What's Been Happening in Literacy?

I have not made contact for a couple of weeks as my computer's fan died, so I had to wait for it to be repaired before I could get back to our blog.

We have been very busy in this time and the children have been flying along in their learning.

The Reading Block

The children were introduced to a new game called 'Eggcup Memory.'

The focus is to build the children's skills in clearly hearing and recognizing the vowel sounds.

Using their memory skills they had to match the picture with its correct vowel letter.

The children were also introduced to sound boxes, which builds their skills in hearing sounds in words.

Here the children had to look at the picture to say the word.

Then they had to stretch out the word to hear their sounds.

Next they had to put the correct letters into the boxes to make the word.

Ask your child about these games that they played during our small group time.

We have also been learning about different letter patterns and the sounds that they make.

Each letter pattern has a story and a sign to help us to remember them

Here Ollie Orange loves to dance with Wiggly Worm, but often stands on him with his big feet.  Wiggly Worm shouts "ow" as in cow and Ollie Orange apologetically says, "ow" as in snow.  

Ask your child about these letter patterns, as well as what Bossy Fairy E does to the letter 'a'.

For 'Rr' week we made these colourful racing rabbits.

For 'Dd' week we made these beautiful Diving Dolphins which are adding to our beautiful classroom displays.

The Writing Block.

We have been having a little go at persuasive text where the children think, and write about points for and against an idea.

This sounds very grand, and way beyond a Prep, but they have shown that they are able to do this really well with our simple approach as you will see.

We wrote about a pet that we would like to have.  These ranged from dinosaurs to guinea pigs.  The children talked about their pet with a partner, then went to draw their picture.

Next they wrote all the great ideas that they had for  why this pet would be so great, and attached this to the left of their picture.

Finally they wrote about why this pet would not be such a wonderful pet after all.  They attached this to the right of their picture.

Archer wrote,

"I want a dinosaur because it can take me for a ride."

"But why can't I have a dinosaur, because it will go on the house."

Cooper wrote,

"I want a crocodile because I will feed it food."

"But I can't have it.  It might smash the windows."

Ryan wrote,

"I want a guinea pig.  He will make cupcakes for us."

"But it will poo on the carpet.  The dog will eat it.  It will not be quiet."

The children all had some great quirky ideas and loved to share them with the grade.

Do call in and look at your child's amazing writing.

What's Been Happening In Maths?

Addition

We have been building our understanding of addition for a while now with our work in subitising.  

We  are able to instantly recognize 5 as 3 and 2 counters, or 1 and 4 counters etc.

Next we introduced the + and = signs so the children could make and read an addition number sentence.

The children moved one counter from the first plate to the second, which changed the number sentence, but the answer stayed the same.

The children start to see how 2 and 3 makes 5 

and 3 and 2 makes 5.

5 + 0 = 5    4 + 1 = 5   3 + 2 = 5

0 + 5 = 5    1 + 4 = 5   2 + 3 = 5

 Next we introduced dice to make our number sentences more random.

The children rolled the dice, put one on each plate, matched their counters to the dice, then read their number sentence.

They worked with partners so that they could share their learning.

Next we started to read and then record our number sentences.

The children were very focused and excited at their progress in our addition work.

Finally we started to think about the number partners for 10 alone.

We made the partners with counters, 2 and 8, 6 and 4 etc.

Then we introduced this game where the children had to match the number partners for 10.

The children are becoming more and more skilled at remembering the number partners for 10.

We have also been working on writing our numbers correctly.