10.1.19 Sandymere Learning Update

Date: 10th Jan 2019 @ 9:11am

Happy New Year and welcome back! 

Firstly may we say a huge thank you for the kind and generous Christmas cards, gifts and messages of goodwill.  We hope that all our families had a lovely Christmas break and managed to have a good rest.  The children have shared some wonderful news and enjoyed telling their friends about gifts they received and places they visited over the festive period.

We are looking forward to 2019 and have lots of exciting activities planned.  If you look on our class page you will be able to see the Curriculum Map which outlines everything we shall be teaching this year.  This terms topic is called Who thought of that? Where we will be looking at inventors and inventions with a touch of a dragon theme thrown in too!  All will be revealed next week when we start our new book called The Dragon Machine.  (shhhh …Please don’t read this book to your child over the weekend as we want to keep the story a surprise!)

In English this week we looked at the book Dragon Poems and explored several poems from within including ‘There’s a dragon in my classroom’ (I hope not!), ‘The Pet’ and ‘Found!’ Each of these poems have encouraged the children to listen to rhyme and expand and develop their vocabulary. There were some great ideas from the children too with ‘gleaming fangs’ and ‘hot, orange breath’.  Brilliant ideas!  The children have also tried to create their own dragon themed poems. 

In Maths we have ventured into the world of 3D shapes with a particular focus on cylinder, sphere, cube, cuboid, and pyramid.  We carried out lots of activities working with these shapes including sorting, describing, investigating and even reasoning. Perhaps you could ask your child to look out for these shapes at home too?

In phonics we have been looking at the graphemes ‘u’ and ‘ow’ and their alternative pronunciations.  This week’s homework is focussing on ‘ow’ as in cow and ‘ow’ as in window.  Can your child come up with any of their own words too? 

Mrs Winder has taken the class for PE this week and started to explore dance with the children.  A polite reminder to send PE kits into school asap, we were missing a few yesterday.  Thank you.

This week we started whole class guided reading where we explored the book ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’.  Guided reading involves lots of questions and answers and a deeper look at particular skills and aspects of reading.  Look out for the guided reading stamp in your child’s book.

Phew I think that’s it for this week!

See you all on Monday.

Mrs Williamson on behalf of Team Sandymere.