The grand reveal!

Thank you for your patience with the blog this week. I have taken the slides directly from our assembly so that you can see who said what in our showing session.

The children were fantastic and tried really hard to learn their lines, so well done - it can be scary to speak in front of all those grown ups!

Charlie's page:

What do you do with a hat like this?

If you are a spaceman you use your white hat to hear. 
If you are a good policeman you use your rainbow hat to chase a really bad guy.
If you are a really good builder you use your yellow hat to protect your head from red and white bricks.

Marah's page:

What do you do with a hat like this?

If you are a big farmer you use your hat to feed the pigs.
If you are a sea captain you use your hat to drive the boat.
If you are a train driver you use your hat to drive the train.

Ellie Mai's page:

What do you do with a skirt like this?

If you are a ballerina you use your skirt to spin around fast.
If you are a singer you use your skirt to sing a song.
If you are a princess you use your skirt to go to parties.

Lucas' page:

What do you do with a hat like this?

If you are a loud spaceman you use your hat to protect your oxygen to keep you alive.
If you are a strong builder you use your hat to protect your head from hard bricks.
If you are a cyclist you use your hat to protect your head from the road.

The rest of our pages are inside our class book 

'What do you do with clothes like these?'

I will put this on our 'We are Orange Class' writing wall along with the children's other pieces of writing.

As always, you are more than welcome to come on in after school and have a look through with your child. I'm sure they'd love to show you what they've been up to. 

Keep your eyes peeled...

With the new set up for Friday assemblies in full swing, it is our turn to share this week! For that reason, I don't want to spoil the surprise by posting too much on the blog before the children have had a chance to show you what we have been doing. 

After the assembly, I will put all of the bits from our assembly on the blog for you to see if you to revisit / see, so don't worry if you can't make it on Friday.

In the meantime, here is your one and only clue...

See you soon!

Welcome Wednesday

Thank you to all of the parents / carers who joined us for our first 'Welcome Wednesday' this week. We loved having you here to read with us. It was lovely to see so many children enjoying a story from you all.

Welcome Wednesday will happen weekly at 2.40pm. Come on in and enjoy sharing books with us before home time.

Place value.

Today we started to look more closely at place value and what it means. This is crucial for the children to understand fully before moving on to more complicated maths.

Understanding place value means that your child will know what each digit in a number represents.


For example, lets look at the number 27.

Without a solid understanding of place value, it could be easy to mistake the size of a number. The child may see the number this way...

The child here sees the digits 2 and 7 and can say 'this is 27', but the understanding of the size of the number that is written is not there.

Once the children understand place value, they will be able to explain that actually, 27 is made up of 2 tens and 7 units (or 'ones' - we use these terms interchangeably) as below...

Note that in this example, the difference in tens and units is apparent. I used Base 10 in this example, but Numicon works too... 

How to help your child at home

• You could play 'guess my number', which we play in school. You think of a number (for example 16) and give the clue 'my number has one ten and 6 units'. Your child then works out the number based on the clue.
• You could print off your own Base 10 (the sticks and cubes) and make numbers together just as in the example above. http://lrt.ednet.ns.ca/PD/BLM/pdf_files/base-10_blocks/base10_all.pdf 
• You could even make your own Base 10 to practise with. All you'd need is something you can split into ones and sets of ten (Lego pieces, stacking cubes, kebab sticks and play-doh balls are a few ideas off the top of my head!

Please do feel free to come into class any day after school (Tuesdays I run sketch club so may need 5 minutes or so to get them started) and I'd be more than happy to run through this with you. Sometimes reading it just isn't the same!

Miss Gallagher

Snow!

It snowed at playtime! We had great fun playing outside in it for a little while. A few of us were clever and hid out under the canopy to stay dry, so I'm sorry for anyone who we missed in our photos.

Well done Orange Class for coming back in and getting into learning mode again ready for our 'big write' after such an exciting time. Our stories look wonderful and I'm excited to read them this weekend.

As always, you are welcome to come and see our stories (based on our talk for writing from assembly) which will be in your child's wallet on the wall in class by Monday after school.

Have a wonderful weekend - if it snows, I'd love to see any photos on Monday!

Reading for pleasure

Welcome back! I hope you all had a wonderful break.

This half term we are really trying to promote 'reading for pleasure'. This means that we want children to enjoy reading rather than seeing as something that they have to do.

Alongside your child's school reading book (which is still important to read regularly to keep improving those key reading skills) we also invite your child to bring in something they enjoy reading from home to have in their tray.

This doesn't need to be a book!

We talked as a class today about some of the things that we enjoy reading at home and we had some great ideas! For example...

• A magazine
• A short news story of the day
• Jokes / silly stories 
• Information pages printed from the internet on a topic of interest
• Notes from friends / family members (could you have a penpal at home?)
• Wordsearches / word puzzles

These are just a few suggestions. Any other ideas are welcome!

As we will be doing more D.E.A.R (drop everything and read) sessions where children can just have 5 minutes to enjoy reading - it'd be great to make it fun and meaningful to the children. 

Here are a few photos from our session today...and a big thank you to Mrs Bales for bringing in some lovely magazines for the class.

If you catch your child reading at home, please do take a snap and we will be sure to display it in our new reading corner! I wonder which strange places we can find to read...