We are grateful for your continued donations of small, clean items of recycling for our STEM area

Many thanks

Independent learning

The children have been developing a wide range of skills through independent learning opportunities in class and outdoors..

Literacy.

This week we have introduced the letter sounds q, x and z as well as revising some of our ‘tricky’ words

We continue to use core reading book resources in school as we begin to develop developing the children’s reading comprehension skills, exploring the cognitive strategies of activating, inferring, monitoring/clarifying, questioning, searching/selecting, summarizing, and visualising.

We had another Friday ‘dictation/spelling’ written activity. Each week the children will be asked to spell two or three words using the sounds we know, and also to accurately write two of our tricky words. Please keep practising this skill at home.

Our Writing prompt was ‘the fox in a box’

Numeracy and Maths

We have been working on individual numeracy targets this week, including adding using the ‘counting on’ strategy, making equal groups, recognising numerals and naming the number after a given number.

You may wish to let your child play this game at home. Choose a level. Try to use a ‘counting on’ strategy, as opposed to ‘counting all’

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Core numeracy skills this week included

• writing the numerals 1 – 10 ( and beyond) correctly
• counting backwards from 10 (or 20 for some pupils).
• naming the next number in an isolated short backwards number sequence. ie. I say, 10, 9, 8 (they say 7)
• establishing a collection (give me 9 counters/raisins/etc)
• counting a collection beyond 10 with accurate 1-1 correspondence
• recognising numerals
• sequencing a short selection of numerals ( e.g. 5,6,7,8)
• making instant finger patterns (show me 6 fingers without counting them)
• recognising dice patterns and clapping the amount of dots on the dice

Our challenge numeracy skills were.

• adding two collections with the second one screened ( e.g. here are 8 counters, there are 5 more hiding under this pot, how many altogether?)
• sequencing numerals within the range 0-100
• naming the number after a given number (0-30)
• counting backwards from 30, starting and stopping at different points
• investigating which equal groups can be made from a given number ( e.g. can I make 2 equal groups/3 equal groups/4 equal groups/5 equal groups from 12 counters? What about if I have 16 counters, or 18 etc)

Looking ahead to next week

We have Loose parts learning on Wednesday afternoon.

Other areas of the curriculum

We learned how some families celebrate Chinese New year

We found out why we celebrate Burn’s night.

We learned about zebras – key vocabulary included mammal and herbivore

In PE we have learned some more Scottish Country dance steps and we can dance the whole of the ‘Circassian circle’

Many of our learners recognise the letters/sounds when they see them written down, but find it much harder to recall and write the letter shape for the sound they hear. e.g they can tell me that mop is m – o – p but cannot then write it down – instead saying ‘what does m look like again ?‘ Please help to consolidate your child’s ability to recall the grapheme needed for the sound they can hear.

A reminder to please name all items of clothing and shoes, and to check names on items brought home in case your child accidentally acquires a jumper belonging to someone else.