Reading

We have put your new shared reading book ‘Highland Summer’ in your book bags today. Please take a little look over the weekend to familiarise yourself with the text ready for our first shared read on Monday.

Doodle Maths

Please try and spend 10 minutes, 3 times a week answering questions on Doodle Maths to ensure that you are in the Green Zone!

Handwriting

We have been working so hard on our letter formation in our handwriting sessions and the children's letters are continuing to improve. We have been focusing on making sure that we can distinguish between our tall and small letters, and are practising sitting our letters on the line. Any opportunities to practise those alphabet letters at home would be fantastic, we appreciate any time you can put in.

This Week

In phonics this week, we have consolidated the sounds that we have been learned so far. The children could recall ay, ea, ie, ou and oy, and read these sounds in a variety of words. We introduced our alien friend, who gives us words to read that are not real, or called ‘non-words’. These non-words encourage children to use their decoding skills to sound out, and their blending skills to read words without being able to put them in context, thus showing us their knowledge and understanding of the sounds we have learned this far.

In English this week we moved away from our CLPE text, in favour of two shorter texts to develop the children’s literal and inferential comprehension skills. We read the texts as a class, looked at a question, highlighted the important part of the question and found the answer in the text, making sure that we answered the question using a full sentence. The children developed their scanning skills through looking for key words in the question and the text, and showed good understanding. We will continue to do this at various stages to develop the children’s independence in reading a text and answering questions.

In Maths, we looked at odd and even numbers. We learned that even numbers can always be put in pairs, and in numberblock language, are called ‘flat tops’. Odd numbers will always have one left over or ‘sticking out’, and we looked at numbers in a variety of representations to support our understanding.

In Geography this week, we explored a range of different types of maps, including Globes, Atlases, treasure maps, tube maps and Google Earth to explore the world around us. We learned that maps are drawn from a ‘birds eye view’, and we enjoyed being birds and exploring our surroundings, picking out key features and thinking about how these would look on a map. With support, the children did a fantastic job of mapping our classroom – they drew the tables, chairs, carpet spots, cupboards and even the doors and windows!

Have a lovely weekend.
The Year 1 Team