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.
14 October 2016
14 October 2016
The spellings for this week are revision from this half term.
-s, -es, -er, -ing -ed suffixes
– you need to remember two rules for this:
- double up for a short vowel sound (‘swimming’ not ‘swiming’ because the i makes an short ‘i’ sound, not a longer ‘i’ sound as in ‘site’)
- drop the e for ing (and ed and er, too!)
un- and dis- prefixes
14 October 2016
The homework this week is creative and is due in on Thursday 20 October.
I can create a piece of art which reflects a feeling or mood.
This could be a painting, sketch, sculpture, collage, e-art, tapestry (?). However, you should try to convey a feeling or mood in your art. We’ll then look at them as a class and see if our feelings when looking at the art match your intentions.
There is also a spelling task to complete this week in the homework books.
14 October 2016
| This week’s spellings are all homophones – words that sound the same but have different meanings (and are often spelled differently).
Children should practise/practice spelling these words in preparation for a test on Friday 21 October. In this example, it should be practise because it’s a verb (the action that is being done).
|
| isle – aisle – I’ll |
| aloud – allowed |
| affect – effect |
| deaf – death |
| herd – heard |
| led – lead |
| steel – steal |
| altar – alter |
| assent – ascent |
| practise – practice |
14 October 2016
As usual, we have two homeworks this week.
The first is Creative:
I can show multiply and divide means.
Children should complete the word study (on the sheet) as imaginatively as they can. We’ve done a similar word study in class so they should feel confident. This homework is due on Thursday 20 October.
The second homework is Talk Time:
I can learn my lines (and the lines around mine) for our class assembly.
Children should learn their lines as soon as possible for our class assembly on Wednesday 19 October.
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
