Well Done!
Congratulations to Archie and Owen for being elected to represent Reception Class in the School Council. I am sure they will do a good job.
School Council Elections
Next week, we’ll be holding elections in school for new school councillors. Two children are elected from each class, including Reception. In the past, the school councillors have played an important role in major decision-making such as choosing our school charities, selecting playground equipment and choosing the colour of our uniform. Please talk to your child about the elections and encourage them to stand. They will need to be confident in speaking with older children and adults. If your child would like to stand, they need to tell us by Friday and be able to talk about what they would like to do for the school and its pupils if they were elected. They will deliver this speech early next week and the elections will be held on Thursday.
Learning to write
Now that your child knows lots of letter sounds, they are keen to use their phonic knowledge to write. The process of writing is not easy and research has shown that for some children, especially boys, holding a pencil can be physically painful if the muscles of the thumb and fingers are not strong enough.
Why not try some of the following activities at home to help develop the necessary muscles for writing:
- paint with fingers and with a variety of brushes
- use dough and plasticine to pound, roll, mould and pinch
- use scissors, hole punches and staplers
- pick up and sort collections of pulses, pasta and buttons
- let your child help prepare fruit and vegetables by cutting and pealing
- do up buttons and zips independently
Please encourage your child to write at home and hold the pencil correctly. However, remember that if your child’s muscles are not ready, forcing them to write at length may put them off. Practising a little every day and doing some of the above activities is far more beneficial than a longer period of writing practice.
This week’s phonemes
This week, the new phonemes are ai, ee, igh and oa.
Remember to say the letter names (‘ay’, not ‘ah’) and encourage your child to join up the letters when writing.
This week’s ‘tricky words’ are my and was.
This week’s phonics
This week the new sounds are sh, ch, th, th and ng. The ‘tricky words’ are me, we and be.
When referring to the individual letters in these sounds, the children should now be encouraged to use letter names as letters do not stand for sounds when they form part of two-letter and three-letter graphemes eg the sound ‘sh’ is written with the letters s ‘ess’ and h ‘aitch’ not ‘ssss’ and ‘h’.
We also teach the children to join up the letters to form these digraphs to make it easier for them to remember.
Phonics
This term, most children will be learning at Phase Three of the government’s Letters and Sounds programme. They already know nineteen sounds and can blend and segment two and three letter words. The purpose of this next phase is to teach another 25 graphemes, most of them comprising two letters (e.g. ‘oa’ as in ‘boat’), so the children can represent each of about 42 phonemes by a grapheme.
Children will also continue to practise CVC (consonant – vowel – consonant) blending and segmenting and will apply their skills of blending and segmenting to reading and spelling simple two-syllable words and captions. They will learn letter names during this phase, learn to read some more tricky words and also begin to learn to spell some of these words.
Some children will continue to work at Phase 2 and will be given extra support to help them progress.
If you have any concerns about your child’s progress with reading please ask.
This week, we are learning the phonemes j, v, w, x, y, z, zz, qu and the tricky words he and she.
It’s Party Time
On Thursday 15 December it will be the Christmas party for Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 after lunch. The children must come to school in their school uniform but are welcome to bring some party clothes to change into for the party.
Please ensure that the clothes are easy for the children to put on themselves and that they are in a named carrier bag. Please remember that they will be playing party games and dancing so make sure that the shoes that they bring are sensible.
Thank you.
This week’s phonemes and ‘Tricky Words’
The last phonemes in Phase 2 are f, l, b, h. This week we will be assessing the children to see who is ready for the next phase. Children should know all the sounds (phonemes) of the letters learnt so far and be able to blend (read) and segment (spell) a word like s-a-t. We call these ‘cvc’ (consonant, vowel, consonant) words.
Don’t worry if your child is not able to blend and segment yet. We will continue to practise these phonemes and skills and remember it does take some children a little longer to be able to do this.
This week, the ‘tricky words’ to learn are I, no, go. A fun way to learn these is to play ‘pairs’. Write each word out twice and take turns to turn over two words at a time trying to find a matching pair.
Don’t worry if they get some wrong! These are hard to remember – they need plenty of practice.
Tricky Words
This week, your child will start to bring some ‘Tricky Words’ home to learn. These are words that have have unusual or untaught phonemes and are ‘tricky’ to decode. Show your child the word and try to blend it as usual, discussing the letters that are ‘tricky’. For example, in the word ‘go’ the last letter does not represent the same sound as in the word dog. Keep looking at the words, use them in a sentence and point them out in their reading book. This week, the tricky words are ‘the‘ and ‘to‘.
Still measuring!
