Welcome back!
We hope you had a great half term break and are ready and refreshed for the run up to Christmas (ooh is it that time already?)
Speaking of Christmas, we will be practising all the songs and dances for our production ‘A Christmas Tail’ over the next few weeks, so you may just hear a few of them being hummed around the house – they are VERY catchy, so be warned!
Many thanks to you all for attending the parents evenings before the half term and it was lovely to put faces to names. May I also just thank everyone for the amount of support you are giving your children at home, as we can see how much the children are coming on – a real credit to you all.
Literacy
We begin this half term with a very short unit on Labels and Captions. We will begin by looking at the purpose of labels and captions and will label the parts of a car or a bicycle and write a sentence to explain their function.
We then move on to changing one of the displays in our classroom, but it really is over to the children! Before the holidays, we started to look at our new topic of Famous People and we chose Florence Nightingale to investigate. They have already produced some lovely portraits of her in charcoal and chalks, which will form part of the display. During our literacy and history sessions, the children will learn how to write labels and captions for the portraits and pictures of Scutari Hospital.
The children will also have the opportunity to write letters home from the hospital, as wounded soldiers who are being treated by Florence, in our Role Play area. For those interested in Dinosaurs, they will be able to write labels and captions for the dinosaurs and the setting in our Small World activity.
'Big Writing'.
Not a reference to the size of the script which your child writes, but more a development of the quality and quantity of their writing. Over the next few weeks, we will be trying out a different approach to independent writing. In preparation for this, we would like your support with an activity called ‘Swagbagging’ at home.
All you need is your child's home reader or any magazine or newspaper that you are reading. They will also need a 'SWAGBAG', which could just be a sandwich bag with the word SWAG written on it! Read it out loud to your child and get them to 'steal' any WOW words that they think are interesting - particularly adjectives or adverbs. Then, get them to write it down on a piece of paper and put it in their swagbag.
At the end of the week, empty out the swagbag and they will find that they have lots of words that they now can try to incorporate into their writing. This also works if you use 'POSH' words during conversations, which they can also try to swagbag!
You will laugh, furrow your brow and amaze at the number of times that your child pretends to grab the air during conversations...they are swagbagging your vocabulary!! We would love to hear of any successes you have at home with this.
http://www.roythezebra.com/ - a great site for lots of literacy games and ideas
http://www.roythezebra.com/reading-games-word-level.html lots of interactive reading games to play online – follows all phase 3 patterns
http://www.britishcouncil.org/kids-topics-dinosaurs.htm lots of activities to do with dinosaurs
http://www.bnsc.gov.uk/3306.aspx this shows the children captions to do with the solar system. Make sure you turn the sound up for this one!
http://demo.iboard.co.uk/screens/thread_home.htm?thread_id=10# choose the caption and sequence session and type in your own caption to them picture. Remember VCOP!
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/transport-english.html transport labels - why not add your own caption?
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/vegetable-english.html vegetable labels
http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/ search for lots of little video clips for all areas of learning – well worth bookmarking!
Numeracy
After having completed our assessments in the week before the half term, we begin our week with investigating the properties of 2D shapes. The children were very good at identifying the name of the shape, but had more difficulty in describing the properties, such as whether they had straight or curved edges and the number of sides.
They will move on to identifying and describing shapes such as a pentagon, hexagon and octagon. Also, we will introduce a quadrilateral to the children – a very ‘posh’ name for a shape which has 4 sides. Think ‘Quad bikes’ and they usually remember!
The second part of the week, we will be looking at subtraction, using a number line.
http://mathematics.hellam.net/maths2000/shapes.html match shape and its name
http://www.innovationslearning.co.uk/subjects/maths/information/shape_facts/shape_facts.htm names shapes, sides and symmetry
http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/gp/pupils/maths/2dshapes.htm match words with the shapes
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/primary/publications/mathematics/12884/nns_useict0260002venn.swf sorting triangles
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=tangram tangrams
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=digitmenu good for addition and subtraction to 20
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=quad polygons and quadrilaterals
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/assets/resources/flash.php?&file=vpinboard4#Scene_1 virtual pinboard
http://www.ictgames.com/partition.html partitioning numbers into tens and units
http://www.wmnet.org.uk/wmnet/custom/files_uploaded/uploaded_resources/853/PlaceValueChartv4.swf place value charts
http://www.wmnet.org.uk/resources/gordon/Subtract%20-%20%20Number%20Line%20v5.swf subtraction number lines
http://www.deltamicro.co.uk/primary_online/planetstaken.html subtraction aliens
The children will be introduced to their ‘I can’ statements for numeracy this week, so that they can keep track of how they are doing:
I can use 2-D and 3-D shapes to make patterns, pictures and models.
I can name most of the 2-D and 3-D shapes
I use in my work as well as those I see in my classroom and playground.
I am beginning to picture a shape in my head.
I can describe where something is using words like ‘next to’, ‘in front of’, ‘underneath’, ‘on top of’
I can use objects to take away a small number from any number up to 20.
I can record the practical situation on a number track.
Topic
As mentioned earlier, the children will be learning all about Florence Nightingale over the next couple of weeks. By the end of the topic, they will have produced a lovely book, which will be used to teach other children about her life and work.
We started our topic on Famous people last week, and the children were spellbound when we read the story of Florence Nightingale – particularly the boys! They were fantastic at comparing the differences between modern day medicine and hospitals in Florence’s time.This week, we will be looking at the journey which Florence made and be able to locate and label the places she visited on a world map. They will also be looking at reasons why journeys in the past took longer and were much more dangerous. They will also be writing an account of Florence’s life, using captions to support their writing.
http://www.snaithprimary.eril.net/flo2.htm
http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/files_uploaded/uploaded_resources/11134/Crimeanwar.pdf the photographs are really useful from this site
Here I Am
We continue with our theme of Invitations and move onto the Relate section. Maybe you could share some invitations at home with your children, which you have had as a family.
http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/vtc/invitations/eng/Introduction/default.htm design, write and print their own invitation.
Have a good week!
Year 1 team xxx
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