Class Assembly – tomorrow 2.40pm
We can’t wait to showcase our first class assembly of the year: Thursday 20 October 2016. It would be great if as many parents as possible could make it. Please be in school by 2.40 pm if you would like to watch.
Phonics
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.
Homework
Yet again, Year 4 have shown how creative they can be. We looked carefully at each other’s work and the children enjoyed commenting on work that particularly stood out to them. It was an absolute pleasure to see how much thought and creativity had gone into the homework produced.
We’d like to share some of them with you.
Buddies
In our class we have several different options of what to do when we are a little stuck with our learning. We call this Brain, Buddy, Boss. Here is a great example of a buddy supporting someone.
Creative Homework
Wow! I was so impressed with the creative homework this week. We had a really good time looking at them, playing games, doing quizzes and all the rest! Here are a few examples. You can encourage your child to be creative with maths even without a creative homework. They really enjoyed it!
Parents’ / Carers’ Appointment Times
Cookery after-school club
At cookery club this evening, the recipe was a simple vegetarian curry. Hope the children enjoyed their tea!
For those who didn’t attend, here is the recipe to try at home.
Thank you!
Thank you to all family and friends who came to watch our assembly this afternoon.
Despite our prop malfunction, we hope you enjoyed the arty assembly and finding out about some of our learning so far in Year 2.
There were a few nerves beforehand but we were very proud of all the children who spoke or acted very confidently in front of the big audience.
Well done, Year 2!
Bonfire Celebrations themed menu
Catering Agency, our school meal provider, will be running a special themed menu on Wednesday 02 November: Bonfire Celebrations. Please contact the office if your child would like a school dinner on this day.
