Russet Class Newsletter 8.1.18
A big well done to all the children for how well they settled back into school last week! Miss France and I had a wonderful couple of days with them, and the children were really pleased to be back in class with their friends. We look forward to the rest of this academic year with them – it always amazes us how quickly the time passes! Thank you also for your continued support, not only with our random requests for donations of items, but also with learning at home, too. Please do try to read with your child at least 3 times a week, as it really does make a difference. I look forward to meeting with you all at the end of this term to discuss the children’s progress in our Parent Consultations – more details about the dates and times to follow in the near future.
Library Reminder
Please remember to return your child’s library book each Monday, as this is when we make a visit to the library as a class. If your child is a member of Library Club, they are able to have 2 books out at a time by choosing a new one on a Thursday, or they may prefer to change their book twice a week, instead of having 2 books out at the same time. Just a reminder, all clubs start from next week, not this week.
Our Learning this Week
This week we will revise the sounds of sh, ch, th and ng with Year R, as they found these harder to apply in our phonics revision last week. These sounds are called consonant digraphs, and instead of sounding s and h separately, we only say the one sound, eg sh, or th instead of t and h. Come and ask if you need any help with understanding this area. This website is really useful, especially now our phonics sessions are starting to get a little trickier:
The Year 1 children will continue to embed their phonics covered throughout their schooling, using them to read real and nonsense words, too. There will be quite an emphasis on this skill for Year 1 now, as later this year all Year 1 children will be screened in this area. Feel free to help at home with real and nonsense words, either making up your own words, or playing along at:
or
In English this week, we will make lots of links with our new topic area of healthy living and fitness – the children loved helping to set up our class gym last week, and we look forward to building up a greater understanding of this area. We will be making links with learning about food groups, living healthy lifestyles, timing sports sessions and taking part in writing opportunities linked to our new theme. In maths this week we will be finding out about using a calendar correctly, to link with our work on learning about time. They will be ordering the days of the week and months of the year, and getting to know about how months can be grouped into seasons. Year 1 children are also expected to be able to spell the days and months correctly on their own, and will also be asking questions linked to sequencing events, and solving problems linked to timetables, for example, answering which day an exercise class takes place on by finding out on a diary. Year 1 children will also now start to work on recalling multiplication facts with greater confidence, developing their fluency with this skill. This week they will focus on solving and recalling facts from the 2 times table, up to 12 x 2. We will be using the words multiply, lots of, groups of and times in our work linked with this area. Our Act of Worship theme this week is finding out about how our school value of helpfulness is shown in different bible stories. We will be finding out about the story of Noah, along with the story of how Jesus helped the paralysed man.