Friday 7th December

This week we have been practising our Christmas performance and continuing to learn our Christmas story – Shh Santa. We started by creating a ‘mood map’ of how Santa was feeling at different times in the story. Please try this at home with stories you read with your child as it helps them understand how characters are feeling and why they act as they do. 

Then we ‘phoned home’. We pretended it was Christmas morning and Santa phone home to tell his parents about his ‘busy, busy, busy’ night.

 The next day we wrote sentences using pictures from the book. As usual, we tried to remember to:

• ·         Put the sentence in our head
• ·         Use capital letters, fingers spaces, write on the line, full stop
• ·         When writing we word we remembered to say the word, finger the word, write the word
• ·         Hold our pencils correctly and try and form all letters using the letter families

When you have read a book with your child please encourage them to write a sentence or two about it. They can then mark their work, giving a tick for everything they have remembered!

This week in maths we have been been revisiting our learning about place value.  This time with numbers between 11 and 20.
We began by counting forwards and backwards from 11-20.  We talked about the pattern heard.
We chanted 
10 is made up of one ten and 0 ones
11 is made up of one ten and 1 ones
12 is made up of one ten and 2 ones…….

We talked about what happens to the ones in the number and what happens to the ten number in numbers from 11-19, then what happens when we reach 20?
You may like to practise this at home and ask your children questions such as how many ones in 13? How many tens in 19?

We then used the tens frame to represent different numbers from 11 to 20.


What numbers do this tens frames show?

We looked at a selection of numbers and talked about which number was the odd one out?
11, 12, 13,14, 51, 16, 17
We had to prove it and explain how we knew.
This is a good way to find out how secure your child’s understanding of place value is.

We then represented numbers from 11-20 in different ways.  Here are some we found.

Your child may like to choose a number between 11 and 20 and try to represent it in as many ways as possible.  Two ways could be the numeral and the word (spelt correctly).

Help your child at home to secure their recognition and writing of number to 20.

We have continued our leaning in computing by following a sequence of instructions to make a paper dog. We realised it really helps if:

• ·         The instructions are in the correct order
• ·         They have a picture to help explain
• ·         All the instructions are there!

We had lots of fun making our pets and maybe you could give your child a sequence of instructions to follow. This could include laying the table for dinner, putting the washing away, or any other household activity!

Thank you for sending in your child's costume for our Christmas performance. We have been practising hard and hope you will love it! Have a good weekend, only two more weeks to go! 

Year One Team