Dear parents
Incase you wish to update your child’s reading books over the half term, there is the excellent website Oxford Owl
By creating a login, there is access to a range of ebooks which might occupy children who are becoming a bit bored of reading the same books over and over again.
I hope you’re enjoying a wonderful week!
Mrs Wiggs
We’ve had another busy week in class and I think it is safe to say we are all ready for half term. We have had a fun week with a few extra treats thrown in, including some Forest school fun in fallen leaves (see the photo below!) and a dance class with Miss Ford. The children had a fab time working with Miss Ford who, as some of you may know, was a West End performer. She told the children the story “Where the wild things are” and then they performed the story to music, working in small groups and showing their readiness when Miss Ford said “Directors coming!!”
In Maths we have been sequencing numbers and we have started to look at part part whole models, and breaking numbers down into tens and ones. Your children could practice the first objective at home, if you want a quick holiday activity. Lay out some number cards to 20, 30 or 50. Get your child to pick5. Can they put them in order, smallest to largest? Can they select the biggest number? Can they say how they know it is bigger? If your child needs an extra challenge, you could write the words for each number (eg twelve, twenty, thirty one, sixteen) and ask them to read them and sequence them, as this is also a year one objective.
In English, we continue to look at letter formation, sentence building and remembering full stops and capital letters. We have also been reading a lot and practicing our phonics. The phonics we have looked at so far include;
All single letters (names and sounds), revisiting ch, sh, th, ng, oa, ai
Children should be fluent in these sounds and should be able to recognise them on sight, and write them. After half term we will start looking at “igh” and “ee”
There are lots of places to find phonics on line and your child will probably be able to tell you what they enjoy, but we use Alphablocks, Mr Thorne, Geraldine the giraffe and PhonicsPlay. If you would like more help or weblinks, let me know in the comments.
Have a lovely half term, Mrs Wiggs
We have had a busy week in Ash Class, and the school, with lots of special events going on.
Monday was our Forest School Day, with the theme of biodiversity. We completed a bug hunt, roasted marshmallows and even got gardening, using the new poly tunnel to plant cauliflowers and micro herbs. We also learned a little bit about some of the species around us including deer, as Bella and her Granddad have bought us some incredible deer skulls.
During the rest of the week we have continued to work on key skills, so using capital letters, finger spaces and full stops, as well as speaking and writing in sentences. In phonics we have been doing the “oa” sound, and recapping sh/ch/th/ng. If you can help your child practice these sounds, that would be very helpful. The “oa” sound is found in boat, goat and coat.
In maths we have been learning about the greater, less than and equal to symbols which the children were very confident using. I continue to be really proud of the progress they have made both in terms of the adaptation to the structures of learning and in their play.
Finally Forest school – we played a duplication game, hunting out matching items, but we have also become very interested in galls. These are, simply, wasp eggs, and so far we have found and identified spangle galls, silk button galls and marble galls.
Have a lovely weekend,
Mrs Wiggs 
We’ve been trying some new things in class this week, and the children have responded well. They are trying to keep up with the learning and all the expectations in terms of behaviour and I’m proud of all the positive changes I am seeing.
In Maths we have been looking at ordinal numbers, which the children have been mainly familiar with, but often struggled to say! There has been a lot of confusion between the ‘f’ sound and the ‘th’ sound which was compounded in words like fifth and fourth! We have continued to work on 1:1 correspondance and number formation.
In English we’ve been working on sentence structure, parts of the sentence including nouns, verbs and adjectives, as well as continuing our daily work on phonics and reading.
Some of the new words we have been learning include chronology, past, present and future as well as learning about our senses in Science. Mrs Soal taught the children all about their senses with a taste test, the results of the “sour” test being quite entertaining! The did eat lots of nice tasting things as well!
The highlight of the week continues to be our outdoor learning/Forest school sessions. The children come alive in the outdoor environment and are starting to take more (considered) risks and be far more observant. This week we made crowns from the long grass, played crocodiles and swamps and saw a huge spider with a an even bigger egg sack. Miss Ford set the bar for puddle jumping, by doing a cartwheel through the puddles!
Just a reminder that although we don’t set homework in year 1, it is important that the children learn to set aside a few minutes each day or so, to do some home learning. At this age, reading is the most important thing you can do with your child in terms of helping their learning. Spending even five minutes, a few times a week looking at books together has proven benefits to many aspects of your child’s development.
