January is flying by and we have been as busy as ever in Pear Class!
Please Remember to check the Numicon Challenge tab to see what this weeks challenge is and don't forget to upload onto the school 360 app for us to see how your child is getting on!
RWInc this week has been a continuation of Ditty reading. We have read the story Bad Dog. At the moment we are taking it slowly, getting used to working with our RWInc partners and taking our time to learn how to track the sounds in the words together as we read. It is important that as we read with the child we do not just focus on phonic decoding and segmenting, but also comprehension of the story. As you do the home Ditties with your child if they are finding it too difficult reading the story, read alongside them and discuss what has happened in the story. After this, then go back and choose a word and see if they are able to Fred talk and blend it. It can sometimes be easier for the children to do this once they know the context of the story.
Top tip - using a lolly stick really helps to aid with attention as your child tracks the sounds in the words, particularly if you attach some sparkly stars!
We have focused heavily on red words this week, playing 'around the world!' a fun game where Mrs H-S travels to lots of different countries around the world but in order to get into those countries that country (child) has to tell me the red word password to get in -the children love this game and it helps incentivize the need to learn those red words! Thank you for practising these tricky red words at home, the children are making super progress! Please let me know if you need a new red word wall if you do not have a printer at home.
In our maths work we revisited the five speckled frogs song and looked at partitioning and addition using the part, part, whole model . Please find a part, part whole sheet attached for you to print and practise with your child at home. You can use anything within the circles that takes your child's interest - shells, cars, dinosaurs etc. At the moment the emphasis is just on explaining the practical process, if your child is confident to record their calculation that is fantastic but not the expectation at this stage.
For our part, whole model we started by looking at our whole amount of frogs in the large circle at the top - in this case it was 5. 2 of our frogs jumped onto the log (the first small circle) and then the remaining 3 jumped into the pond (the second small circle). We were then able to say the stem sentence '2 frogs on the log and/added to 3 frogs in the pond equals 5 frogs altogether. We practise this several different ways with different amounts of frogs with the emphasis every time on the fact that the two parts added together gave us the answer(equals) for the whole amount. Maybe you could work on this at home with hula hoops and bean bags?
In our topic work this week we have visited the Southern Hemisphere in response to our wonder 'why are penguins black and white?' We enjoyed watching lots of non-fiction fact videos and looking at the globe and some Atlas books to look at the habitat of Antarctica, spending time thinking about why Penguins were all the same colours with none of the bright colours we see in our British Blue Tits. We discovered how Penguins have adapted to the cold, icy and watery climate of Antarctica by countershading - (having a black back and a white chest) to camouflage and hide from Predators in the water. We also discovered that Penguins have black feathers as black helps to absorb the heat from the sun, keeping them warm. Many of us were shocked to discover that whilst we learnt last week that a feature of all the British Garden Birds we looked at was that they fly, we discovered Penguins do not fly, but in fact use their flippers to swim and instead of making nests to birth their eggs, they all huddle together and stand over the eggs to keep them warm!
In response to all of this discovery we created our own Penguin Expert fact files and also took part in an experiment looking at how Penguin's fur is waterproof because they have a waxy layer on their feathers to stop them feeling cold and dripping wet like we do when we get into the water! We enjoyed playing in icy small world set ups and in response to the story The Magic Snow Garden, we decided that because flowers do not grown in habitats like Antarctica because there is no soil, we made our own beautiful snow garden flowers! Lots of exceptional explorers and wow writers in Pear Class this week!
Later in the week, we have been celebrating World Religion Day. For this, we have looked at the Christian story of the Parable of the Sower and the Seeds. We have thought about what this story means and how it links to our own lives. We talked about how we can prepare our minds so that we can learn lots of different things and we put this into practise by playing some games to develop our listening and attention skills. To help develop our fine motor skills, we have particularly enjoyed helping the farmer in the story to sort out all the mixed-up seeds into the same type and create pictures using the different seeds. We had to take extra care to only pick up the right type of seed! Linking to our maths work on measuring, we explored the weight of different bags of seeds and compared them to each other. We have been using the language of heavier and lighter to describe the bags of seeds.
In our PSHE session this week, we have been thinking about “never giving up”. We looked at the story of The Hare and The Tortoise and how we can achieve our goals if we keep trying. Some of us decided to complete a challenge to see how high a tower we could build. When it fell over we just tried again and didn't give up. At home, why don’t you share some of the times you have had to persevere to achieve your dreams and goals?
Have a lovely weekend and see you all next week.
The Pear Class Team
Part, part, whole addition example
2 beanbags
+
3 beanbags
= 5 beanbags altogether
Exceptional Explorers and Wow Writers!
RWInc!
Mastering Mathematicians!