This week in literacy we have been reading different versions of the well-known story of Little Red Riding Hood. Throughout the week we read books together under the visualiser, encouraging the children to read along. We also watched it on Cbeebies on www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/storie
The children wrote sentences about pictures from the story using their word grid and word book. They ordered pictures to retell the story and made get well cards for grandma. In ‘shared writing’ groups of children wrote letters from the wolf to Red riding Hood and grandma to say how sorry he was. This helped the children to express their ideas and try to spell words. With an adult to scribe, encourage and develop their ideas it was an opportunity to get everyone talking and contributing in some way.
Groups of children acted out the story with the puppets and they were encouraged to think of their own words for their character to say and project their voice to speak to an audience. Some of the shows were hilarious! There were some very angelic Red Riding Hoods, some very fierce wolves and some heroic axe wielding woodcutters.
In phonics the sounds taught and practised were ‘oo’ and ‘ee’ and ‘ea’ . We looked at words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words on the phoneme frames using these sounds. Please continue to practise recognition of these daily and point them out to your child when they appear in a word in their reading book or word box.
In maths we have been doing lots of practical work to further the understanding of 1 more and 1 less. Using a number line to count forwards was very challenging for many children and despite playing lots of board games in school this is an area which still needs lots more practice. At home it would be beneficial to count on by playing track games such as ‘Snakes and Ladders’.
Our lessons on ordinal numbers also highlighted the need for repetition at home as some children found it very difficult to answer questions about number order or to order a series of toys as directed.
In our ‘Knowledge and understanding of the world’ we revisited the name of the plant parts by looking again at our indoor hyacinths and making 3-D models of them. We also decorated cakes for grandma and learnt about the stages of growth from baby to old-age.
Show and Tell should have been interesting with some lovely baby and toddler pictures sent in, however with Fridays snow and children leaving early we only looked at a few so we will take this work forward into the first few days of next week.
In ICT we practised programming Bee-Bot to move around a Little Red Riding Hood grid. Counting on the correct number of squares from where the robot was, to where we wanted it to go, caused a few problems and remembering to clear the memory before putting in a new command. More practise next week with a Goldilocks grid.
I hope that you have already looked at our PE pictures as our apparatus works gets better and better as confidence and skill level develops.
Next week sees the beginning of the ‘Little Schools Birdwatch’ so look out for more details and pictures as we go bird watching.
If you are interested, next weekend is the ‘Big garden birdwatch’. Watch with your child and see what birds come into your garden for one hour and send in your results. Further information and bird identification sheets are available on