Beech Class

Welcome to Beech Class – Years 1 & 2

Teacher: Caroline Norris
Teaching Assistants: Tracey Thompson & Tara Butcher

Beech Termly Booklet – Spring 2019

What have we been learning this week?

15.3.19

This week Beech have completed their booklets persuading their readers to visit beautiful St. Lucia. We concentrated on describing the scenery with amazing adjectives and thought about how we could set out our booklets to make them easy for the reader to navigate. We have also finished writing our character profiles for our Charlie and the Chocolate factory style characters.

In maths, we looked at the climate and average temperatures of St. Lucia and compared them with Thornford. Year 2 also tackled some very tricky fraction work and Year 1 worked hard on word problems. We all enjoyed making our our pizza toast with our lovely parent helpers. Thank you to them.

What have we been learning this week?

8.3.19

Beech have had a very busy week. We really loved hearing the story of Charlie and the Chocolate factory as part of the activities to celebrate World Book day. We have started to create our own Roald Dahl inspired characters which we hope to share with you soon. We loved performing our Charlie and the Chocolate factory dance today in our sharing assembly!

We also did a fantastic job researching St. Lucia for last week’s homework. We shared this work enthusiastically with each other this morning and looked at the official tourism website to give us extra ideas of what to write in our booklets about St. Lucia. We have been trying to use exciting vocabulary to make our writing exciting for the reader, and our homework is to be word detectives and find interesting words in our reading and home books.

In maths, both year groups revised 2D shapes and then carried out an investigation into fractions and 2d shapes. It was fantastic to have the Year 1s from Acorn joining us for this session. We all had fun and learnt a lot about the importance of equal parts in fractions.

What have we been learning this week?

Beech Class have been learning about fair trade this week and how we can help farmers and producers in other countries. We enjoyed working together to research the subject using the iPads and produced some eye-catching posters to help other children at school learn more. We also managed to include all four different sentence types in our posters! We have now begun to research the beautiful island of St. Lucia, where fair trade bananas are grown. Next week, we will be creating an information booklet all about the country, and comparing it to England.

In maths, the Year 1 children have finished their chapter on numbers to forty and have become much more confident with number recognition and making numbers using place value apparatus. The Year 2 children have been learning about fractions and how it is important that all the parts are equal in size. We are all looking forward to our Shrove Tuesday topic morning next week!

Beech Class Information

Homework and Home Learning

Spelling words:

Year 1: launch, haunt, August, phone, elephant, photo

Year 2: alphabet, elephant, photograph, phoneme, telephone, badge, bridge, fudge, smudge, edge

Homework: Y1: practising segmenting and blending real and nonsense words. Y2: fractions of shapes.

Here are some links to online games that may help with maths practice:

Hit the Button

Number fact families

Please ensure that spelling test books & spelling folders are brought to school by Friday.

Don’t forget that we also have links to lots of educational games (from external websites) in our learning links section.

Reading – All children have a reading book. This is primarily a home reading book, to read to parents or other adults. Please see the section on reading rewards for further information. Within school, we carry out a range of other reading activities, such as guided (or group) reading, where the teacher hears individuals read and then the group discusses the text, and shared reading, where the class reads together.

Reading Rewards

We are very keen for children to become regular readers and we use a reward scheme to encourage home regular reading, at least 3 times per week. Mrs Thompson will be updating the chart every Monday, so please ensure that home reads are written in the home link book. Thank you!

Ideas for talking about books with your child:

As your child gets older you tend to ‘hear’ them read less and less because they become more fluent. However, it is important that the children continue to develop their comprehension and reasoning skills, through talking about the books they are reading. These brief discussions will count towards your child’s reading reward too, so please note them in their home reading log.

Here are some ideas to help:

Fiction

1) Ask them to find their favourite paragraph in the chapter they have read
· Ask them what happened before this?
· Why did they like it?
· What do they think will happen next?
· How do they think the issue/problem will be resolved?

2) Ask the children about their favourite character in the book. Then ask them if they have read any other books with similar characters? Or ask them if they know of books which have characters that are completely the opposite.

Non-fiction

Is the information presented clearly?
Do you think then layout is good? Would you lay it out differently?
What age do you think it is intended for?

Year 1 Parent Information

Phonics

We currently use the Letters and Sounds phonics scheme as a basis for teaching phonics, though this is supplemented by the guidance from the National Curriculum for English 2014, Years 1 & 2.

Please find below some information taken from the Government guidance on the Year 1 phonics screening check, which is carried out nationally.

What is the Year 1 phonics screening check?

The phonics screening check is a quick and easy check of your child’s phonics knowledge. It helps your school confirm whether your child has made the expected progress. The check normally takes place in June.

How does the check work?

Your child will sit with a teacher he or she knows and be asked to read 40 words aloud. (20 real words and 20 ‘pseudo words’)
Your child may have read some of the words before, while others will be completely new.
The check normally takes just a few minutes to complete and there is no time limit. If your child is struggling, the teacher will stop the check. The check is carefully designed not to be stressful for your child.

Year 2 Parent Information

Assessment Information

As well as ongoing teacher assessment, which takes place throughout Year 2, pupils will take end of Key stage 1 tasks or tests in Reading, Spelling, Grammar & Punctuation and Maths. These new tests were used nationally for the first time in 2016. The administration times of these tasks and tests are flexible to a certain extent, though most will have to be taken during May. The results of the tests are combined with teacher assessment of each child’s work throughout the year to show where each child is in relation to age related expectations (ARE) by late June. These results will be reported to parents in the annual report in July. As we move from the old curriculum to the new, it may appear that your child is no longer doing as well as before. This is nothing to worry about and is due to the way the new curriculum has been designed, with some difficult concepts moved down to Year 2 from older age groups. Please let us know if you’d like further information or discussion about your child and how they are getting on.