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.
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.
Colour mixing
We used colour mixing to find out about primary and secondary colours.
Maths with vegetables
In maths, the children have been learning to use the language ‘equal to, more than, less than, fewer and greater than‘ to compare objects.
I know that 5 is less than 7 and 7 is greater than 5.
In our first lesson, the children struggled a little with this concept. So, today, we used some real life objects to help us to compare.
Try this one at home with your child. It may help to draw pictures.
Mrs Freeman has 7 apples in one hand. 
She has fewer apples in the other hand. How many apples could Mrs Freeman have in her other hand?
Our first PE lesson
The children really enjoyed their first PE lesson.
PE is on a Wednesday. Remember to send your child to school in their PE kit. We will try to be outside when possible, so please make sure they have warm clothes and trainers.