Dear Parents,
I hope you have all had a great week. This week we have been working on getting to our destination ‘remembering to be respectful’ and we have come across lots of obstacles. A few have been shouting out on the carpet, not listening to instructions and talking to friends when we are supposed to be lining up. We have had lots of discussions about why these things are disrespectful and also looked at how we can overcome them. I am hopeful that next week we will make it to the end of our Pathway.
Year 1 Ditty Books
Just a friendly reminder to please return the Ditty books each week after reading them at home. Some students forgot today, including myself, hehe 🙂 Other teachers use them too so it would be much appreciated if you could return them in the homework folder. Thank you.
Year 1 Phonics words
For those students who are working on Ditty 5 you will notice that the words are very difficult this week. At this stage, the programme is focusing on being able to phonetically decode the words and unfortunately there aren’t so many easier words that use tious, cious and tion. So please don’t worry too much about them knowing all their meanings at this stage. It would be great if you could have your child read the words at the top of the worksheets before practising their writing too.
Year 2 English
We have been a bit sloppy with our writing in our rotations this week and so I have included some sentence homework for Year 2. This is basic writing however, many of the students have not been answering questions in full sentences and so I would like them to show me some really good ones this week for homework. There are words provided to support them.
In Maths this week Year 1 has continued with addition and subtraction to 20 and today started looking at doubling numbers to 20. We had our ladybirds out and worked on adding dots to each of their wings.
Year 2 has had great fun creating regular and irregular patterns. We made them out of blocks, bears, frogs and shapes. At the end of the week we began looking at probability and will continue with this next week.
In IPC this week we have continued to look at musical instrument families, specifically string and percussion instruments. The students got a chance to look at how professional musicians used these instruments and they were so surprised to see that not all musicians use real ones; some use everyday objects instead. The students were so excited to make their own string and percussion instruments out of pans, food containers and elastic bands. They created some really interesting sounds. In our other unit, “Creators and Communicators” the students learned all about internet safety. The students learned how important it is to reduce their screen time to promote a healthy mind. We also created our very own class avatars and they had so much fun with this. We will display them next week on our door.
In English we continued with our unit, “You’ll Never Believe It” by looking at the classic story, “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt”. Using this story the children were able to look at verbs more closely and come up with some action words of their own to fit into the story. They really enjoyed reading this and it was delightful to see them use their imagination to come up with new action words. They also started a new story called “Bedtime for Monsters”. In this story the students were introduced to a new imaginary character and they were asked to make predictions about how they thought the story would end. We’ll have to wait and see how it ends next week!
Homework
I try my best to provide homework that the students can do independently as I believe this is what homework should be; a revision of what we have done in class. If you feel that the homework is too much for your child (Year 1 students mainly) feel free to focus on the spelling words and reading as I do feel that this plays an important part in becoming a fluent reader.
Library books
I am trying to encourage the students to choose books that they can read by themselves and some of them are a little disappointed they cannot choose novel books with princess covers 🙂I think a mix of a more difficult book that mum or dad can read along with two that they can read themselves would be appropriate and I have suggested this to the students.
Thank you to Nayra’s mum for the donuts on Monday and Happy Birthday to Nayra! Wishing you a great year ahead!
Have a lovely weekend and I will see you all on Monday.
Mrs. Sim 🙂