Hello everyone,
We had another busy week learning at school. I’d like to share our ideas for parents of both home and school children to try at home. However, may I begin by saying a big ‘THANK YOU’ parents for the generous hand wash contributions – our hands are definitely much softer but still beautifully clean.
Maths
We have been concentrating on subtraction this week with a particular focus on counting down from 20. We’ve sang lots of counting down songs including a variation of ‘Zoom Zoom We’re Going to the Moon’ choosing a different number to start counting down from each time.
Another favourite has been ‘One Man went to Mow’. Using our fingers to count down for each verse also develops those finger skills so essential for writing.
We played Kim’s game using 10 objects on a tray. You can try this at home using every day household objects.
- Ask your child to identify each object (just to make sure they know the name of each object).
- Cover the tray with a tea towel (we used a box).
- Remove an item.
- Ask your child to name the object missing and tell you how many objects are remaining.
We extended this game by removing more than 1 object. We challenged the children to calculate how many objects were missing and how many remaining, encouraging the use of fingers to solve the problem. I was very impressed that the children were able to do this with 4 or 5 objects missing (sometimes even more!). This is also a fabulous game to develop your child’s memory skills.
Another game we played was using a number track (20 – 0) chalked on playground. Each child put a counter on 20 and took turns to roll a dice and move their counter down the track according to the number indicated on the dice. The first child to reach 0 was the winner.
Letters and Sounds
This week we have revisited ‘qu’, ‘ch’ ‘sh’ and ‘th’ digraphs (one sound two letters) – all included in your child’s Letters and Sounds book. A top tip is to use a mirror to show your child the mouth movements for each sound – ‘th’ in particular can be confused with ‘f’ and ‘v’. Look at the mouth shape, position of the tongue and teeth. Tongue pokes out slightly for ‘th’ and bunny teeth for ‘f’.
We really appreciate the ideas suggested by parents on Tapestry and this week played a game posted by one of our ‘home school’ friends.
- Write individual words on pieces of paper, fold and place in a box.
- Use a bucket or box for each digraph.
- Ask your child to read each word and identify the appropriate digraph.
- Roll the word up into a ball and post into the corresponding bucket/box.
Suggested words:
quick, quit, quack, queen
chop, chin, such, chip
shop, ship, fish, rush, cash, shell
this, that, with, moth
We also played ‘What’s the Sound Mr Wolf’ which you may recall previously posted on my blog (20 May). The wolf calls out a word and children take a step towards the wolf for each sound in the word. Either use the words suggested above or words in your child’s word bag (excluding those tricky words – star shapes in bag – these cannot be sounded out).
Literacy
We are busy learning the story of ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’. The children independently made their own bridge and used story sticks to retell the story.
We’ve also made our own stick puppets and are continuing to fine tune those scissor skills by learning to cut out quite tricky shapes.
Physical Development
The children have been very keen to play lots of team and circle games and have had fun playing ‘Duck, Duck, Goose’ and running in a relay race.
Learning at home and school together
In school we also explored some of the suggestions from this week’s home learning.
Understanding of the World
We placed various pieces of fruit and a piece of bread in plastic bags to observe the changes. The banana caused much excitement with the most extraordinary change very quickly – turning a squishy black colour on the same day! We’ve now added a green banana to watch as well. It will be interesting to see what all the various items look like on Monday – including one bag with some pom poms in it as a comparison to man-made objects.
3D Creative Engineering
Here are our creations! Ideas included a fun fair with a roundabout, slide and catapult including safety instructions ‘Only older children can use it’!
We also sang ‘5 Fat Sausage Sizzling in a Pan’ using a frying pan and objects to represent the sausages.
I will post another blog on Monday to suggest some ideas for next week’s home learning.
Hope you’re all having a wonderful, restful and safe weekend.
Nicola Palmer