Dragons

To send me photos of you hard at work or of your work please email me at rbridge@brassington.derbyshire.sch.uk

Thank you :)

I have attached the document we use in school for Year 1 and 2 spelling patterns. The document may look slightly overwhelming at first but do not worry too much- look at the far right column and see examples of the spelling pattern in action i.e. the n sound before nk- bank, think, honk. Use the example spellings and see if you can come up with some more words that use this pattern/rule and encourage the children to use them in different sentences. 

I will hopefully be able to email out/upload to here set spellings like we have done in class for your child to continue to use in the coming weeks.

In Literacy, Year 1 and 2 have been writing instructions and how to use bossy verbs (ask your child to explain what this means and to give you an example- they will enjoy playing Bossy Verbs Simon Says). The writing we had started in class was instructions on how to trap an elephant. The children were writing an interesting opening statement as to why one might want to trap an elephant (link to our African learning- they trample over crops) and were then going to write step by step how to create a trap ensuring they used bossy verbs. You may want to have a try at building an elephant trap at first (my example was to dig a large hole, cover it with leaves and leave a trail of tree bark leading up to the hole) so the children have an experience of building a 'trap' before they then write step by step instructions.

If you feel the above is a bit tricky then if you do any baking or making ask the children to write instructions for these. In class they instructed me how to brush my teeth correctly, they wrote instructions for making a jam sandwich etc. The more inventive the better.

For Reception we have been focusing on constructing simple sentences and then writing them down. It doesn't matter if they spell the words wrong or miss out sounds, the fact they are 'writing' and able to 'read' their sentence back to you is progress.

We have done some sentence substitution in class where we have started (verbally and written) with a simple sentence such as 'The red dog'. We then underline a word i.e. red and the children have to use a different word so then the sentence could become something like 'The big dog'. Then get them to change the word dog, 'The big cat' etc. See below for an example:

The red dog

The big dog.

The big cat.

The big cat jumps.

The big cat swims.

The big cat swims fast.

Turn it into a game and see how far the child can verbally change the sentence, you write it down like above and let them see how they have changed the starting sentence in a few words to something completely different.

After the Easter holiday our new topic is "Do all fairy tales have a happy ending?" Use this time now to read different fairy tales and have the children tell them back to you. This is key for Reception as they need to be able to say and retell the story in order to learn how stories are structured and eventually write them down. 

Play adjective tennis- get the children to tell you as many adjectives as possible (a describing word i.e. beautiful, big, scary) and write them down. Then take it in turns to use one of the adjectives in a sentence. The more bizarre sentence the more fun you will have i.e. The big green toad jumped over the humongous unicorn horn.