A visit from the Road Safety team was a great start to the week. Class 1/R joined the reception class in the hall as we listened to advice on how to stay safe when out in the street, sang our road safety song learnt last week and practised crossing the pretend roads.
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 by putting the book under the visualiser and encouraging the children to read along. The story gave us a chance to talk about keeping themselves safe by doing what their parents tell them and of course not talking to strangers.The Cbeebies version that we watched is a good story to view on the computer as it will help to develop mouse control. www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/stories/theme/fairytales/page/2 .
The children became authors as they retold the pictorial story of Red Riding Hood. This can be completed over the weekend for homework. In ‘shared writing,’ groups of children wrote letters from the wolf to Red Riding Hood and grandma to say how sorry he was. With an adult to scribe, encourage and develop their ideas, it was an opportunity to get everyone talking and contributing in some way. It was a good introduction to letter writing.
All of the children acted out the story with the puppets. They used the familiar refrains from the story and thought of some of their own words for their character to say. Performance is a skill to learn as there are a lot of things to think about. Speaking in a loud voice, keeping the puppet upright for all to see and projecting the voice to speak to an audience. Using a special voice for their puppet came naturally to some. All of these skills will be practised more in the coming weeks as we visit and retell familiar tales.
In phonics the sound taught and practised was ‘oo’ which can of course makes two different sounds. We looked at words and stories with these sounds in and practised writing words on the phoneme frames. Please continue to practise recognition of these diagraphs 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 develop our understanding of taking away. The children have been solving formally written sums using equipment to find the answers. A few children have some taking away sums to practise at home this weekend as they found the independent working quite difficult to cope with. At home you could tell your child number stories so they can use their adding and taking away skills to solve the problems. For example: A man had 6 sheep, 2 ran away how many were left? I have 5 sweets in one hand and 3 in the other, how many altogether?
In our ‘Understanding of the world’ the children were learning more about plants. They looked more closely at the bulbs planted in October and tried to name the plant parts. They watched the BBC ‘Step Outside’ program about bulbs and made 3-D models of the indoor hyacinths.
Show and Tell was interesting with some lovely baby and toddler pictures sent in. Next week the children will be expected to do more talking as they show their family pictures and tell us about their families. Pictures of the extended family could also be included.
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 for some children and remembering to clear the memory before putting in a new command. More practise next week with a Goldilocks and bird recognition grid.
Next week sees the beginning of the ‘Little Schools Bird Watch’ so look out for more details and pictures as we learn to recognise different birds and prepare to go bird watching.