Week beginning 16.09.24

It’s been another great couple of weeks in P1A.

In literacy we have introduced another two letters as part of our phonics work. These are Pp and Tt. Please have a look at the short videos in the next post to hear the ways we’ve been teaching these sounds to the children. It’s been wonderful to see the children spotting these sounds in words they see around the classroom and in the stories we’ve been reading. They’ve also been exploring them through their play too. It’s been great to see children sharing their learning from home too.

We’ve also been having fun exploring rhyming words through Julia Donaldson books like The Scarecrows Wedding and The Smartest Giant in Town. As part of this we were deciding whether the rhyming words we were coming up with were real or made up. Lots of us have been choosing to share and act out stories during our play too.

As part of our drawing and writing we’ve introduced the describing bubble. This will form the foundation of all the children’s writing throughout primary school and it helps us to think of different ways we can bring our drawings and writing to life by considering characteristics like colour, size, shape, position, texture, doing, We used The Smartest Giant in Town to help with this; discussing this as a class and then creating drawings that reflected these descriptions.

In maths we’ve extended our awareness of numbers to five and this has included lots of exploration about the different ways you can show and make these numbers. Our wonderful pattern work has continued and although we’ve only explored repeating patterns in class, the children are naturally starting to explore other types of pattern types too including growing patterns and symmetrical patterns.

We’re lucky to get a fruit delivery each week and we used this as a wonderful opportunity to explore the maths in answering the question “Is there enough?” We looked at who wanted which types of fruit, we found a way to compare the number of people with the number of pieces of that fruit. It was sometimes tricky to compare so we used counters and number tracks to make the comparison easier to see. We could visually see whether there was enough and we started to explore other questions like, How many people want bananas? How many bananas are there? Are there more bananas or more people? How many more people are there than bananas? After discovering that there were 8 people and only 4 bananas, the children worked out that each banana needed to be split equally into two parts which led to a lovely discussion about the fraction one-half.

This week we’ve also introduced “Dot Talks”, these give us a way to see different people’s perspectives on how they group a collection of dots and work out how many dots there are. The children only get to see the dot arrangement for a second before it’s hidden so they have to visualise the dot arrangment in their minds. Here are some of the different ways we came up with. The language that was used to describe how they saw the dots was super and we shared some different ways that we could work out how many there were altogether.

In our wider play, it’s been wonderful seeing the children develop important life-long skills of problem solving and resilience as they test out designs to see what works and what doesn’t or ways they want to extend what they’ve done further. Marble runs have been a big favourite and the variation in structures has been very creative. The thinking and discussions the children have been having connect closely to engineering and mathematics. These have been wonderful to hear. There has been some artistic design in the mix too with the children creating images out of shapes and exploring which paint colours can be mixed together to create other colours.

Music has been another firm favourite with lots of children deciding they were going to create a band. Lots created shakers testing out different materials and hearing the difference in sounds. We explored pattern on the triangle too and the guitar is usually in high demand as well!

Have a great weekend and we’ll see you all again for more fun and learning next week!