Hello everyone,
Welcome to Thursday’s home learning.
Children’s Mental Health Week
Dress to impress!
Today’s activity is to dress up for the day. Wear your favourite colour or choose a range of colours that express how you are feeling. Colour can be very personal and mean different things to different people, so this is a great way to express yourself.
Perhaps you could wear a favourite character from your dressing up clothes or your own special clothes. Maybe a favourite outfit. I’d love to see your outfits on Tapestry.
Literacy
Changes to the Jack and the Beanstalk story
If your child hasn’t already done so, we can now start adding extra bits or altering the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. The simplest way to move into addition is by adding in more description eg. they were very poor and only owned one naughty cow!
You could build on this by:
- adding in more dialogue eg. Jack said “Look Mum, I’ve got some magic beans”
- adding in a new character eg. Jack saw a hen and some golden eggs
Perhaps the giant tries to explain to Jack that he is happy to share his gold coins with Jack.
Make an alteration that is significant and changes the direction of the story – alterations that have a knock on effect!
You could try altering:
- the nature of one of the characters eg. the giant is kind and friendly
- setting eg. the giant lives in a spaceship
- the end of the story eg. Jack and his mother decided to ask the giant to live with them and built a bigger house
- a key event within the story eg. Jack made a magic spell with the beans
As always, acting out the story together really helps embed story telling skills.
Letters and Sounds
Fe, fi, fo, fum (fee, figh, foa, fum)
This game plays on alliteration and will also help your child develop their ability to read nonsense words (letter sequences that follow regular phonetic rules and are pronounceable, but have no meaning). This is an important skill that will support your child’s use of phonics.
What to do:
- Show your child how ‘fee, figh, foa, fum’ can be written based on the sounds they know eg. ‘ee’, ‘igh’ ‘oa’.
- Introduce a different letter in front of each word eg. ‘s’ – see, sigh, soa, sum.
- Play this game verbally first, taking turns to change the first letter at the front of the words. I normally find using a ‘b’ brings about much hilarity. You will see what I mean.
- Challenge your child to choose a letter and write the giant’s phrase eg. if your child chooses a ‘t’ then ask your child to write ‘tee, tigh, toa, tum’.
Adding a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) as the first letter will not work so avoid these.
This game will also really help your child consolidate their knowledge of ‘ee’, ‘igh’ ‘oa’.
Jellybean graph
I hope you have been able to buy some jellybeans for this game. If not, you can use any small object eg. beads, Lego bricks. Before the jellybeans are gobbled up show your child how a graph could be made – see picture below.
Ask your child to make comparisons using the key mathematical words we are learning ‘more’, ‘fewer’ and ‘equal’. You will be looking for your child to say ‘I notice there are more orange beans and fewer yellow beans’. Model the language if your child hesitates.
For challenge
Ask questions such as ‘I can see four yellow beans and 5 orange beans? How many more orange beans are there?’. Again model the mathematical language and support your child as required..
I hope you all have a good day.
Nicola Palmer