Happy New Year!  We hope everyone had a restful break. 

Another busy term has passed.  The children performed brilliantly in the Nativity and we are proud of their confidence and effort in this.   They had a fantastic time at our Christmas party with our special visitor.  Lots of learning also took place 

 

In literacy, we are continuing to learn our sounds (single phonemes) and will learn all sounds before moving onto the joined phonemes (sh, th, ch, ng …).  In school we use the pink magnetic boards to help the children to make, blend and read simple CVC (Consonant, vowel consonant) words. 

 We use the 5 finger strategy – Say it, Make it, Break it, Blend it, Read it, Write it. 

Say it – say the word 

Make it – with magnetic letters on the pink board 

Break it – break the word up by separating the sounds (phonemes) 

Blend it – starting at the beginning, move the sounds and blend the sounds (phonemes) together 

Read – read the word aloud 

Write it – write the word 2 times, remembering a finger space between each word  

Every week we have 3 new common words which we are learning to recognise with increasing accuracy to develop our reading fluency. We are also continuing to develop our phonological awareness. Please continue to share nursery rhymes with us, helping us to learn these and recite these back to you.   

Everyone has a reading book and is enjoying sharing them in class and at home.  Please remember to bring your reading book to school every day for the activities in class. 

You can continue to help at home by encouraging us to recognise and identify all of the sounds (phonemes) and common words that have been taught by using the flashcards.  You can practise the correct formation of all of the phonemes – doorwayonline.org is a super interactive resource for letter and number formation.   You can also encourage us to sound out and blend sounds (phonemes) together to read words. 

In Numeracy we have been learning to count forwards using the forward number sequence and count backwards using the backwards number sequence, identify numbers, before, after and in between in a sequence of numbers within 10 and also to add within 10. 

This term we will be learning to recognise and identify numbers to 20 and to count accurately within 20. We will be doing lots of counting using our forwards and backwards number sequence to 30.  We will also be subtracting within 5 and then within 10, exploring money and identifying and making o’clock times on analogue and digital clocks.   

You can help us by practising formation of all of the numbers and number names to 20, continuing counting on and counting back orally to increase our confidence and continuing to encourage us to find numbers, shapes and patterns in our environment. 

 We learned all about 2d shapes during our beyond number lessons and enjoyed going on a shape hunt around the school. We could all name shapes like square, circle, rectangle and triangle and were able to say how many sides and corners they had. Some of us were even able to identify trickier shapes like hexagon and pentagon. We also had lots of fun learning about capacity and enjoyed measuring water using lots of different vessels.  

Our science topic for Term 1 and 2 was water so we had a great time investigating the different ways water can change from one state to another. We loved rescuing Paw Patrol characters from the ice and making our own ice gardens. It was very interesting to see how the ice melted and we worked in groups to explore what different substances would make ice melt quicker.  

We look forward to learning more this term and to getting better weather for outside play/learning.