This week in Dexter class
Welcome back and a very Happy New Year to all of you. It is lovely to be back in school and to see all the children so engaged and ready to get cracking with their learning. This half of the Spring term is only five weeks long but we will be packing it full of learning opportunities for the children.
This week we will be nearing the end of our Phase 3 phonics learning and focusing on the digraphs ow, oi, ear and er. We will be practising reading and writing words using these and all previously taught sounds. It is good to see that children have kept up with their reading over the festive period. This will become even more important now as we progress into Phase 4 where we will build on our existing phonics knowledge and start reading and writing more complex words and sentences.
Our Literacy, language and communication focus is centred around the traditional tale of The Gingerbread Man. We will be discussing what a traditional tale is and discussing others that we may know such as Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs etc. We will compare them and talk about problems, solutions, the role of the baddies and the heroes. We will start by talking about whether it is fiction or non-fiction and then we will create a story map to show our understanding of the order of events in the story. Later inn the week we will box up the story into it's beginning, middle and end before reading and matching simple sentences and then writing the story ourselves.
In Maths, we are starting the week by talking about zero -It is amazing the conversations you can have about 'nothing'! We have looked at what zero is and what it is not, talked about different representations of zero such as number of counters on a ten frame, fingers, Numicon etc. We will be moving on to what we need to take away to get to zero using numbers up to 5. We will also be using number lines to count up from and count back to zero.
Our value this term is Trust and our worship will be based upon this. RE this week will also will look at the value of Trust using the story of The Storm on the Lake. We will talk about stories that are special to Christians and to those of other faiths throughout the term.
Starting this week but over the course of the entire term, we will be looking at growth, seasonal change and farming around the world including how this has developed from the past to the present. I will be discussing Fairtrade and talking about harvests from other countries.
So, lots to look forward to this term. Please remember to wrap the Dexters up in their warm coats, gloves and hats as the weather is set to be very chilly, brrrrrrrrr!
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