Dear Year 1/2 Parents,
I hope you are all well. It was nice to have a full week with no days off in between. The week has flown by!
At the beginning of the week I started the phonics assessments and I am pleased with the progress the students have made since starting in August. It is always lovely to see them improving.
There will be a few changes being made to the phonics groups to ensure the children are reading and learning at a level which is right for them. If your child’s colour of book changes next week, this is because they have tested at a higher level than what they were currently doing. If it stays the same, then that means they are right on track.
In Literacy, we finalised our storie and they are just wonderful! I showed them in assembly today as I was very proud of all the students and the effort they put in. We started a new book for our next unit “Katie in London” and have began exploring London. We watched a little video which you will see I have also assigned as homework. I would like the students to become familiar with the famous tourist attractions in London so they can relate to the story more once we begin. The Year 1 students will continue working on combining words to make sentences, ensuring that they use capital letters and full stops. In this unit they will also be practising to use ‘and’ in a sentence and learn all about plural noun suffixes -s and -es. Year 2 students will be focusing on using co-ordination (but,or) and adding ‘ly’ to turn adjectives into adverbs. They will also learn to use commas to separate items in a list. The unit will end with the children writing a non-chronilogical report about London using information from the text. It is a lovely little story and I am confident they will enjoy it.
In Maths this week, we have been very busy!
Year 1
| 2.8 – Addition – add together |
| .2.9 – Addition – add more |
| .2.10 – Addition problems |
| .2.11 – Find a part |
| 2.12 – Subtraction – find a part |
The year 1 students have been doing very well with addition and started learning about subtracting using the minus symbol today (-). It was a little stricky so we will be reviewing this again next week.
Year 2
| Aut.2.2 – Fact families – addition and subtraction bonds within 20 |
| Aut.2.3 – Related facts |
| Aut.2.4 – Bonds to 100 (tens) |
| Aut.2.5 – Add and subtract 1s |
Year 2 did very well this week working on fact families again. We looked at bonds to 100 by learning that if 2+8=10 then 20+80=100. The homework will review this as some students found it a little tricky.
In IPC, we finished our jelly beans experiment on Monday and wrote up our results. Some students were a little sad that they didn’t guess the correct taste. It was so much fun overall and the children learned that when we use our sight, smell and taste buds we can more accurately guess the flavours. On Tuesday, we moved on to looking at herbivores, carnivores and omnivores. We did a sorting activity to see which animals belonged in each of the groups. On Wednesday and Thursday we took a look at the different food groups and spent time in groups sorting various foods into their groups. We made fantastic posters on the benefits of Calcium, Protein and carbohydrates. It was a very team based activity and I was pleased to see the students working nicely together.
Star of the Week
I would like to give you more information on the “Star of the week” and how it runs in my classroom. I do not choose the student for the star of the week myself. Each student has a lollipop stick with their name on it and I choose a stick randomly with my eyes closed. I allow the children to go around the circle and tell me something they would like to write about the chosen child. My reason for doing it like this is that I believe that all children are stars of the week in their own way <3 I do not want any child to feel like they are not being recognised for their effort each week. I tell the students that they are all stars and encourage them to try and not get upset if their stick isn’t drawn. However, each time we draw a name it causes some upset. I totally understand them and try to explain that everyone will get a turn. It is a compulsory part of the assembly so please understand and do not believe that your child isn’t doing well because they haven’t yet received it. It’s not a measure of how well they are doing in class. Their turn will come but it may be a little while as they get chosen every 2 weeks and there are 13 children to go around. I just wanted to make you all aware and know that I give them lots of compliments and encouragement as a whole class 🙂
Phonics Books and Homework
Just a gentle reminder that homework, library books and Phonics books should be returned together in the Yellow Folder each week. If possible, it would be great to return them all together each Friday. This allows for myself and Ms. Kim to swap over the homework all together, check that the Phonics books have been returned and put the new homework in.
We have one week before the midterm break now and I can’t believe that we are more than half way through the first term. I am currently researching where we can go for our first field trip together and will let you all now when arrangements are made.
I hope you all have a great weekend. There has been a lot of coughing and sickness in our class this week. If your child has a cough please may I ask that they take a mask with them. I hope everyone feels better and look forward to seeing their smiling/tired faces on Monday.
Warm regards,
Mrs. Sim
