This fortnight we had 70% of students attending school 95% of the time or more.  Thank you to those parents who communicated absences in advance, we were able to organise learning events based on each students needs.  If you know your student is going to be away over the next few weeks, please let me know so I can take this into consideration when planning.  Of course illness is a different matter and students should stay home to recover and limit the spread of germs.  

In Reading, we have been learning to identify syllables (sound beats) in words, use chunking to break unknown words into decodable sounds, and blending these sounds together to read the whole word.  It is important when we do this that students sound out the word, say the whole word and continue reading. If students fall into the trap of going back to the start of the sentence and re-reading the whole sentence every time they reach an unknow word, they become fatigued and lose the flow of meaning.  This in turn can impact comprehension and the enjoyment of reading. We will continue to focus on passage reading over the next few weeks, with an emphasis on fluency.

In Writing we have been learning to persuade our readers by using emotive words, facts and targeting our reasons to suit our audience.  Sorry in advance if you have some argumentative students over the next few weeks! Next week we will be focussing on starting our writing at the moment of change.  We have banned the boring - no sentence starters like: On the weekend… In the morning I… We will begin our writing at the start of the most interesting event. You can support at home by asking the students what the most interesting part of their day was (could be the best part of their day or it might be the worst part).

In Maths we have been consolidating our number sense by solving simple (and some tricky) addition and subtraction problems.  The students have been getting really excited about identifying the MANY different strategies they now know to solve problems - doubles, friends of tense, partitioning, counting on, counting back etc.  We will continue this learning by incorporating number talks and connections to place value.

I hope you are all enjoying practising Little Donkey at home.  Just a reminder if you could please start bringing in costumes for Starry, Starry Night now, we will have a few dress rehearsals at school.  Students may choose whether they are Mary, Joseph or a traveller (in which case they need a towel for their head and sheet or towel for dress/toga), or a donkey (in which case we have made a mask/ears at school and they just need to wear “donkey” clothes - brown, grey or white).