Our Brilliant Maths
This week, we’ve continued our place value learning with rounding.
Just look how neat we are to show off our fantastic understanding.
Challenge your child at home to explain how they would round to the nearest 10, 100, 1000 or 10,000. They might use a number line or the look next door method!
Reading
Reading is super important. In fact, we think it’s one of the most important things you can do to support your child at home.
Some studies have found that children who read regularly are more likely to be happy in adulthood, more likely to earn more money and more likely to do well in all school subjects.
Whilst we understand life is busy, we’d love it if you could read with your child every day (ideally for about 20 minutes but anything is better than not reading at all).
This article has a handy reading for parents guide if you’d like any more information or tips.
Our Reading Activities leaflet will provide lots of activities to make reading an even more enjoyable and active experience for all. Check out the ‘Help Your Child‘ section of our website for a range of guides and tips for helping your child across a range of subjects.
Some common questions about reading:
When should my child have their reading book in school?
Our library session is a Thursday morning where we can browse the library or exchange a book. Children can now take their library book home. It might be a good idea to have one of your library books at school and take one home to read. Make sure you keep it at home until you’re ready to swap it; it will be quarantined at school beforehand!
My child can read fluently. Should they still read aloud to me?
Ideally, yes. They can spend time reading on their own, too – we encourage this. However, it’s really important that children still practise the skill of reading aloud. It helps improve their confidence and improves their ability to read with expression. Being read to is really important, too – so don’t underestimate the power of a bedtime story!
The book my child has brought home is too easy / hard. What should I do?
This will rarely happen but if you do think your child’s book isn’t the right level please get in touch with me.
Living and Learning: 8Rs for learning
For the start of this half-term, our Living and Learning focus is the ‘8 Rs for learning’. This is about promoting good learning behaviour for your child.
In class, the children will focus on different ‘Rs’. We use an animal to symbolise each ‘R’, which might help your child remember all eight – can your child remember which animal matches the correct ‘R’?
You can support your child at home – we’ve listed a few ideas to help you below. Ask us if you’ve any questions or comments.
Download top tips for promoting the 8Rs for good learning behaviour.
Risk taking
Talk about the difference between a safe and unsafe risk. At school, we want your child to take a safe risk by having a go at answering, even if unsure; trying something new and attempting harder learning.
Responsibility
Provide time and space at home so your child is able to organise themselves: their PE kit, reading book, homework, spellings and tables… Don’t organise everything for them!
Make a link between rights and responsibilities: your child has the right to a great education, but needs to be responsible for their own learning.
Responding
This could be responding to their teacher in class or responding to feedback in their learning.
Ready
Make sure your child is at school on time for a prompt start.
Make sure your child has had plenty of sleep so they are alert and ready to learn at all times.
Encourage your child to ask lots of questions – that shows they want to learn!
Resourceful
Encourage your child to be organised so they can play with a range of different toys.
Encourage your child to try new ways to solve a tricky problem.
Resilience
Encourage your child to keep going! Set a tricky challenge or puzzle for your child to do.
Encourage your child to think of different ways of doing things.
Don’t let your child win when they play a game – they need to experience losing, too!
Celebrate mistakes as opportunities to learn – be happy that your child found some learning hard and encourage them to ‘bounce back’ and learn from the experience.
Relate this ‘R’ to Humpty Dumpty and our current whole school topic, After the Fall.
Remember
Make sure they have time to learn spellings, number bonds and times tables – a little practice daily is best.
Play memory games:
Kim’s game: show them objects for 30 seconds… can they remember all the objects?
Can they build up the sequence, ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple and a bike.’… ‘I went to the shop and I bought an apple, a bike and a cucumber.’ etc … Take turns!
Reflect
Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…
This week, children will have the opportunity to not only reflect on their learning in general but also reflect on how the 8Rs supports their learning.
Of course, these characteristics are referred to throughout the year across all subjects to promote good learning behaviour.
Tennis
Take a look at a few photos from our latest Tennis session.
As you can see, the children are trying really hard to watch the ball onto their racket. The children have been working independently to improve their hand eye coordination. They are trying to position their body and read where the ball is bouncing before striking it again into the air. Soon, the children will move onto playing in pairs to test out these skills with a partner.
Settling in
We’ve had another great week in Reception with twenty children settled and happy. We can’t wait to meet the final ten!
Please remember that the school day for our class is 8.30-3.00. Please try to bring and collect your child at these times.
Our Amazing Writing
Take a look at some excellent examples of our writing in Y6.
I’ve been very impressed with their powerful vocabulary.
We enjoyed sharing our brilliant writing with and learning from each other.
- expanded noun phrases
- varied openers
- conjunctions
Challenge your child to explain the three ways you can write an expanded noun phrase!
Welcome back!
Hello everyone!
What a first two weeks it has been! All the children have settled back into school life brilliantly. I have been really impressed to see how the children have adapted to the ‘new normal’ in school.
Here’s a little bit about our plans for the next few weeks…
In maths, we’re beginning with place value and looking at numbers to 100. We are recapping some of the learning from Year One, to make sure that everyone is confident before moving on to the trickier Year Two skills.
Starting at any given number, support your child at home by counting forwards and backwards within 100. Also, give them a number and ask them to tell you how many tens and ones the number is made up of.
In writing, we’re looking at sentence structure. Again, we’re recapping on Year One learning to begin with. This will help the children become confident writers, for when we begin to write our own short narratives, recounts and diary extracts.
Support your child at home by asking them to write sentences using varied punctuation, including full stops, question marks and exclamation marks.
In reading, we’re using our whole school novel ‘After the Fall’. In Year Two, we practice reading in a variety of ways. We have daily phonics and fluency (ask your child what this is) sessions, one-to-one reading and lessons that teach skills such as RIC (retrieval, interpret and choice).
Please read at home as much as you can. Look out in the coming days for your child’s home reading book. Reading this as much as possible at home, will help build up your child’s fluency.
In topic, we will use the book ‘After the Fall’ as a stimulus which will inspire lots of artwork. The children will take part in sketching, painting and collaging.
Reading in Year 1
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been listening to the children read in class and today your child will have brought a reading book home with them.
Reading books will be changed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
To minimise contact with items coming from home, we would like the children to put reading books, they have read, in the box at the cloakroom door at the start of the day. The children will then put their reading record book in their appropriate group basket in the classroom.
We are sure the children will cope well with this responsibility.
Please could we ask for parents/carers to write the title of the book and a brief comment about their child’s reading inside the reading record book.
We would encourage the children to read to an adult every day to develop their fluency skills. The Active Reading Guide (in your child’s homework book) will provide support for reading with your child at home.
Thank you to those families who have begun to use Lexia. The children are starting to use this in school now and we would recommend 10 minutes every day if possible.
Please contact us (carolinetaylor@spherefederation.org and jackiefreeman@spherefederation.org) if you have any questions about your child’s reading.
Book Club
It’s been lovely and mindful in today’s library session.
“I love the different books we can enjoy here,” said Ethan.
Musa said he likes the library because of its variety of styles and genres.
Back in class, we’ve been practising our reading fluency by reading aloud to an adult or partner. Children have the choice to read their library book or a First News newspaper.
Ask your child what they’re reading at school. Do they enjoy it? Who is the main character? What’s happened so far?
Keep reading everyday at home, too!
Origami
Inspired by our class novel… 
…we’ve been making origami!
We’ve also learnt about pattern in our art lessons so we enjoyed experimenting with different ones.
Just like Humpty, we had to be resilient – one of our 8 Rs for learning – because it was quite fiddly! We were very proud of our efforts at the end, though!