Month: September 2025

This week we are learning the sounds <m> and <d>. Here are some activities you can do at home to support what your child is learning in school:

• Make the letters m M d and D out of playdough.
• Think of words that begin with the letters m and d and write them down or draw them.
• Think of animals that begin with the letters m or d. You could make a colourful poster of them and bring it to school to show us.
• Draw the letters that you know so far (s a t p i n m and d) on a family member’s back and see if they can guess it. Take turns so that you can guess, too.
• Write the letters d D m and M all over a sheet of paper. Challenge your child to colour code the letters – can you make all the d yellow, all the D green, all the m blue etc.

I have also given out word boxes for your child to practise reading at home. These words are fully decodeable. Encourage your child to sound out each letter first, then “drive” through the sounds with their fingers at they blend the sounds together. I will add common exception words throughout the week to the word box that cannot be sounded out. This week we are learning I and to.

It would be helpful if your child could bring the word tub to school every day in case we want to practise reading the words in school.

I have issued a new reading book on our Boost Learning website. This is our first “proper” reading book with words. Please check the video for some tips and tricks on reading with your child.

This week we are learning the phoneme <ai>. Here are the words we are practising this week:

You can choose one or more activities from our spelling activity sheet below:

I have also given your child a word box containing some decodeable words. Please practise reading these at home with your child whenever possible. I will endeavour to replace the words weekly. To help your child, you could ask them to underline phonemes that are made up of more than one single sound like I have done with our spelling words on the board.

Reading homework is available on our Boost Learning website.

This week, we are revising <oo> words.

Here are your child’s spelling words for this week:

Choose one or two activities from the sheet below to practise your spelling words. You can always do a mock spell check to see how well you know your words already.

Have fun!

This week we are learning the sound <n>. This is the last sound in our first set of sounds and we will be spending a week or two revision all of our six sounds that we have learned so far. We will also continue practising sounding out and blending CVC (3 letter) words.

Here are some activities that you could do with your child at home to practise this week’s sound:

• Make the letter n with things that you find around the house and garden, like coins, paperclips or rocks. Please work with an adult as these items may be quite small and could be choke hazards.
• Use a white crayon to write the letter n all over a piece of white paper. Then use some watery paint to paint the sheet of paper and reveal your letters!

I have also issued another board game this week. This game practises all of our sounds so far. Enjoy practising your literacy work this week!

We have been busy revising our phonics from last year, starting with <ch>, <th> and <sh>.

This week we are looking at <ee> which the children have been finding a bit tricky. Here are our spelling words for this week:

You can practise these words at home. Primary 2s will receive a wallet with a whiteboard, a pen and a rubber on Tuesday that they can use for some of the activities below. The following are suggestions to practise spelling words but please feel free to practise in whatever way works best for you and your child. Please click on the image below to enlarge:

This week we are learning the sounds <p> and <i> in our Literacy lessons.

In addition to reading with your child every day, you could do some of the following activities if you wish:

• Think of things that begin with the letters p and i and draw them.
• Rainbow write the letters p and i – pick a handful of different pens, pencils or crayons. Write the letters with a pencil first and then ask your child to trace them with different colours, multiple times.
• If your child comes along with you to do the food shop, challenge them to find as many different fruit and vegetables as they can that start with the letter p.
• Play letter detective by searching all of the <i> and <p> in a book or a magazine.
• Practise all of our letters so far (s, a, t, p, i) by drawing a letter on each others backs with your finger and guessing which letter it is.
• Sing along to our phonics songs: for the letter p and for the letter i.

Your child has also received a new literacy game to practise the new sounds. Have fun practising!