DT: maze making
In DT lessons over the next two weeks, we’re designing and making marble mazes.
In this lesson, children had to design their maze on squared paper. The colouring serves an important purpose as each colour represents a different length of maze wall that they will have to saw. This will help them know how many pieces of each length they will need.
Oracy: performing a poem
In our reading lesson yesterday, we had an oracy (speaking and listening) focus. We have been retelling The Ugly Five by Julia Donaldson with some changes. We then practised performing them in a pair with focus on appropriate volume and intonation. They were great!
Finger Spaces
What are Finger Spaces?
Finger spaces refer to the amount of space that needs to be left between words so that they can be read as individual units of meaning. Young children learning to write are first taught to put their finger on the page in between each word, to create the necessary spacing. This is an important skill and a Year 1 objective. By the end of Year 1, it is expected that all children will use finger spaces in their writing.
How Can You Encourage Children To Use Finger Spaces?
In class, we have various strategies to encourage finger spacing. These include:
Modelling the Use of Finger Spaces
Demonstrate using finger spaces when writing on the board by placing your index finger between words. It is important to exaggerate these spaces when demonstrating to help children to understand why there is a space in between each word.
Finger Space Tools
Providing children with a finger space tool for them to use instead of their finger. Have children place the tool in between each word to help them learn to place the correct amount of space between words.
Use Reminders and Prompts
Place writing prompts and fun reminders on children’s desks if they are forgetting to use finger spaces in their writing. Visual supports not only help children use finger spaces when writing but also act as visual reminders.
Today, the children were asked to try to read some sentences that did not have spaces between the words. This was tricky!
This activity helped to increase awareness of why spaces are necessary.
Ask the children to look for items at home that could be used as finger spacing tools.
This week’s learning
We are really impressed with how well the children have settled. They have quickly learnt the routines and are ready and eager to learn.
Reading
Your child will bring a book home this week. These books don’t contain any words at this stage. Please share the book with your child. Encourage them to talk about the characters and events and predict the ending.
Use the reading record book to write a short comment.
We will change books weekly, so please keep both the book and the record book in their bookbag.
Phonics
We will begin phase 2 of our phonics programme, ‘Letters and Sounds’ this week. In this phase 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.
We will be continuing with activities to help children identify the initial sounds in words. Games such as, ‘I spy’ are easy to play at home and when out and about.
Phase 2 phonemes:
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
We will send one set of phonemes home each week to practise at home.
Next week I will post a presentation explaining how we teach early reading and writing and how to help at home.
If you have any questions please email me.
moortowneyfs@spherefedertion.org
Homework Heroes
We thoroughly enjoyed our homework review session on Friday. The quality and variety of submissions was excellent.
Take a look at some of the – many – highlights.
Harris, Musa and Kashif combined forces to create this truly impressive retelling of the story. The level of detail and sheer creativity shown here is brilliant.
Emma’s origami from memory (Wow!) …
Albie’s Axolotl – inspired by his writing…
Testing homemade paper aeroplanes must have taken resilience and concrentration just like Humpty.
This superb creation of what might have been on the top shelf of the cereal aisle…
Check out Daisy’s recreation using some fantastic haikus…
Well done, Y6.
Living and Learning: 8Rs for learning
As you will know, this half term our Living and Learning focus is the 8Rs for learning.
Year 3 have shown one of the 8Rs in particular within maths lessons: resilience.
We have been looking at numbers to 1,000 and breaking them down (partitioning) into different parts, before plotting them on number lines.
We found it tricky to start with but we kept persevering and are now confident with it!
Showing resilience to overcome this has made us very happy indeed!
Science: classifying animals
In our current science topic, we have been learning about the different types of animals including: mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians and invertebrates.
We thought of our own yes/no questions to classify animals based on their characteristics. We called this a classification key.
Test your child’s knowledge of the different types of animals at home – they’re very confident!
Living and Learning: building relationships
In this week’s Living and Learning session, we were learning about attributes that will help us to make friends. We were all given an attribute and children had to decide where to place it on a continuum showing whether it was a positive or negative attribute for building good relationships.
Our perfect performances
Today, we’ve been performing poetry about animals!
We needed to have voices that were expressive and fluent when performing the poem that we had memorised off by heart.
It was also important to project our voices and make sure we were facing the audience.
Numbers to 100
In maths, we’ve been learning lots about numbers t0 100. We’re confindent with tens and ones and know how to represent two digit numbers in different ways.
