Friday 26th April

Welcome back to school! We are looking forwards to our new topic 'Our Country', and our final topic 'Water World' for this final term of Year One! Please look at the school website for further details about our learning. There is a link to the topic overview on the 'Learning and Information' page.  In maths, we have started learning about multiplication and division. We started by counting forwards and backwards in 10s and working out how many groups of ten were in different numbers. Here are a few questions we tried: We then challenged ourselves to solve problems using our learning. Here are some examples: Please think up some questions like this to practise at home. Please also practise counting in 2s, 5s and 10s.  This week in English we have been learning about ‘Traditional Tales’.  Over the next two weeks we will be focusing on the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’.   We began by listening to the story and joined in with the repeated refrains.  After we recorded the story as a story map using simple pictures to represent the key moments.  On Friday we thought about the story from the first little pig’s perspective and showed this using a ‘mood map’.  We thought about how he felt at each key moment during the story – at the beginning when he left home, when he got the straw, when he was building his house and so on.  Look at the words we used to describe his emotions and the journey of his emotions.  As in all good traditional tales there is a happy ending for the good characters. At home you may like to read different versions of the Three Little Pigs and talk about what is the same and what is different.  This will give your child ideas for when they come to plan and write their own story next week. You may like to encourage your child to retell the story in their own words.  Can they use   story words - Once upon a time….. Suddenly… They lived happily ever after…… time words – Then…. Next… Soon… After…. repetitive refrains - I’ll huff and I puff……. No! Not by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin I will not let you in. So he huffed and he puffed ….. verbs/ed  endings – trotted, worked, knocked, huffed, puffed, prowled, jumped, blazed, boiled Phonics This half term  in phonics we will be learning about suffixes (endings in words).  In Year One when we are adding suffixes to words, the root word always remains the same, it doesn’t change. This week we have been focusing on plurals. We added s to the third person singular (verbs)   eg I see - he sees, I come – she comes, I draw – he draws, I read – she reads We added s to nouns eg one dog - two dogs, one star- the stars, one goat- two goats All the words above have one syllable after adding the s – clap and see. We added es to verbs ending in ch, sh, ss, x, zz  eg I watch – he watches,  I brush – she brushes,  I kiss – he kisses We added es to nouns ending in ch, sh, ss, x, zz  eg one church - many churches,  one stitch – lots of stitches, one fish - two fishes, one box - two boxes All the words above have two syllables after adding the es – clap and see. We have learnt if the word has one clap add s, if 2 claps add es. Can your child show you how they use their phoneme fingers to segment the words above (both singular and plural)  and then blend them back together again? Can they spot the digraphs in the words above. Is there only one digraph in these words or do some have more than one? Spelling ideas. Perhaps you could get your child to think of a sentence using the words above with this week’s digraphs and the word and ‘he’ 'she' and ‘they’ to practise the common exception words. D n’t Don't forget all the Year 1 common exception words are in your child’s Progress Book. In computing this half term, we will be learning about coding, using ScratchJr. We will be encouraging basic understanding of algorithms, and how to create precise instructions for visual programs. We will be developing a sense of creating, debugging and logical reasoning. If you have a tablet at home, you might like to download it and practise.  We hope you have a good weekend - and we might see you at the allotment tomorrow morning! Year One team