Headteacher: Anna Moss

26.04.24

Hello Red Class Families,

Another busy week in Red Class with lots of super learning. However, before I talk about school learning, can I just celebrate the standard of home learning. The level of detail, research and creativity has been amazing! It was an incredibly tough decision for ‘Homework of the Week’. Well done to all our Red Class superstars.

We covered lots of tricky words in Phonics. When we teach tricky words, we look at the parts that are phonetically plausible and then talk about why the other part is tricky. So, we looked at ‘here’ and talked about how ‘h’ was the usual sound and ‘ere’ was making the ‘ear’ sound. We also listened carefully to the second and third sounds in words like ‘strong’, ’string’ and ‘strap’. Try reading words like these at home.

In Literacy lessons, we used action verbs (jump, hop, clap) to write sentences. The children were also given the challenge to add ‘and’ to make their sentence longer. We finished the week by writing sentences about Anna from our class story, ‘Anna Hibiscus’s Song’. The children worked hard to use a capital letter and a full stop and to use their phonic knowledge to spell words. Here are a few examples of their sentences:

-Anna can jump and count in the garden.

-Anna can dance and swim in the pool.

-Anna can clap and dance in the field.

-Anna can jump and dance in the veranda.

It was lovely to see the children using vocabulary from the story and having the confidence to create their own ideas.

A couple of weeks ago, we played an addition game on the interactive whiteboard and I was surprised to see the children reverting back to counting the images. As a result, we’ve spent the week working on recognising numbers, doubles, number bonds and finding 1 more. We played the same game today and the difference was striking. The children no longer relied on counting each picture but used their mental maths skills. Well done, Red Class.

Science lessons were all about plants. We named plants, talked about their features and finished the week by sketching them as scientists.

Mrs Hipkiss was busy on Tuesday helping the children with their numeral formation. Any extra work on 7 at home would be great as we tend to reverse this one. We say, “Across the sky and down from heaven. That’s the way to make (write) a seven.”

No wonder we’re all tired with all that learning!

Wishing everyone a great weekend,

Mrs Webb and Team Red Class XXX