Phonics
It has been amazing to see how much progress the children have been making in phonics – both reading and spelling words with the sounds we have been learning. The link below has some great resources to help children practice reading and spelling further.
Writing
This week we have spent 15 minutes each morning reinforcing phonics work through writing simple sentences following some brief taught input. We watched a video read by Oliver Jeffers about a boy who threw things at a problem only for them to get stuck. We thought about what we might throw up a tree and made a lovely display for our classroom with our ideas.
Another day, we realised that we weren’t too sure about what the word ‘future’ meant, so we talked about some of the jobs we might want to do in the when we are older in the ‘future’ and made a class book with beautiful illustrations and simple sentences about what we had decided on. We enjoyed reading it together as a class at the end of the day
Yesterday, we watched a video about our solar system from ‘Storybots’ (I’ve learnt so much from this programme!) and then chose our favourite planet and wrote one interesting fact about it.
Today we watched an animated film called ‘Something Fishy’ and wrote a sentence about what we saw.
The children are getting very good at counting the sounds in words and choosing from the ‘special friends’ (phonemes, digraphs and trigraphs) they have learnt this year.
Maths
We have been busy in maths this week too. We have continued to run a snack shop each day where children have to identify the correct coin in order to take their snack and explored these coins through a busy fingers activity too. Children also made and described shapes with lolly sticks as well as 3D shapes using polydron, created their own patters using peg boards and made (some quite creative) patterns with numicon. Some children enjoyed a game of Snakes and Ladders in our outdoor area too.
Physical Development
We also continued to get lots of exercise including running with Mrs O’Conner, regular ‘brain breaks’ through the ‘Penguins Attention’ song and an increasingly challenging obstacle course to develop our balancing and coordination. PE sessions with Ms Bowen, including learning how to travel in different ways and working with a partner to pass a quoit for a relay race. We’re certainly ready for our lunch each day!
We’ve got lots to look forward to next week too – including the children meeting their new teacher for next year – I can say confidently that she’s a very lucky teacher because I for one have been having fantastic time with this hardworking, creative and lovely group of children.
Mr Sallis