Home learning Friday 27th November
We have reached the end of yet another action packed week!
We appreciate you taking the time to read our blog and it is fantastic that the children have been working on their sounds and red words at home as well as continuing lots more of our school learning with you.
In our Read Write inc work we are now down to one last sound to learn from set one and then it will be Fred talk galore as we begin to not only blend, but write our cvc words using all of set one sounds. Here are our sounds for this week:
qu = Round the queen’s head, up past her earring, down her plait,and flick
X = Down the arm and leg and do the other side.
ng = thing on a string (a long nasal sound at the back of your throat!)
Down Nobby, over his net, around the giggly girl and give her a curl.
You will now see that there is a folder available on our class page entitled ‘resources to support your child at home in reception’ We hope that you find this useful. Remember little and often - our inputs are never longer than 15 minutes and we wouldn’t expect reception children to sit still for long periods of time.Try to make home learning as fun as possible - red word hunts in the garden, drawing sounds on coloured ball pool balls to use in the bath and using the children’s favourite toys such as dinosaurs to complete maths jobs, will ensure that children are engaged! There’s also a short video which shares our next steps as we begin our journey into reading and writing.
In our number work, number 9 has been our focus for the week. We have learnt to form this number and count out irregular shapes to check if they are equal to 9. This was trickier than it sounds - even for our confident counters. When children see objects or numbers in a set out of context, they can often miscount. We then moved on from this work to focus heavily on numbers ‘less’ than. We find that if asked “what is one less than 5?”, many children will still answer six, so we have worked on jumping backwards on the number line and explaining our thinking and calculating to our partners. Why is five less than six? Can you explain that five comes before six on the number line and that it is a smaller amount with fewer objects in its set? If you feel that your child is confident with more and less, by all means use larger numbers such as teen numbers, but remember that ensuring depth of understanding is vital. Can the children explain their answer as well as just giving it?
Moving on from our studies on hibernation last week, we have been investigating nocturnal and diurnal animals.The children enjoyed finding out all about the wealth of different nocturnal animals that can be found in the environment close to us. We sorted animals into groups of nocturnal and diurnal, but found that the cat was a confusing one for us, as many of us have seen our cats awake during the day and during the night, so we agreed we could consider them as being both nocturnal and diurnal! We then moved on to closely consider one nocturnal animal in particular - the owl and learnt lots of interesting facts about these beautiful creatures. Did you know that owls have no teeth but instead use their beaks to tear up their food and that they can also swivel their heads around 270 degrees!
We all enjoyed working with Claire to create a careful observational line drawing of an owl. We carefully considered shapes and colours and the results were fabulous!
Owl Babies has been our focus story for the week and we enjoyed discussing the story structure and considering the different characters. This story has also been the stimulus for some philosophical classroom thinking. Our big question for our sustained shared thinking was ‘is it ok that mummy owl left her babies on her own?’’ This was the start of some rich discussion with some very strong opinions! Most thought that it was absolutely not ok as they would not like their mummy to leave them, but after some discussion, changed their minds as we explored the idea that there might be different sets of rules for animals than there are for humans. Some children decided that it is ok for mummies to leave us at school because we are safe and with grown ups who look after us.
Mrs Hammond has been very industrious as always this week - supporting us to put together a fabulous Owl Babies classroom display. The children thoroughly enjoyed collaging owls while finding out facts about these beautiful creatures,
We’ve also been very interested in another nocturnal animal - the badger. Ask us all about where badgers live and how they care for their families. |The children loved listening to Mrs Hammond’s tales of badger spotting on her family farm in years gone by. We took this learning outside on Thursday for PE and gathered, carried, rolled,piled and shaped natural resources to make badger setts. There was also a lot of running around and team work in this really enjoyable session.
Our shape, space and measure work this week focused on measuring time - we asked the children how long it might have taken for mummy owl to come back to the nest. We discussed what a minute is and whether our mummies and daddies say “just a minute” to us! How many jumps can we do in a minute and how many worms can you pick up and place into the owls nest? One minute seemed much longer than most of us had thought it would and we were shocked by how tired jumping for that long made us feel!
As it is biting cold now, I would again emphasise how important hats and mittens are - we stay outside for over half an hour at lunchtime so cold hands are miserable! Many children are now able to zip up their own coats and put their own hats and mitts on which is fantastic but there are still a few who struggle to even get their coats on, so any home practise with this skill would be greatly appreciated!
Reading in reception is underway - it has been lovely reading the first few books with your children. I am pleased to see some people have been working hard on bug club. There are still many people who haven’t accessed this yet and I would encourage you to get in touch if there are any issues (including lost passwords!). Reading at home is vitally important to ensure that there is progression with reading development as there are not enough hours in the week for us to read with your children as much as we would love to! I will be in touch early next week if people still haven’t logged on to check if there is anything I can help with.
I look forward to speaking with lots of you on Tuesday during our consultation meetings. If you’ve not made an appointment yet, it’s not too late to do so.
Have a great weekend and we will see you next week for some night and day learning and a trip to deliver our letters to the big man himself!