6th January 2014

Happy New Year !

 

Happy 2014! I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year and that Santa brought you everything you wished for! Thank you to you all too, for the very generous gifts that you gave all the staff - they were all very much appreciated.


Having recharged our batteries, it is time to start the SPRING term with gusto. We will be stepping up the pace from now, as this is a very short term. We have a great deal to fit in, so here goes with what we have in store for the start to the new term...

Literacy

For the next few weeks, we will be focussing out work on Traditional Tales. I love this, as the children are so familiar with them, as many of them have heard them as bedtime stories.Why not buy a Sunday newspaper and let your child SEE YOU reading...or make time to read that novel or autobiography that was bought as a Christmas gift?

We will be looking at the story of Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. The children will be expected to be able to name the main characters and events of the stories, as well as being able to sequence the events in chronological order. Why not make a story board, or film strip of the story – then cut it up. See if your child can put the events back in the correct order, whilst retelling the story.

The children will also be trying to earn their equity cards this week, by exploring how the use of their voice can make a story sound more interesting. Try raising your voice at the end of a sentence and see if they can predict what will happen next...”What big EYES you have grandma!...All the better to SEE YOU WITH!”

http://www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/curriculum/literacy/lit_site/html/fiction/fairytale2/fairytale.htm this has lots of examples of Traditional Tales, with activities to support ideas reading and writing. It does takes a while to download, but the activities and ideas are well worth it.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-stories-red-riding-hood.htm some great activities to print and make to do with Little Red Riding Hood. If you have the time to navigate through some of the other tales on this site, they are well worth a look. We will be revisiting this site over the course of this topic.

http://www.penguinreaders.com/pyr/resources/index.html This may seem quite a daunting site when you first look at it. It isn’t a game that your child can play on, more of activities that can be carried out with you. Although it is based on a particular publisher’s books, it can be used with any version. The PDF files (that open in Acrobat Reader) have a brief overview of the story, it origins and some ideas of activities that you can do at home. The chants are a great way of helping children to remember the order of events in the stories, with having to read the whole story. This will be a great hook for them when they come to write their own versions in a couple of weeks time.

http://www-math.uni-paderborn.de/~odenbach/pigs/pigs.html Wow! This brought back many memories of childhood!

Numeracy

We will also be reviewing the numeracy assessments which the children did just before Christmas, in order to clarify any misunderstanding that occurred.

One way you could help at home, is with missing number activities. Many of the children found it challenging when we turned around some of the number sentences:

2 + 3 = ? was easy to calculate, but they found it hard to grasp 5 = 3 + ?

Try doing this type of activity at home with number cards are symbol cards and see how many correct number sentences your child can make.

This type of question comes up every year on every assessment all the way up to year 6, so if they are able to grasp the concept now , it will become easier when they use bigger numbers.

http://www.wmnet.org.uk/wmnet/custom/files_uploaded/uploaded_resources/853/Postsortingv3.swf click on the tens and units postbox to post the letters. Be careful, as you cannot post all the letters!

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=Toolkit%20index2a this will open up lots of things that we use in class, but for this week, you will need to click on the place value calculator. Although it says it is aimed at Key Stage 2, many of the children will be able to use the knowledge they have to calculate the answers.

http://www.wmnet.org.uk/wmnet/custom/files_uploaded/uploaded_resources/853/PlaceValueChartv4.swf having used this before the holidays, we know how much the children enjoyed it!

Science

This half term, we are investigating the theme of Healthy Humans.

The children will learn that humans need food and water to stay alive; that children need to eat and drink a variety of food to enable them to grow and to recognise and sort a collection of basic food types.

Maybe you could get them to sort out the weekly shopping in the food groups, or plan a meal, to make sure it includes all the elements – then they can see it isn’t always as easy as it looks!

The following sites will show the type of vocabulary the children will be expected to know by the end of the topic.

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/healthy_eating/eng/Introduction/default.htm we will be using this website in class to introduce the topic this week

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=platehtml The balanced plate – sort the foods into the correct category as they come along the conveyor belt.

http://www.welltown.gov.uk/school/dining_game.html sort the food from the plate into the correct category

http://www.foodafactoflife.org.uk/Activity.aspx?siteId=3&sectionId=37&contentId=55 make your own balanced plate of food

http://www.greatgrubclub.com/?location_id=71 a great site, with lots of fun activities to share. It does involve cooking, which is great activity and covers so many areas of the curriculum. Why not have a go at making the ‘eye-ball eggs’??

The children worked extremely hard last term, so here’s to a happy, but hard-working Spring term!

Dates of the diary

Monday 6^th January 2014 - Inset day for Staff Training. No children in school.

Tuesday 7^th January 2014 -all children return to school after the Christmas.

Thursday 9^th January – Pantomine whole school Parr Hall.

Thank you

Year 1/2 Team.