Good morning parents,
Many thanks for all your observations on Tapestry. I’ve already had some wonderful ideas about how we can change The Gingerbread Man story. Today, we’re going to make some more changes.
Communication and Language/Literacy
Additions to The Gingerbread Man story
In some ways making additions comes quite naturally. Children retelling a story will often start adding extra bits. Similar to the way your child may add extra things when in conversation about something that has happened.
The simplest way to move into addition is by adding in more description eg.
Once upon a time there was a little old woman who lived in a cottage. She decided to make a gingerbread man.
You could build on this by:
• adding in more dialogue eg. the cow said “I want to eat you”.
• adding in a new character eg. the Gingerbread Man met a pig.
Perhaps The Gingerbread Man decided to look for a boat and managed to cross the river.
Keep demonstrating to your child how to add and embellish the story.
A good way to do this would be to act out the story together and add as you play.
Maths
Cookie Challenge
Here is a problem solving activity involving sharing. The game can always be adapted and explored at snack time.
What to do:
- Place 12 biscuits on a plate. You can cut out circle shapes for this activity rather than actual biscuits or perhaps pieces of fruit.
- 2 soft toys.
- Provide a plate for each soft toy.
- Talk to your child about parties and the biscuits; count them together.
- Ask ‘Let’s share the biscuits, how can we make it fair?’
- If your child hesitates, guide towards taking 1 biscuit at a time and giving to each toy in turn.
- Ask ‘How many biscuits each?’
- Put the biscuits back on the original plate.
- Ask ‘What happens if 3 toys each have a plate?’
- ‘What about 5 toys, can the biscuits be shared equally?’
Talk about how you can change or extend the problem, for example, by changing the number of biscuits to 10 or inviting some more toys to join the group.
Sharing and acting out The Door Bell Rang story can extend your child further:
Adapting the game
Ask questions involving addition or subtraction eg. ‘If we put 2 more cookies on the plate, how many would there be?’ or ‘If three get eaten, how many would be left?’
Letters and Sounds
Tricky words
What are tricky words? Words that contain letters that do not correspond to the sounds children know (e.g. in go, the last letter does not represent the same sound as the children know in dog). They are words that cannot be sounded out and blended together. Children learn to read these words by sight.
This video revisits tricky words learnt so far. All these words will be in your child’s word bag.
This video introduces new tricky words. Learning to read these words by sight is the first step.
Top Tips:
- Tricky words are the star shape words in your child’s word bag.
- Play a game spotting tricky words in story books and read the words together.
- For support, concentrate on reading words in your child’s word bag.
- For challenge, learn to spell all the tricky words in the word bag and new words listed above.
- For extra challenge (only if your child can happily read the words), write a sentence that includes tricky words (and draw a picture). For example,
Big and Under Writing
Making writing fun will always inspire and motivate your child to write. I have attached to the Activities Section of Tapestry some ideas about writing ‘under the table’ or on ‘big paper’. I’d like to share with you a photo I received of a very passionate writer producing some fantastic writing and a story map all about pirates.
Religious Education
The Presentation Story ‘Mary and Joseph take Jesus to the Temple’
This is a story from the Bible Luke 2:25–35. Explain to your child that it can be found in the New Testament because it is about Jesus.
Together look in either your own Bible or your child’s Bible to find the story and talk about the story.
To reinforce the story, role-play indoors or outside the story of Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to the Temple.
I hope you all have a great day.
Nicola Palmer