Author: Mrs Wood

Thank you for attending our Maths Mornings last week.

We hope you enjoyed them and found them useful.

Don’t forget this week’s Phonics Mornings.

 

Thanks to everyone who attended the learning workshop last week. We hope you found it useful.

During their phonics learning, your child will be learning the following terms:

Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound found within a word

Grapheme: how the sound is written e.g. h, ai

Diagraph: Two letters that make one sound when read

Trigraph: Three letters that make one sound

CVC: Stands for consonant, vowel, consonant

Segmenting : Breaking up a word into its sounds

Blending : Putting the sounds together to read a word

Tricky words: Words that cannot easily be decoded

At the moment children are learning their first 19 phonemes and the graphemes that represent them.
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   f      ff (as in puff)   ll (as in hill)     ss (as in hiss)

They will use these phonemes to read and spell simple “consonant-vowel-consonant” (CVC) words:
sat, tap, dig, duck, rug, puff, hill, hiss

All these words contain 3 phonemes.

How you can help at home:

• Practise the phonemes together
• Articulate the sounds clearly and precisely, eg
  mmm; ssss ; nnnn
• Use the phonemes to make different words at home and play phonics games
• Read everyday with your child
• Attend our phonics mornings in the week beginning 28 November

Although phonics is important in teaching the mechanics of reading, reading is about much more. We also want children to read for pleasure. Reading to your child regularly will help them to develop a lifelong love of books and reading.

Which potato is the heaviest?

  

Can we make the scales balance?

  

This week, we will begin Phase 2 of the Letters and Sounds phonics programme.

In this phase, children will continue practising what they have learned from Phase 1, including ‘sound-talk’ (orally blending and segmenting words). They will also 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. Your child might use pictures or hand movements to help them remember these.

Children will learn 19 letters of the alphabet and one sound for each. They will blend sounds together to make words and segment words into their separate sounds. They will begin to read simple captions.

The 19 phonemes are:

• set 1: s a t p
• set 2: i n m d
• set 3: g o c k
• set 4: ck e u r
• set 5: h b f/ff l/ll ss

VC and CVC words

C and V are abbreviations for ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’. VC words are words consisting of a vowel then a consonant (e.g. am, at, it) and CVC words are words consisting of a consonant then a vowel then a consonant (e.g. cat, rug, sun). Words such as ‘tick’ and ‘bell’ also count as CVC words – although they have four letters, they have only three sounds. For example, in the word bell, b = consonant, e = vowel, ll = consonant.

In Phase 2, children will be seeing letters and words, as well as hearing them. They will be shown how to make whole words by pushing magnetic or wooden letters together to form little words, reading little words on the interactive whiteboard and breaking up words into individual sounds, which will help their spelling. These will be simple words made up of two phonemes, for example, ‘am’, ‘at’, ‘it’, or three phonemes, for example, ‘cat’, ‘rug’, ‘sun’, ‘tick’, ‘bell’.

Tricky words

Your child will also learn several tricky words: ‘the’, ‘to’, ‘I’, ‘go’, ‘no’.

Children will still be practising oral blending and segmenting skills daily. They need plenty of practice at doing this.

This week the children have been learning to recognise, write and order numerals by finding missing numbers around school.

  

  

Don’t forget to join us in The Space tomorrow morning at 9am for coffee and an informal chat.

 

Our PE day will be Wednesday. We will begin changing the children for PE from next week, 28 September. Please make sure your child’s PE kit is in school.

Relax and read will begin on Thursday 29 September. Please stay with your child on Thursday morning to read and choose a library book to take home.

Show and tell will be every Friday. Beginning Friday 30 September, the children can bring a small interesting item from home to show and talk about.

Thanks.

We’ve been busy preparing the classroom and now can’t wait for the children to start!

We’re looking forward to meeting you all again next week as your child begins this exciting chapter in their lives.

Please bring your child to school on the date and time arranged.

See you next week!