Week Beginning Monday, April 20th

Hello!

I hope you haven’t missed me too much over the last couple of weeks.  It’s great that school has restarted and so we can have lots of fun together whilst we learn some amazing things. 

Plan for the Week

You can find our plan for the week here.

Things to do Everyday

Remember that there are some things that should do EVERYDAY!  One is to read our Book of the Week.  A second is to sing our Song of the Week.  We have also to get physical everyday – that means, we need to do something that increases our heart rate, makes us breathe faster and feel warmer.   

Book of the Week

Our Book of the Week this week is: Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs by Giles Andrea and Rusell Ayto. (You can view the book here.)  This book combines dinosaurs, pirates and a magic cupboard!  What’s not to like?

Read this book with your child every day, ensuring that they repeat key phrases of it or even the whole book. That way by the end of the week they will almost know it really well.

Song of the Week

This half-term our topic is Growing.  So here’s a song that everyone should know off by heart: Old MacDonald had a Farm.

If children are to learn new songs, they will need to practice. My suggestion is that on Monday and Tuesday sing this song to your child across the day. From Wednesday get them to sing one line at a time. On Thursday and Friday get them to sing more and more lines together. By the end of Friday they will be able to sing the song all by themselves.

You can find the lyrics to Old MacDonald had a Farm here. (And here you can find a nicely song version of it, in case you are unfamiliar with it.)

Letters and Sounds (Learning to Read and Write)

Not only has you’re child now been taught learnt all the sounds in Phase 2 and Phase 3 of Letters and Sounds (the is the government scheme we use to teach phonics which you can) but over the last few weeks you have been working hard with them to put these skills to use.

So now we’re ready to begin Phase 4!  (You can find the Phase 4 of Letters and Sounds here.)  In Phase 4 we have 2 mains aims.  First we want your child to begin to able to read and write words that contain adjacent consonants, such as: ‘tr’, ‘st’ and ‘mp’.  The other thing that they will be learning is to read and write polysyllabic words, that is, words containing more than one syllable, such as, carpark or boatmen.  

As this will be a little be different from what you have done before with them I made a short video to help you, which on our Class Dojo page.  Don’t worry about getting it perfect, the key thing is to have a go with your child.  

Each day I’ll upload some slides on Class Dojo that will help your child read and write words containing the day’s 2 adjacent consonants.  Today’s 2 are ‘st’ and the slides can be found here.  (On this PowerPoint you can move things around just as I do it the video.)

Yours, Terry