Author: Mrs Wood

We are having a storytelling workshop on Thursday and telling our own stories. We’ll share these with parents at 2.30pm in the classroom.

Try this activity at home to help your child with understanding addition and partitioning:

Spot the difference

Draw a row of six coloured spots.

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• In turn, one player closes his/her eyes.
• The other player hides some of the spots with a sheet of paper.
• The first player says how many spots are hidden.
• Try with other numbers of spots.
• Show your child how to count on.

Here are some ideas when reading with your child:

1. Introduce the book.

2. Look at the front cover illustration and ask your child to predict what the book is about.

3. Ask questions eg “What can we see on the front cover?”

4. Look through the book at the illustrations.

5. Read the blurb – the description on the back of most books.

6. Ask questions about the text as you read.

7. Explain unfamiliar vocabulary and new words.

8. Ask your child to find words in the text and discuss them.

Other questions and prompts you might use are:

• Show me where you start reading.
• Show me how you point to the words as you read.
• Point to a capital letter.
• Point to a full stop.
• Can you find a word that starts with___?
• Can you see any speech bubbles / exclamation marks?
• Can you find a long word on the page and count the syllables?

This week we are learning to recognise and write the numerals 0-9.  Here are some ideas for helping your child at home.

Choose a number for the week eg 2

Encourage your child to look for this number all the time, at home, in the street and while out shopping.

Choose a different number each week and encourage your child to write the numeral.

Try this website for games to help your child to recognise numerals.

We are beginning to learn vowel digraphs such as ai, ee, igh, oa, and oo. Encourage your child to say the letter names as this is less confusing at this stage.

Here are some examples of words they will be reading. Their confidence from the daily experience of practising and applying their phonic knowledge to reading and writing is really paying off!

tail, week, right, soap, food, park, burn, cord, town, soil.

Tricky words

The number of tricky words is expanding. These are so important for reading and spelling: he, she, we, me, be, was, my, you, her, they, all.

Continue to play with magnetic letters, using some of the two grapheme (letter) combinations:

r-ai-n = rain blending for reading      rain = r-ai-n – segmenting for spelling

b-oa-t = boat blending for reading    boat = b-oa-t – segmenting for spelling

h-ur-t = hurt blending for reading     hurt = h-ur-t – segmenting for spelling

PLEASE continue reading to your child even when they are reading independently. This is very important – your child needs to practise their reading skills every day, and needs the support of an interested adult.

Reception children have been following and making their own repeating patterns in Maths.

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Don’t forget the Reception Class assembly on Thursday at 2.45.

Would you like to read to a small group of children or the class?

Do you have a favourite story from your childhood you would like to share?

We are learning traditional stories in our Literacy sessions this term and would like to provide the children with a wide range of stories read by a variety of people. If you would like  to read to the children at story time please let us know.

We would particularly like to hear stories from a variety of cultures, not necessarily from a book.

Memory

Memory, also known as concentration, is a fantastic game that can be played by even the youngest children, making it a very enjoyable way to learn the phonemic code. Because children generally excel at memory-based games, it also allows them to compete easily with older players.

The player to the dealer’s left starts. On each turn, a player must turn over two cards and pronounce each phoneme. If they match and are a pair the player may keep them if he or she can pronounce the phoneme correctly. If playing with the advanced code phoneme cards, then a word containing that phoneme has to be said in order to keep the pair. Because that player was successful, he/she also gets to take another turn. If, however, the two cards that he/she turns over do not match, then the player must turn them face down again and the next player takes his/her turn. The game is over when all of the pairs have been found. The person with the most pairs is the winner.

Word Card Winners

Place all the cards face down and take it in turns to pick one. If your child says the word correctly they keep it. Read a few words wrongly and encourage your child to spot the mistake. The person with the most cards is the winner.

Have fun!