Phase 3 Stay and Learn
Thank you to all parents and carers who attended the Stay and Learn this week. Hopefully you found the ‘Phase 3 Phonics’ presentation and lesson informative and that you enjoyed playing the phonics games with your child in class. If you’ve any questions about the information you heard/saw during the session, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Please take a short few moments to feedback on the Stay and Learn session by copying this link and pasting it into your browser:
https://forms.gle/JWgXSyfTj53kx6Em9
Book Club
Enjoy seeing some of our 3,4A learners enjoying their favourite books in today’s book club…
Help at home: Ensure your child reads daily for around ten minutes and completes their reading record task ready for Friday’s book club!
Great Fairies of the World
This week, we read Great Fairies of the World by Stephanie Moss. This rhyming story introduces fairy characters with jobs that help others, including an architect fairy, a doctor fairy and an engineer fairy, to name just a few!
We discussed how the author chooses the most interesting and imaginative words to bring the characters to life. Through describing images and making our word choices more adventurous, we’ve developed our oracy skills and strengthened our writing too.
In provision, we linked our fiction reading to non-fiction information about real-life heroes in the community.
We also used the fairy theme in our classroom challenges by:
- using our phonics skills to read the fairy names and creating our own names using some of the phase 3 digraphs and trigraphs that we know. (If you’d like a reminder of how to pronounce them – watch this video!)
- finding answers to a reading quiz.
- designing and creating fairy gardens.
- making fairy potions and talking about the ingredients.
- practising our scissor skills by cutting out stars to make wands – just like in the story!
Phonics
Spring 1 week 5 focused on reading longer words, using the ‘chunking method’. When we ‘chunk it up’, we segment and blend longer words one syllable at a time. For example: sunset (s-u-n, sun. Then, read s-e-t, set. Finally, join them together. Sun-set. Sunset.)
Ask your child to show you how they ‘chunk-it-up’!
Help at Home: Here’s a game you could play at home to help your child remember Tricky Words.
This week’s game is: Tricky Word Splat.
- Write a selection of tricky words on paper/sticky notes.
- Place around the room/floor.
- Say a tricky word for your child to splat. You might jump on the words, splat with a masher or create your own ideas!
Each week, we learn a new poem and recite it daily. Saying the poem aloud helps the children focus on the sounds and rhythm of each word and line, supporting their reading development. This week’s poem is called Mrs Bluebird.
A visit from D-Side
This week, children also took part in an online safety talk with Dave from D-Side. They learned how to stay safe when using the internet, including asking a grown-up for help and telling an adult if something makes them feel worried or unsure. Watch out for more information about on-line safety in next week’s post!
If you’d like to email us any photos of your child’s home learning, share any achievements or tell us about any exciting events, please send them to our Reception email. Children love to share them with their friends and it’s also great for their confidence and communication skills too!
Year 3/4 – PE
This week, we’ve enjoyed taking part in yoga which is excellent for both physical and mental health. It helps to develop strength and flexibility. We enjoyed trying the following poses:
- warrior one
- warrior two
- triangle
- tree
Why not try some yoga at home?
Reading – Viking Boy
As we continue to enjoy Viking boy as our class novel, we have been making sure that we remember the key parts of the story. We’ve been using story maps to help with this. Each time we read a chapter, we have been adding to our maps, noting down a five word summary of the main events. This is sometimes quite a challenge as lots can happen in a chapter! We sometimes add illustrations to help us remember too.
Reading and Writing : Bog Baby
We’ve been reading The Bog Baby by Jeanne Willis and using it for our reading and writing learning.
It is a lovely story and has enabled us to retrieve information and start to infer the characters’ feelings from the pictures and text. We’ve also talked about wild animals and nature.
We’ve orally rehearsed sentences and been using conjunctions to make them more interesting. The children have also written some sentences, sometimes using conjunctions too.
Help at home by talking about The Bog Baby story. What would you do if you found a beautiful little creature? There is a video version here, read by the author. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)
Yorkshire Museum Trip
Recently, Y3,4 went on a school trip to the Yorkshire Museum!
We learnt more about the Romans, our current topic in History, and other periods of history as we looked around the museum, too. We also enjoyed observing artefacts that date back to the Roman period in Britain.
A highlight, though, had to be marching as a centurion!
A centurion is a commander of a century in the ancient Roman army.
Did you know? As the Romans stood opposite their enemies before battle, they stood in complete silence as an intimidation tactic! Much different to war cries you may have heard from other armies!
Learning about toys from the past
Today the KS1 had the pleasure of having a lovely visitor in school. Sue! Sue is a long-known resident at Scholes Primary school. Today the children were able to ask Sue all about the toys she played with when she was younger.
Here are some of the questions we asked:
2C
What companies made toys back then?
What was your favourite toy to play with and why?
1/2B
What material were your toys made from?
What were toy shops like?
1A
Did you have a slide or did you go to the park when you were younger?
Did you have colouring books?
See some of Sue’s answers below.
This half-term we have been learning all about toys from the past. We’ve learnt how to spot older toys and the materials they were made from.
Help at home by discussing toys you played with when you were younger and try to identify differences between toys then and now. It would be brilliant if you could get older family members involved such as grandparents or even perhaps well-known neighbours.
Dinosaur Roar
We’ve enjoyed listening to ‘Dinosaur Roar‘ during our story times in Nursery this week. We talked about the different parts of a book, including the front and back cover, the title and blurb. As we read the story, we identified the words on the page and followed them with our finger as we read from left to right.
“Dinosaur weak, dinosaur strong, dinosaur short or dinosaur very, very long” We looked at the illustrations and talked about the meaning of the different words in the story
Can you remember all of the different types of dinosaurs in the story?
In the sensory area, we loved playing with the slime in our dinosaur swamp! Ergh.. it’s very sticky!
In the creative area we printed with dinosaur shapes.
We have continued to explore the concept of heavy and light this week by introducing bucket balances. The children have observed what happens when one side of the balance is heavier than the other.
“it went down”
“ it went up”
This week the weather has been very wet but we’ve still managed to have lots of fun learning outside too.
Help at home
Independence is an important skill for all of the children in Nursery. Being able to put on their coat, fasten it and go outside is a significant achievement. We support the children to do this independently at Nursery. Practicing these skills at home, maybe on a weekend when you have a little more time, will support the children’s development considerably.
Next week’s learning:
Story of the week.
We will continue to read Dinosaur Roar next week.
Nursery rhyme of the week
Jack and Jill went up the Hill
Can you join in with the rhyme at home?
Sound of the week
‘c’ for cat and ‘k’ for kite
Reminders
The weather is still very cold and we spend lots of our time learning outside. Please ensure that you child has a warm coat, hat and gloves/ mittens every day. As always, name everything.
Please remember to name your child’s packed lunch box on the outside. We have a number of identical lunchboxes at the moment so it is essential that they are all clearly named,
Thank you as always for your continued support. We hope that you have a happy and healthy weekend.
The Nursery Team
Supertato
Supertato
This last week’s book focus was the amazing Supertato by Sue Hendra. There was a real buzz about the classroom with the children enjoying all the linked activities. They designed traps to capture Evil Pea, wrote wanted posters for the villain, created patterns with vegetables, created observational drawings of different vegetables and used green pea counters to make words in the Phonics area.
Our new word of the week is: mischievous. A perfect word to describe the small, green villain in our story!
Help at home: you could read some other Supertato stories (there are many) or watch some episodes of Supertato on BBC iPlayer. Talk to your child after the story/episode to see if they’ve understood the story and the events Why did that happen? What do you think might happen next? Who was the main character? Why did they feel that way? Did you like it? All these types of questions help with reading comprehension.
Poem of The Week
This week’s Poem is A Little House. We enjoyed the rhythm and rhyme in this poem and talked about the new words we came across like curling and drifting.
Gross motor skills
Did you know that gross motor skills helps with early writing skills?
Gross motor skills involving large muscle movements like crawling, climbing, and throwing are crucial to early writing. This is because they build strength in core, shoulder and arm muscles. These movements enable children to sit upright, stabilize their shoulders for controlled pencil grip, and improve coordination. It also helps to improve stamina when writing. We practise lots of gross motor skills every day in our outdoor area.
Help at home: take your child to the park, ride bikes and scoot together. Play tennis, football, rugby or dance around your kitchen. All these playful activities help in your child’s writing journey.
Art
Following on from our visit to the ‘gallery’ last week, we begun to create some wintery art. The art work is inspired by Claude Monet’s magpie Painting. We created a wash with watered down blue paint and mopped some of the paint using different media to create different effects. Next week we’ll finish off our creations using tissue paper. Look out for photos of our finished art.
Dates for your diary:
Wednesday 4th Feb – Stay and Learn
Tuesday 10th Feb – Parents teacher meetings (booked appointments)
Thursday 12th – Parent teacher meetings (booked appointments)
Friday 13th – break up for half term