Welcome back – it has been lovely to see the children and hear all about their holidays.

Please continue to send in your clean recycling. Many thanks

Our learning this week

Here are some photographs of us developing our skills through our independent learning opportunities and experiences this week. Please take time to share these photographs with your child so they can share their learning with you.

Literacy focus

This week we discussed the role of Authors and illustrators and investigated the difference between fiction and non fiction texts. We have an authors table where we can begin to create our own books.

We also revised recognition of all our block one Tricky words

Tricky words

These are words which cannot be sounded out using phonics and should be learned by memory as sight vocabulary. please practise both reading and writing these words

Use the sounds you know to read and build words. If you want a challenge you could try to write the word if an adult reads it to you.

Building a word. Using plastic letters or letters written on small pieces of card or paper an adult says a three letter CVC word ( consonant, vowel, consonant) and the child chooses the correct sounds to make the word.

Blending a word . Adult writes or uses letters to make a CVC word and the child should say the pure sounds of each letter then blend them together to read the word.

Our writing programme starts with telling stories through detailed drawing. We are now beginning to write some of the words and sounds we know as part of our sentence. This week our focus was ’In the holiday’

Maths and numeracy focus

This week we revised how to correctly form the numerals 0 – 9

We also continue to practise our number bonds of ten. These are the pairs of numbers which, when added together, total ten. The children should learn these as instant recall facts. We also talk about ‘switchers’ e.g. if we know that 8 + 2 =10, we can tall that 2 +8 = 10.

Please support your child at home to learn these facts. If they already know them, the challenge is to apply that understanding to tens numbers to 100 ( e.g. 8+ ? = 10, 18 + ? = 20 , 8 +? = 40 etc)

We continue to work on SEAL ( Stages of Early Arithmetical Learning) Pupils are working and challenged at a level appropriate to their individual development. These are examples of some of the skills we have been practising :

Making arrays and counting in groups to find the total. Key vocabulary included the words rows, columns and groups

Other areas of the curriculum

In PE we started to learn some elements of Scottish Country dancing.

We have been learning more about article 1 of the UNCRC and we learned how to do watercolour colour washes as we prepared a display for the area.

Looking ahead to next week

‘Homework’ ( things to practice at home)

Please continue to practise correct letter ( and numeral) formation

Write your name. Try to use correct letter formation for all the letters. Remember, only the first letter should be a capital. As a challenge, try writing your surname too.