Phonics sounds

Since we have been back to school we have been practising our new phonic sounds. We are now learning phase 3 sounds in phonics. This means we are learning graphemes (letters that makes sounds) that are now stuck together to make a new sound, sometimes this can confuse us. So we will be needing extra help to remember them.

So far we have learnt;

qu for queen

ch for church

sh for shop

th for thing

ng for strong

ai for rain

ee for sheep

Please help us at home by practising finding these around the house, in books, on signs or posters when we go out and about. Please practise writing them with us in words. A great game to play is to write them on post-its then get us to find them around the house and read them.

Below is a chart of all the graphemes we will be learning in phase 3.

If you want any games to play www.busythings.co.uk has lots of phonics games (which we play in school) or apps such as Hairy letters and Hairy Phonics 1, 2 and 3 would be good to get for Android and Apple tablets, they are not free but are good quality. If you want to see them in action we use them during our guided reading sessions in the morning so we could show you how they work!

     Review of Hairy Phonics

‘Teach your monster to read’ is also a very good reading and phonics resource as it helps children to read in the order they learn their sounds.

 Teach your monster to read. You can also access the games on computers by signing on to the site and that version is FREE!

A mega Tuesday

Its fair to say that today our brains have been electric. With fantastic phonics, when we learnt our new sound ‘g’. We practised writing it and putting it into words with other letter sounds we knew. We should now be able to read words with s,a,t,p,I,n,m,d and g. We can do it in class, maybe you could help us at home?   
Rhyme or slime? This week we’ve been learning about the rhyming words in shark in the park. We know words rhyme if the end of the word sounds the same. 

We played a game called rhyme or slime, we got yo try and match rhyming word pairs in the slime. Messy!

      

In the afternoon we created our own Marble run challenge.    

Learning to work as a team. Finding the problems like runaway marbles!
    
    

Then trialing ways to solve the problems. Like building barriers with bricks and moving things.
    
    
 
We started to make our 3D Sharks out of recycled material with a Ruby’s mummy’s help.

  
  We knew what shapes we needed. Some of us even decided to make certain types of sharks, such as hammerhead Sharks.  

Reading

As part of our phonics lessons we have been learning our letter sounds (phonemes). We have learnt – s,a,t,p,i and n. We have also started learning the words I, the and A. 

As well as learning phonemes we have now started putting them together to read. Which is why as well as reading every day we should try and practise our sounds.

We can read cvc words (consonant-vowel-consonant) such as sat, pat, tap. Some of us have even had a go at writing them.

  We have been practising our formation and love using our colour pens. We can practise doing these things at home if you help us. Remember practise makes perfect.

Miss Irwin taught us how to use robot arms to segment and blend words to read them . We can turn into robots by using our robot voices and by moving our arms up for each phoneme.  If you ask us we can show you.

Parents information

Blending: Joining together individual sounds to read the whole word. E.g. h- a- t = hat

Segmenting: Separating the word into individual sounds to spell it.

How you can help us at home-Blending and Segmenting Games

Robot speak and actions

Explain that robots cannot say whole words, they can only speak using the individual sounds in words (sound talk). Choose a CVC word e.g. pan and say it in robot speak, using up motion arm movements for each sound to make the segmentation explicit – p-a-n. Ask your child to say what the robot is trying to say. They will blend the individual sounds together to hear the whole word. When your child is confident doing this orally, they can then move on to writing down the word the robot is trying to say. Next, reverse roles. Provide your child with objects or pictures of CVC words. They choose one to say to you in robot speak, using the sawing arm movements. You then guess what they are saying.

Phoneme fingers

 Say a word and ask your child to show you, on their fingers, how many sounds they can hear. For example, cat = 3, cup= 3, chips = 4, sock = 3, flat =4. Start with CVC words and then move on to CVCC words and blends such as sh, ch, th and ck. Once your child has identified how many sounds and which sounds, they are ready to write this word.

 

 

Letter formation and crocodiles

On Wednesday we started our learning by finding the letter P in our classroom. We looked on labels, posters and found things that started with ‘ p’.  
 P for park. P for pear.    
    
P for playdoh. P for paper.

 Then we practised our letter P formation.    

    
 Miss Irwin was so impressed with us she put all our work on the writing wall to show visitors how great our writing is.
After playtime we had P.E when we had to pretend to be crocodiles. We had to avoid the crocodiles (hoops) by moving around them. Then we practised balancing beanbags on different parts of our bodies whilst moving around them.    

    
 Then in partners we pretended to be the crocodiles and crocodile feeders by practising throwing beanbags into the crocodiles hoops to feed them. 
  
   We loved being hungry crocodiles. 

Amazing blends!

As part of our phonics lessons we have been learning about blends. Blends are the letters that come together at the beginning or end of words that sound like the letters are stuck together. For example bring has a blend at the beginning – br. We have learnt to say the blend section fast to read, but to say it very slowly to spell it so we can hear all the letters making the blend. It’s very tricky! Today we read words with blends in then tried to write them in our own sentences. 

Look at our fantastic attempts.  

                                   

French cafe and building walls

This morning in phonics we worked on our blends at the beginning of words. Such as St, ch, th , the, star, bl, br, tr and had a go at writing words and spelling them with blends in. 

If we say the words slowly and think about what our mouth is doing it helps us to write down all the letters in the blend. 

Maybe we could try sounding out and writing some of these words at home! 

Tree, three, blend, spend, trip, skip, creep, sleep. 

We did also do some secret stuff which we can’t tell you about. But during secret work time some of us did find time to build some walls.
After lunch we had French with Mrs Oakes and she opened up her cafe again. This week she was selling ‘pain au chocolate’ . We had to colour in and cut our euros to go and buy the food in the shop. We used hello, thank you, please and many more French words we’ve remembered from over the last year. 
After playtime we did some year 1 writing in year 1 books for Mrs Hodder, she’s going to be so impressed! 😀 but don’t tell her it’s a surprise! 

May Day babies!

 

   

  
Today we checked the duck eggs to see if there were any ducklings growing inside. We could see tiny little peanut shapes inside some, with burns going to it. We checked our calendar and we think they are due to hatch on or around May Day! 

We have to keep our fingers crossed though and remember to pray for them. 

This afternoon we also looked at our beans to see how they were growing. They have started to sprout roots! 

   
        
So as scientists we investigated them with our magnifying glasses and started to record their growth in our Bean Diaries.  Today we drew what our bean looked like and labelled its root. 

Miss Irwin says we need to plant them in soil now to give the bean food to grow bigger. We will be doing this tomorrow. 

We learnt our new sound ‘air’ today. It’s very tricky to remember these big sounds so please can you practise writing it with us at home and putting it into words and sentences. 

Questions!

         
After reading the Kenyan letters and their questions today was our day to write some questions. 

First we went on a question mark and full stop hunt in the secret garden. We were very good at remembering question marks. 

Then we practised writing them  

  

After that we had a good, hard think about what questions we wanted to ask the Kenyans. Then we had a Kenyan style writing lesson. We had no electricity and sat in rows. We wrote on lined paper like the Kenyans, using our small handwriting. Rberimg to segment and bend, to use super sentences and put a question mark at the end! 
 
Our writing was AMAZING! Miss Irwin is reading them tonight, to decide if we deserve anything extra special for all writing super questions on our first attempt. 

This morning we also did our first attempt at Mayday dancing. It was tricky at first learning how to dance up and down, banana peel and spin round! But for our first go we were very good 😃. 

   
The adults weren’t bad either! 
This afternoon we practised our new sound ‘ear’. It’s quite tricky but we are trying to remember it because it’s also a word. We wrote it in a sentence to show Mrs Hodder, it said- “o have a year 1 brain.” . Mrs Hodder was very impressed. She said she can’t wait to have us in her class next year if we are that clever.  

We checked on our beans after play to see if they had grown. Our beans had swollen up in size and their shells were starting to split.  

  

  

  

  

It was very exciting, we didn’t know the beans would swell up! We might check them again tomorrow! 

A Gruffalo hunt! What’s a Gruffalo hunt?

Today we practised our new sound ‘I’ and finished our first sound card sheets. A copy will be coming home soon so we can use them at home with our families, to support our reading and writing.

After playtime we had a special delivery from Percy. He’d sent us a letter saying he’d made us a Gruffalo hunt! We didn’t know what a Gruffalo hunt was! He explained we needed to find the Gruffalos on the field and there might be a prize at the end. So off we we went.

On our hunt we heard Owl in the tree, saw snakes log pile and found fox’s hole. Then Nathaniel and friends found a parcel. In the Parcel was a Gruffalo! It was a puppet and a small world background. So now we can re-tell the story and play the Gruffalo with our puppets.

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In the afternoon we had French with Mrs Oakes. We learnt to sing bonjour with Albert the French boy.

After French Mrs Armitt read the story of the journey with us. We’ve been learning about journeys in our worship. We thought about journeys we would go on. Our ideas blew Mrs Armitt’s mind!

Tomorrow we plan our food for the Gruffalo picnic. Such busy days we have at school, it’s no wonder our brains are so big and heavy at night when we go to sleep.

Outside phonics and playdoh Gruffalos

On Tuesday morning we practised forming the letter ‘a’ in our phonic lesson. Then Miss Kippen and Miss Irwin had a surprise for us…outside phonics. We got to use squirty bottles, big chalks, ribbons and paint brushes.

After playtime we had a number hunt from Percy. He’d left hidden numbers around the playground for us to find. Some of us even thought we had seen him through the window.

After that we used our new colourful playdoh to make our own Gruffalos.