Heads, Shoulders, Knees and smells!

First of all, thank you to all the parents who attended the Induction meeting on Tuesday evening. We hope that you found it informative and was able to answer most of the questions that you may have at the beginning of the academic year.

If you were unable to attend or have any further questions, please feel free to speak to any member of the team, who will be more than happy to help.

This week, we will be starting formal curriculum, after a successful induction period. The children are now fully in the swing of their new routines and are ready and raring to go on their learning journey this year.

Literacy

We begin the year, with a great topic for the children – Stories with Familiar Settings. This creates lots of speaking and listening activities, as the stories we will be looking at, are all situations that the children will have found themselves in.

We will be reading a lovely story called ‘Peace at last’ with the children and they will be expected to be able to talk about who the main characters are and identify the setting of the story (where it all takes place.) They should be able to use all the strategies they have been taught from last year, including using the pictures and the actual text to help them.The children will also become budding actors and actresses, as they will have to act out the story – but with a twist! They will be presented with a problem that Mr Bear will have to solve before he can get a good night’s sleep! By talking through a familiar story and changing one element at a time, the children will get lots of ideas to use in their own stories, when we come to write them next week.

We will be using this week’s literacy to introduce ‘Thinker’s Keys’ to the children. They will be encouraged to look at things from a different point of view. You could try some of these at home...

Read the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ as a bedtime (or bathtime) story. Try asking your child the following questions during the story:

The Prince is crying! Can you think of 5 reasons for that?

You’ve made it to the castle to rescue the princess, but the drawbridge is up! Could you think of 3 ways to get into the castle without being discovered?

Some of the ideas that the children come up with are truly amazing! Go on, give it a go! We’d love to hear some of the things they came up with, so let us know through the diaries.

By the end of week, the children:

MUST be able to identify a character and a familiar setting.

SHOULD be able to do the above plus sequence the main events from the story.

COULD do the above plus use evidence from the text and illustrations to explain their answers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/starship/english/storyplant.shtml grow your very own story from the story plant

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/learn_y4/main.asp?lesson_path=year_4/writing_stories/&lesson_file=lesson.swf&language=eng this will be useful for yourselves as well as some great sequencing activities for beginnings, middles and ends of stories.

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/cap_letters_stops/eng/Introduction/default.htm how to use capital letters and full stops. This has some lovely activities to help click and drag them to the correct place.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/starship/english/penguinsonice.shtml Can you make the penguins take a bow? Remember to ask your child to choose the right piece of punctuation for the end of the sentence. Can they sing you the penguin song??

The links from last week's blog will be useful for developing high frequency words recognition and spelling.

Numeracy

We begin this week with a recap of the number work from last week. The children were great at one, two and ten more than a given number, but some still need a little practice at counting backwards when doing one, two and ten less.

Encourage them to look for the patterns, particularly when adding and subtracting 10.11, 21, 31, 41, 51 etc . Are they able to spot the number that changes? Can they explain why?This will lead into the number work we will be covering this week.

We will be look at what the actual numbers mean in a two or three digit number.

A good activity to try at home, is to get two dice and roll them separately. The first number represents the number of tens, and the second represents the numbers on 1’s. So, if you roll a 3 and a 4, encourage your child to tell you:“ That’s 3 tens and 4 ones (units), so the number is 34.

Try getting them to write the number down on paper too.You could extend this, by asking them if they can tell you what 10 more/less is.

The second half of the week, we will be looking at 2D and 3D shapes. The children will be describing the number of faces and edges in the shapes and should be able to sort them according to their properties.Try to encourage your child to look for examples of the shapes in the house and when you are out and about. When the identify shapes such as cubes, cuboids, spheres and pyramids, extend the questioning and ask them how many sides the shape has; how many edges it has.

Another great activity to try, is to cut up lots of different shapes from coloured paper, and ask your child to make pictures, just by using these shapes. Maybe you could draw the shapes onto paper yourself and ask them to cut out the shapes, developing their scissor skills.

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=washindex For those children working or ordering numbers to 20

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/ngfl/ngfl-flash/place_value/place_value.html a great way of explaining place value. Select Level 1 for Year 1 children and for a challenge, why not have a go at level 2? Even more of a challenge is Level 3, when it asks you to order 1000's!http://www.ictgames.com/dinoplacevalue.html can you 'partition' the numbers into tens and units?http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks2/maths/bgfn/number.cfm Choose how many tens and how many units make up the target number. If you click on 'check' it will even mark it for you!

http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=Toolkit The children are used to using a 100 square in school, so this will be a big help at home, particularly when doing numeracy homework.

http://www.ictgames.com/football2.html kick the ball that shows 10 less than a given number

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/ngfl/maths/maerdy_2d/e_index.html guess the name of the 2D shape by listening to the properties

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/build_it/eng/Introduction/default.htm what can you build using these shapes and blocks? Encourge the children to describe the properties of the 3D shapes too!

http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/maths/mathsE3.htm you will need to be selective from these ideas, but there are lots of sheets, activities and powerpoints for you to use at home to support your child with both 2D and 3D shapes. Be aware, that some of them are for Key Stage 2, but give them a go if you fancy a challenge!http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=MatchingPairs3Dshape why not try a memory game with 3D shapes. Some of these shapes are quite difficult to name, but you could ask your child to describe the properties them - how many faces/edges do they each have? Remember to click on start a new game to begin the activity.

Topic

We begin our science topic this week, all about Ourselves. We already have a great display in our classroom, completed by our budding Picassos!

The children will learn:

to name a variety of external body parts;
about their sense of smell and to explore various samples;
that their ears help them to hear sounds.

...and it wouldn’t be us if we didn’t include some food sampling in the week would it? Do we really eat with our eyes? Does it matter if you can’t smell the food you are eating? Does it affect the taste?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/scienceclips/ages/5_6/ourselves.shtml good old Science clips! By far the best resource on the internet for science. The quiz at the end of each section is a great way to assess your child’s understanding.
http://www.ehc.com/VBody.asp this is a very detailed website, but this group are certainly very inquisitive! I would suggest that you have a look at this website first, and then sit with your child as you click through some of the animations.
http://www.ictgames.com/bodyrunner.html click on the parts of the body to see and understand their function
http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/our_bodies/eng/Introduction/default.htm click and drag the names of the parts of the body

Challenge...

http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/systems.html for those aspiring doctors out there, why not have a go at putting the internal body parts in the right place? Mmm...it took me a few attempts!
http://www.childrensuniversity.manchester.ac.uk/interactives/interactive_fs.asp?swfpath=science/bodyandmedicine/skeleton.swf find out all about your skeleton

Here I Am

Our new topic is, very appropriately, Myself. This topic encourages the children to look at themselves and appreciate how important they are in their community.

The children will:

Recognise that they have five senses
Reflect on their senses and how they use them
Respect the value of their senses

University

You thought you had years before your child went to university? Well, they actually had their very first university session on Friday! This term, the children will be attending Spanish university, taken by Professors Latham and Higgins. As you remember from last year, the children are really developing their language skills and are in fact, correcting me with my Spanish grammar!
Over the course of the year, they will attend a variety of other universities, including ICT, Multiskills, Art and Craft and Drama. The children will get to graduate from each of these universities, and will gain a diploma certificate! It has proved extremely popular last year and I know the children are glad they can take part this year!

Diaries

Your child’s high frequency words will should have been stuck in the diaries on Friday, so you are able to support their learning at home. The words highlighted in pink, are the words which your child needs to review, as they may have forgotten them over the holidays. It is important that these diaries do come into school every day, as we have messages, information and targets that we need to pass onto you. The children all know where they need to put their diaries each morning when they come into school, but just a little reminder from yourselves, would really encourage that independence even more. Also, we do love to read your comments, so please do write in the diary when you have read with your child every week. We are aiming for a 100% response rate this year, so your efforts to help us achieve this targets are appreciated. From many years experience, children who are heard to read regularly at home, make rapid progress.

School council

We held our school council elections last week and we now have two representatives who were elected by their classmates. This is very responsible role and one which the children really seem to have taken to already. They have some fantastic ideas, which they are eager to present at their first council meeting. Well done to all children concerned – you will be fantastic!

Homework

On Wednesday, your child will bring home the very first set of homework for the year. They will receive a homework book, containing their weekly spellings and a piece of maths homework. We would ask that these are returned next MONDAY morning, in the folder that they came home in. I know some of you may be keen to complete all the homework in one go and return it as soon as possible, but it would be helpful for all staff it was brought in all together on Monday, to help with storage. As discussed at the induction meeting, we will test whether or not your child has understood the spelling pattern by choosing three or four of the words and asking them to write them in a sentence, which will be dictated to them. If you have any questions regarding homework, please do see any of the team.

I think that is all for this week, but keep an eye on the diaries, as we do include some information in those too!

Have a great week!
Year 1 team x