Many thanks to everyone who came along to the parent evening meetings this week.  We hope you found your meeting useful and enjoyed getting an idea of what your child gets up to during the school day!

This week, we have continued to think carefully about the properties of 2D shapes and we have been looking for shapes in the world around us.

Weekend challenge: how many circles, triangles, squares and rectangles can you find at home?  Can you find any other 2D shapes?

The first sound in our sound bag this week was ‘o’.  When saying the sound, we made sure we were making the ‘o’ letter shape with our mouths and used our pointy finger to draw the ‘o’ shape around our mouths.  (Please note, there is a jolly phonics action for ‘o’ where the children pretend to turn a light switch on and off – the children didn’t learn this one as we felt reinforcing the letter shape was more important at this point but if you are using any jolly phonics resources at home please feel free to use both actions).

The next two sounds to come out of the bag were ‘c’ (curly ‘c’) and ‘k’ (kicking ‘k’), which have exactly the same sound and the same action.  We pretended we were Spanish dancers playing our casatanets as we said ‘c, c, c, c, c’ and ‘k, k, k, k, k’.

This week, we also introduced the idea of tricky words.  These are words that cannot be sounded out as they just don’t make sense when you try to do so.  For example, the tricky word ‘to’ sounds like ‘toh’ if you sound out the sounds ‘t’ and ‘o’and blend them together. So, instead of sounding out, tricky words need to be learnt on-sight as whole words.

Within phase 2 of the letters and sounds programme, there are five tricky words to learn ‘no, go, I, to, the’.

This week, we learnt the tricky words ‘go’ and ‘to‘. We said ‘hey, you’re a tricky word!  You can’t trick me!’ These tricky words were lurking all around the classroom, so we searched high and low to find them and feed them to Sharkey the Shark who thinks tricky words are delicious!  

Lots of words can be sounded out and it is really important at this stage that the children understand the difference.  Here are some words that can be sounded out and use all the sounds we have learnt so far.

sat, pat, tap, sap, as

it, is, sit, sat, pit, tip, pip, sip

an, in, nip, pan, pin, tin, tan, nap

am, man, mam, mat, map, Pam, Tim, Sam

dad, and, sad, dim, dip, din, did, Sid

tag, gag, gig, gap, nag, sag, gas, pig, dig

got, on, not, pot, top, dog, pop, God, Mog

can, cot, cop, cap, cat, cod

kid, kit, Kim, Ken

Weekend challenge: How many of these words can you read? Don’t forget to use your robot arms!