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.

Literacy.

This week we have introduced the letter sounds j and w as well as revising our 1 ‘tricky’ words I and the

We have also started 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 also started our regular 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 ‘I can….’ Three things we can do

Numeracy and Maths

Our focus this week was on ‘counting on’ – keeping a big number in our head, then counting on three ( or another amount), keeping track with our fingers to see where we end up.

ie. What is 3 more than 14? :- say fifteen out loud, then count on three steps…..15, 16, 17.

The answer is 17 – Three more than 14 is 17.

Please practise this at home. The starting number can be any number in a range within which your child is comfortable, but please keep the counting on number to no more than 5 at the moment.

Core numeracy skills this week inclided

• 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 Thursday afternoon.

Other areas of the curriculum

We have started our focus on Scotland and its culture, landscape and history.

We identified where Scotland is on a map of the world and also looked on a map of Scotland to find the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness.

We have been learning about some famous Scottish Artists including Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Steven Brown and John Byrne. We have enjoyed creating our own artworks inspired by these artists.

We have been discussing the job of an architect and enjoyed reading the story ‘ Iggy Peck, Architect’

You can hear the story here

In PE we have learned some Scottish Country dance steps and we are building towards being able to dance the ‘Flying Scotsman’ in sets .

This week’s homework and other information

Something to focus on……

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.

p

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.