Rabbits blog 12
Date: 14th Jan 2024 @ 5:09pm
Spring term
Firstly why is it called spring term when most of it is in winter? Wishful thinking? Or do you love those cold, damp mornings and huddle around the fire evenings? Well there was no huddling or dampness going on in the Rabbits' classroom this week! We had a great week 1, full of promise, hard work and getting back into the established routines. And a lot of coughs and yawns!
In English we will continue on our mission for the holy grail of sentence construction understanding. subject and verbs galore with an 'and' thrown in here and there. I want them to feel confident in knowing that:
VERBS: was/is/were/are/has/had
SUBJECTS: I you they we she he we
Of course we will be looking at lots of other subjects and verbs but knowing these will give them a huge step forward in their writing.
What can you do? You can 'spot the subject of this sentence' in their Little Wandle book every so often (pick your sentence carefully) or change the subject to see if it still makes sense. But mostly you can talk about the author's choice- why that word, why not repeat the 'he' here etc.
In phonics it is full steam ahead with phase 5 alternate graphemes. This week we had:
y (yellow vs tiny)
ou (loud vs boulder)
ea (egg vs spread- although we also had to differentiate from 'each')
wh (wig vs which)
Our tricky words were: any, many, again, water, want. Can you find the tricky bit? (Little Wandle call it 'tricky' because they have not been taught that part of the code yet so any used to be tricky because of the grapheme 'a' being the phoneme 'e' and the grapheme 'y' being the phoneme 'ee'. Now of course we know about the GPC 'y' as 'ee' so that is no longer a tricky part. Yeeha! )
I am putting together something so that you can have a copy of Grow The Code at home as soon as the children are more confident in using it.
Talking of confidence, wow what a difference a break makes! This week's writing has been great! Not too challenging in the tasks but they have let their light shine and are embracing the skill of writing so much more now. To the point that I could introduce the green pens for corrections. So I mark in purple and will guide them to find their mistakes and they will use green pen to correct them.
In maths we are looking at what makes 10 and using numbers to 20. They asked me to tell you about the game that we played. I drew a track on some paper and wrote numerals 11-20 around it. They then had a dice (they have one of those now!) and a counter and made their way around the track, remembering to jump off the square. Some tracks were in 11-20 order, some were random. Firstly they had to write the numeral in words (Y1 objective: to read and write numbers 0-20 in numerals and words accurately), then we played it so that we chose one number and then had a play off- whoever landed on that number first was the winner. It was a little raucous as they kept beating me (I blame a dodgy dice).
Next week I will tell you about RE, science and ICT. I hope you can come to our curriculum day at 2pm on Thursday when we will be doing our weekly geography lesson. This week we learnt about what is a man-made vs natural physical feature, this coming Thursday will be simple map work and then Shanghai! I have been in touch with Mr Webster (currently on his KS2 placement but back with us in May) who lived in China and he is making us a little video and photo montage of his time. Miss Jones and I went to Winsford to pick some Rachel Bright books and I found some great bilingual texts so the children can see what mandarin looks like.
See you tomorrow and Thursday!
Mrs H
