody (intonation, rhythm, pace, pausing for effect, using punctuation meaningfully). This used to be called reading with expression!
Session 3: Comprehension (understanding what has been read through questioning).
You listening to them read at least 5 times a week will move their learning on without a doubt, especially with our Little Wandle books that should provide confident (almost memorised) reading as they have read that book at least 3 times with us in school. You may find that the Little Wandle book they are bringing home is easy (that's great), however we know there is so much more to reading than using our sounds to decode.
- Pick out key vocabulary and look into it's meaning. Can your child use it in their own words? A different context?
- Ask your child to retell the story in full sentences using the pictures at the back of the book.
- Look at the different punctuation marks that feature. Lets use our prosody to ask a question, exclamation for excitement, ellipsis for suspense, a comma as a pause etc.
- What are the tricky words in your book? What part of the word is making it tricky?
- We often talk to the children about prosody and not sounding like a robot when they read. We want to be story tellers so changing our intonation, pauses and flow helps support fluency in reading.
- Reread the sentence with prosody after decoding if needed.
- If you need to decode, encourage your child to blend in their head.
- What might happen next? How do you know? What can you use in the book to back up your opinion?
- Opinions! Their opinion means so much. It's okay not to like the same as your friend but encourage your child to back up with reasoning using 'because'.
There is so much to unravel in just one book! Being able to read the words on the page without sounding out does not mean fluency in reading. Please use the pointers above to delve deeper into your child's reading book this week. It really does make the world of difference and encourages a love of books. The more they understand the more worlds they can discover and unlock their imagination. All these points are the stepping stones to your child's progress and understanding in reading books. We want to inspire lifelong learners and we do this together, so please do not hesitate to speak to your child's class teacher if you need support.
I have added a pdf document which includes some questions to support the above points called 'The Reading Spine'. This is separated into year groups so do take a look at Reception.
In Maths, we have been learning all about the counting system by exploring our teens numbers. We found out that each teen number is one ten and X number of ones. E.g. 14 = 1 ten and 4 ones etc. We have been using numicon to help us to spot this pattern and when it changes when we get to 20! To help us with this, we played the traditional game of bingo with teens numbers and different representations of these (tens frame, unifix cubes, numicon). We have been practising counting backwards starting from twenty a lot this week which is essential for when the children come to subtract. You can play lots of different games with counting especially ‘I say, you say’ where you might start from 20 taking it in turns with your child until you get to 1. You could change this up by saying two or three numbers in a row and your child would have to copy by doing the next two numbers. E.g 18, 17 and so on. Keep practising counting back from 20 at home, count backwards on the stairs or before going down the slide at the park.
On Monday, we continued to read and meet new dinosaurs in our book. Today we learnt all about the Triceratops through various non-fiction books and videos and found out lots of interesting facts.
On Tuesday, we had fun exploring the Brachiosaurus. Did you know they were estimated to have a life span of up to 100 years?
On Wednesday, we learnt about the Stegosaurus. After that, the children chose one of the dinosaurs they had learnt about to create their very own traditional Top Trumps card! The children can’t wait to play with them!
On Thursday, we talked about the volcanoes in our ‘Gigantosaurus’ story and held our own eruption!
On Friday, the sun made an appearance so we went outside to practice all of our Sports Day races in preparation for the big day. We also treated our buddies to little packets of sweets after their hard week doing SATs papers.
Congratulations to our Stars of the Week, George T and Faith!
Our mystery reader this week was Honor-Grace's Mum. Thank you for coming to share your story with us!
Have a lovely weekend!
Miss Selwyn and Miss Woodward
