17.1.19 Sandymere Learning Update

Date: 17th Jan 2019 @ 12:17pm

Well what a wonderful surprise this week with the mysterious arrival of a dragon's egg!  The children have been busy predicting where it has come from and have shown great compassion looking after the egg.  Some children have been singing lullabies, reading stories and even hugging the egg.  It is a great mystery and we hope to find out soon where it came from and why it is in our classroom.  The arrival of the egg coincided with the creation of the most wonderful dragon on the wall of Sandymere by Mrs Monson.  We can’t wait for you to see it!

The dragon theme started last week with poetry and we are now enjoying the story of The Dragon Machine by Helen Ward.   It is such a fabulous book about a boy called George who simply loves dragons.  The children in Sandymere have been imagining they were George and discussing how they would feel if they saw a dragon outside the window.  There was some fantastic vocabulary used including curious, terrified and interested.

In spelling and phonics this week we have explored the prefix un and how this can change the meaning of a word such as happy becomes unhappy, fair becomes unfair.  All the children have been encouraged to use un words in their speech and writing this week.  We have also explored alternative pronunciations of ie.  This week’s homework links to hunting for ie words in books and magazines.

Maths at the start of this week has seen us completing our 2D shapes unit.  The children created repeating patterns with shapes also producing the most fantastic 2D shape dragons.  We are now moving on to addition and subtraction and really putting into practise our knowledge of numbers to 10 to working with bigger numbers.

We have started our science topic ‘Animals including humans’ this week by thinking about our top 10 favourite animals.  We then moved on to animal groups and considered which animals fit into which groups.  Perhaps you could talk to your child about different animal groups such as reptiles, amphibians, mammals, fish and birds.  Could they produce a poster showing these animals in their groups?  They could watch these clips to find out more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHYi4fqeEdw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBJrRwa7Zjo

Keep up with the fabulous home reading.  We can really tell who is reading regularly at home as there is some fabulous reading progress taking place.  Remember to talk about the books as well as reading the words.  This is a skill we are practising within Guided Reading sessions.  This week’s whole class text was Elmer and we had some fantastic question/answer and discussion time within our groups about the text.

That’s all for this week.  We hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

I’ll see you bright and early on Monday.

Mrs Williamson on behalf of Team Sandymere.