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09 November 2012

This week the spelling chant to practise with your child is ‘drop the y for an i’. The route word of these spellings has an ly added (or fully) and the y is replaced with an i.  For example, cheeky becomes cheekily.

There are lots of types of words where it’s necessary to drop the y for an i. In this list, all the words are adverbs. That means they all describe a verb.

What a busy week!

Year Six have made a great start to this half term with some awesome artwork, splendid spelling games and winning the Cool Class Cup!
Well done and keep it up!

DT

We are currently in the middle of a DT project. The children are working in groups to design and make a prototype of a moving vehicle. In the pictures below, the children are measuring and then sawing the wood for the frame of the vehicle.

09 November 2012

This week we are learning to spell words with double letters. Spellings will be tested on Friday 16 November.

Learning about mood in literacy

In literacy, we’ve been learning about how authors create mood by describing how a character is feeling. We’ve been focussing on the things that a character’s body and face do which show their emotion.

In the pictures, the children are building a phrase bank of these things to use in their writing next week.

09 November 2012

This week’s spellings are a recap of split digraphs (a-e, i-e, o-e and u-e). The ‘e’ at the end of the word indicates the word has a longer vowel-sound in the middle – think about the difference between hop and hope, for example.

Your child will be tested on Wednesday 14 November 2012.

• make
• take
• spike
• broke
• smoke
• snake
• brake
• like
• huge
• came

09 November 2012

Homework this week is creative.  It’s the first of three homework tasks this year when we invite children to respond to something from a cultural or spiritual perspective (we’re going to time these so they fall close to religious festivals, from Eid to Easter).

I can respond to a book I’ve recently read.

This week, we’d like children to present their responses about a recent book they’ve read. We’re interested to hear your child’s opinions and any connections they might have made between the book and their own life. This book review might include pictures, an interview (you could write a fictional script between an interviewer and a character), a letter (eg to or from a character, or perhaps even the author) – anything which might include your child’s responses!

However, your child might prefer to do the following:

I can show what Eid or Diwali means to me and my community.

Just before the half-term, some children in school will have celebrated the Muslim festival of Eid. Next week, some children in school will celebrate the Sikh and Hindu festival Diwali. We invite those children to respond to the sentence above – they might include a recount (like a diary entry), pictures, an interview (perhaps in a script).

Class assembly

A quick reminder that it’s our class assembly on Thursday. We hope to see you at 2.40pm.

Learning to write

In Reception we are continuing to learn letters and sounds. As they learn each letter, the children will be shown how to write the ‘grapheme’ (a way of writing down a sound or phoneme; graphemes can be made up of one letter like ‘p’ and ‘s’, two letters like ‘sh’ and ‘th’, three letters like ‘tch’ in a word like ‘catch’ or four letters like ‘ough’ in ‘dough’ or ‘cough’, where the same grapheme is used to represent two different sounds). You can download a guide to how we form our letters in the Help Your Child section on this website.

Remember that children need lots of practice with different activities to develop the muscles necessary for writing. When the muscles of the hand are weak, or when the fingers have not learnt to work together well, the child often compensates by using a poor or faulty pencil grip.

Here are some fun things to try at home to help your child develop these essential muscles:

Using an egg box, have your child hold 6-10 beans in their hand, and place them into the container one by one.  Write a number inside each hole and ask your child to add the correct number of beans.  This is also a great way to reinforce the concept of number. You could also have a race to see who can put five beans into each hole in the fastest time! The important thing is to do it one bean at a time.

Give your child a few coins to hold and ask them to push them one at a time through the slot in a money box. Make sure the coins are placed with the tips of the fingers, not the sides of the fingers.

Using  Play Dough is great exercise for the fingers – try squashing, rolling, pounding and moulding with the hands, without using any cutters or other traditional Play Dough toys.

Other activities may include cutting with scissors, doing up buttons, tearing paper and picking up the pieces. Let your child help with the washing up and wring out the dishcloth!

New SEAL theme – Getting on

The SEAL theme Getting On covers four main aspects:

• developing the social skills of friendship
• working well together in a group
• managing anger
• resolving conflict

Group work takes place across all lessons and even at lunchtime and playtimes.  Some questions for children to consider are:

• Did everyone take turns?
• Did everyone listen to what other people thought?
• Did each person have chance to tell the group what they thought?
• If people had different ideas could the group reach a compromise?

The key areas of learning throughout this theme are empathy, managing feelings and social skills.

Within this theme is Antibullying Week, 19 November – 23 November.