Take a bow superstar learners! 👏🙌🤩🌟

Wowee, what a week we’ve had in P1B! We were kept busy with lots of learning. There have been lots of wow moments where the children have taken significant leaps in their learning! Well done P1B – you are all superstars! 🌟

Literacy

Last week we had began working on consolidating and extending our knowledge of the sounds and letters for b, p, and d. These letters have strong similarities and it takes time for children to recognise the differences that make these letters unique. It is normal for young children to mix them up and make errors with their orientation. When forming the letters we learned about small, tall and fall (when part of the letter falls below the line) letters. The children were great at identifying these! It is important to continue exposure to these letters and practise hearing them, looking at them and writing them.

This week we focused on revising a set of sounds and letters called The Curly Letter Family. As we have learned c, o, a, d, g, e and s, we took time to get to know them better.

In formation we spent time learning how to form the curly letters. We spent time looking at their similarities (where we begin, the direction we travel when writing them ) and whether they are small, tall or fall letters.

We went outside with our chalk to practise writing and making formation movements on a bigger scale too!

At snack time the children kept thinking about letter shapes and began sharing snacks that they thought looked like letters! This was really fun! Can you spot what letters they found in their snacks?

Snack Letters! Yum!

In reading we have been working hard at blending and oh my what progress the children are making! I’ve been delighted to see these wow moments in their learning. Many of the children are able to orally blend the sounds together. That is, if they hear each sound said in sequence they can put them together as a word! Many children are able to visually blend, that is where they see the letters in sequence and can say the word that they make. With lots of practice the children will become more confident and fluent with this skill. Then we will have readers! It’s such an exciting time in P1 to see these skills come together!

To help with the skill of writing, we’ve been doing lots of practise with segmenting and word building. Segmenting is when we hear a whole word and we are able to break it down into each sound e.g. we hear cat and we can hear that it is made up of the sounds c, a, and t. The children are getting so much more confident at this skill! In word building, we have a word that we want to make and we have to identify each sound and find the corresponding letters to build the word. Many children are becoming more skilled at this and it shows in their writing! This week in writing we focused on the ‘tools for writing’. We use many tools when we write such as: formation of letters, identifying sounds, segmenting and word building as well as word boundaries spacing and punctuation! We pack a lot of teaching into our writing session. This week the children selected their own picture to write about and did an amazing job! As we all learn at different paces and have our own areas of strength, each child has specific skills to work on. I support each child with their next steps. After writing, we shared each piece of writing. It was lovely to see how delighted they were with their progress! They all took a bow and were praised by their classmates! 🙌👏🌟