Investigating numbers

This week the children made up superhero stories to help with their understanding of number.

They placed the small world superheroes in different places and were encouraged to use sentences to explain.

“There are two superheroes in the house. There are three superheroes in the garden. There are five superheroes altogether.”

  

Supertato learning

This week, we’ve really engaged with the story, ‘Supertato‘.

The evil pea escaped from the freezer again – but luckily we made our own Supertatos to protect the classroom.

Unfortunately, some vegetables were frozen in ice and the children had to investigate how to free them.

 

Ask your child to retell  the story and take care! Check the peas are not escaping from your freezer!

Phonics

Thanks to everyone who came to the phonics mornings last week. We hope you found them useful. Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions.

In Phase 2 of our phonics programme (Letters and Sounds), children will be taught the phonemes (sounds) for a number of letters (graphemes), which phoneme is represented by which grapheme and that a phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, /ll/ as in b-e-ll. We use Jolly Phonics actions to help children remember these phonemes. Each week the children will bring a set of letters home to learn. Please practise these every day and keep them in their book bag for us to add to.
Your child will be taught how to pronounce the phonemes correctly to make blending easier.
Sounds should be sustained where possible (e.g. sss, fff, mmm) and, where this is not possible, ‘uh’ sounds after consonants should be reduced as far as possible. (e.g. try to avoid saying ‘buh’, ‘cuh’).

Set 1: s a t p
Set 2: i n m d
Set 3: g o c k
Set 4: ck (as in duck) e u r
Set 5: h b l

We will begin learning ‘tricky words’ this week which are words which are not phonetic. Please help your child to read these by recognition. The first tricky words are the and to which we will be sending home for the children to learn.

Now the children have knowledge of some letters and their sounds, try to encourage them to write words independently. This might just be the initial sound of a word. Let them write something important to them. This could be a label for their drawing, a list or a letter to a friend.

Learning about measures

Our maths learning this week has been all about measuring. The children have been comparing the length and height of objects such as sticks, playdough worms, pencils and each other!

  

Home challenge
Ask your child to build a tower of five blocks and a tower of 9 blocks. Can they build a tower shorter than one but taller than the other?

 

What is one?

The children have been learning all about the number one by investigating and using one in a variety of situations:

  • as the answer to ‘how many?’
  • one is an amount
  • one is a quantity
  • first means position one
  • once means one time

We have been encouraging the children to use a sentence stem to talk about a single unit, e.g. “I can see one apple.”

Pattern making

We’ve been busy copying and making patterns this week. Recent research has found that young children’s ability to spot mathematical patterns can predict later mathematical achievement.

 

Copying patterns is important as it helps children to focus on ‘What is the same and what is different?’

Why not encourage your child to spot patterns around them? They could have a go at copying repeating patterns and making their own.