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!
Measuring!
This week Reception have been busy measuring everything in the classroom!
This week’s phonemes
This week, the new phonemes are g, o, c and k. The children will be taught that c and k together make the same sound. They will look at words with ck and identify that this usually occurs at the end of a word.
When learning a digraph (two letters making one sound), the children will be encouraged to join-up the two letters when they write.
This week, the high frequency word to learn is ‘and‘.
Super Sculptures!
It is not only children who are involved in learning. On Tuesday, all of the teaching staff were involved in a Art workshop and some super sculptures were produced.
Check out the new member of our school community, Sebastian.
Mrs Burke, Mrs Weekes, Mrs Maver and Miss Hewson worked together to sculpt using newspaper and modrock and this is the result.
Look out for him in the middle building.
