This week we have been very busy exploring letters. We are continuing to focus on blending and segmenting letter sounds to make words.

Blending is when you hear the sounds in a word, for example:c-a-t and blend them together to make the word cat.  

Segmenting is when we hear a word and sound out or segment the sounds. For example, leg has the sounds l-e-g.

Blending and segmenting help us to read and write. That is why it is very important that we can hear the letter sounds and articulate them correctly. There are many different games that can help us to hear the letter sounds. We looked at the picture segmented the sounds and found magnetic letters to form the word! 

We have also revised the sounds and names of letters and played lots of different games that help us to recognise letters and the sound they make. We had to read the letter and find pictures that started with that sound.

We also went digging for treasure and had to find gold coins in the tub. When we found a coin we had to read the word. If the word was real we wrote it on our whiteboard, if the word was made up we put it back in the tub.

More maths around the room

We are also focusing on our listening and speaking skills to ensure we speak clearly and understand what the speaker has said. To develop our listening skills we played a barrier game on the mat where we had to listen very carefully to Mrs Beale's instructions and place the correct coloured counter on the correct place on our boards.

To develop our speaking skills we played a guess the picture game where we had to describe a picture to the group and they had to guess what we were holding. We then made a detctive book with a secret lift the flap and gave clues to decribe what was hiding behind the flap.

This week we have been very busy exploring descriptive language and how to use it in our narratives. We read the story 'Turn Over Tuesday' by Phyllis Root and as a class used the pictures to create a retell.  We then acted out a puppet show of our retell.

We are continuing to learn letter sounds and have begun to blend letter sounds to form words and and segment (sound out) words into the letter sounds.  

These are all different ways we made words. When you read or write a word you need to sound out the letters.

In Maths we have been exploring numbers beyond 20 and have learnt the 1-9 pattern when reading a two digit number. We played a game using MAB blocks and sorted them into piles to make certain numbers. We know that 46 can have 4 long blocks (tens) and 6 small blocks (ones). We then played a game where we rolled a dice and had to subtract the amount of blocks from our game board. The winner was the first person to subtract all their blocks.

We also painted our hands and made a class chart. We then counted all of the fingers. We counted 110 fingers altogether.