13.12.18 Sandymere Learning Update

Date: 13th Dec 2018 @ 9:14am

Well this is the penultimate blog before we finish for Christmas and the teaching and learning is still going strong in Sandymere.  This week we have continued to look at the story Harvey Slumfenburger’s Christmas Present and considered how the main character lives ‘far, far away at the top of a roly poly mountain’.  The children then came up with their own suggestions for ‘far away’ places Harvey could live.  These ranged from mud huts in Africa, to treehouses in the rainforest to space stations on Mars!  I have to say, all of these places might be tricky for Father Christmas to deliver presents to.  The children wrote some fantastic descriptive sentences to describe these places making good use of their basic skills in writing.

We have had quite a lot of experience in art this week starting with experimenting with colour mixing to create the colour green for the trees on our Mark Rothko inspired Christmas cards.  We also continued to find out about the artist Jackson Pollock and the children completed some fantastic Pollock artwork using drip, dribbling and flick painting techniques.  The children discussed the moods they wanted to create for their painting and used some fabulous emotive language during discussions.  I particularly loved the ‘brain fog’! 

This week in phonics we have continued you to look at alternative phonemes.  We have also begun checking the children’s decoding skills using a past Phonics Screening Check.  The children are really trying hard with their segmenting and blending and we are very pleased with their efforts at decoding both real and alien words.  This is something that all the children can practise at home too and there are many websites/games accessible for download.   Such as

https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/ChildrensMenu.htm

In computing this week we have talked about internet safety and the importance of staying safe online.  As a class we discussed who we talk to online and what games we play.  This then led to discussions about age ratings on games and why the age ratings exist. 

In maths this week we have begun to look at numbers from 11 – 20.  We began by matching numbers in words and numerals then looked at how numbers are constructed.  We used Numicon and Base 10 to demonstrate how there are tens numbers and ones numbers.  The children have made a positive start with this and will continue to work on this as the week progresses.

Our PSHCE lessons have focussed around the importance of listening to one another carefully and engaging appropriately in conversations.  We talked about turn taking and asking questions that relate to the topic of the conversation.  This week’s VIPs have shared their news and the children showed improved listening skills and have started to ask some wonderful questions relating to the news being shared.  Well done children!

The Christmas song rehearsals are going well – thank you for practising the song with your child at home!  We have even introduced some basic sign language to our song.  We can’t wait to perform it to you next Thursday afternoon.

That’s all for this week.

Mrs Williamson on behalf of Team Sandymere