Sunday 29 October 2017

What have we been up to this week?

This has been our last week on shape in maths. The children were given lots of challenges, including making their own pumpkin cubes, sorting shapes into different properties using 'Carroll diagrams' and making 3D shapes with Lego.


 




We have also been completing some independent writing to see if we can apply our neat handwriting skills and form our letters correctly. 
Do any parents remember this poem about the Gunpowder plot?


This week, some of our continuous provision activities have had a spooky twist and children have been making ghost decorations out of tissue in the creative area, counting pumpkin seeds in the maths area, creating potions in the role play area and hammering golf tees into pumpkins to develop their hand/eye coordination skills in the funky fingers area. As an extra task, some children sculpted apples into heads which we left to go brown and mouldy for an extra gruesome classroom decoration!


This Friday, the children enjoyed an afternoon of 
'Double Discovery Time!'
We added last weeks minutes to this week's minutes and had a total of 48 so they watched a film as a treat for all their hard work in this first and very long half term!
Can parents guess which film you watched?


Finally the children loved dressing up for Halloween and they all looked fabulous - thank you to all parents for your efforts with their costumes!
We couldn't let the children go home without posing for a few dramatic snaps - they all played along like pro's!




Have a great holiday - see you all soon! Mrs G x

superstar of the week

This week our superstar has been chosen for increased resilience and showing a hard-working attitude in class, completing all his work to his best standard!


Sunday 22 October 2017

Phonics games/activities to support learning at home

What is phonics? Great websites for parents and children

What is phonics?

There has been a huge shift in the past few year in how we teach reading in UK schools. This is having a big impact and helping many children learn to read and spell. Phonics is recommended as the first strategy that children should be taught in helping them learn to read. It runs alongside other teaching methods such as Guided Reading and Shared Reading to help children develop all the other vital reading skills and hopefully give them a real love of reading.

So, what exactly is phonics?

Words are made up from small units of sound called phonemes. Phonics teaches children to be able to listen carefully and identify the phonemes that make up each word. This helps children to learn to read words and to spell words
In phonics lessons children are taught three main things:
GPCs
They are taught GPCs. This stands for grapheme phoneme correspondences. This simply means that they are taught all the phonemes in the English language and ways of writing them down. These sounds are taught in a particular order. The first sounds to be taught are s, a, t, p.
Blending
Children are taught to be able to blend. This is when children say the sounds that make up a word and are able to merge the sounds together until they can hear what the word is. This skill is vital in learning to read.
Segmenting
Children are also taught to segment. This is the opposite of blending. Children are able to say a word and then break it up into the phonemes that make it up. This skill is vital in being able to spell words.

What makes phonics tricky?

In some languages learning phonics is easy because each phoneme has just one grapheme to represent it. The English language is a bit more complicated than this. This is largely because England has been invaded so many times throughout its history. Each set of invaders brought new words and new sounds with them. As a result, English only has around 44 phonemes but there are around 120 graphemes or ways of writing down those 44 phonemes. Obviously we only have 26 letters in the alphabet so some graphemes are made up from more than one letter.
ch th oo ay (these are all digraphs - graphemes with two letters)
There are other graphemes that are trigraphs (made up of 3 letters) and even a few made from 4 letters.
Another slightly sticky problem is that some graphemes can represent more than one phoneme. For example ch makes very different sounds in these three words: chip, school, chef.

So why bother learning phonics?

In the past people argued that because the English language is so tricky, there was no point teaching children phonics. Now, most people agree that these tricky bits mean that it is even more important that we teach phonics and children learn it clearly and systematically. A written language is basically a kind of a code. Teaching phonics is just teaching children to crack that code. Children learn the simple bits first and then easily progress to get the hang of the trickier bits.

How is phonics taught?

Some people worry that phonics is taught to children when they are too young. However, those people might be surprised if they stepped into a phonics lesson. Phonics sessions are entirely made up from games, songs and actions and these sessions only last for 15-20 minutes per day. In my experience, (when phonics is taught well) children generally enjoy phonics so much that they beg their teachers to play phonics games with them at other times of the day.

Great Phonics Websites for Parents








A few weeks ago, I posted a link to a useful phonics website (https://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com) which the children can access at home for extra phonics practice in the form of fun games. We have been looking at the site in class to give the children an idea of how it works. This week at parent's evening, I will give out each child's individual log in details which I have already set up.

Happy Learning!

What else have we been doing in 1G this week?

In History, the children were re-enacting scenes from the story of the gunpowder plot. These pictures do not do justice to the excellent drama skills of the children - please ask them what they were doing in each picture and see if they can explain what was happening in that part of the story!


In Geography, the children used iPads to explore the digimaps website and tried to navigate their way to their house from our school. We all managed to find Stanley park, the beach, the piers and Blackpool Tower however, some of our houses proved quite tricky to find!