Christmas Writing – Foundation – 17.12.21
In Foundation, we have been working hard to develop our writing skills. This week, we decided to write our Christmas lists ready for Christmas Day. We worked so hard to form our letters beautifully and used our phonic knowledge to support us in writing words.
We were resourceful and used sound mats to help us form our letters correctly. We were also resilient and kept trying even when we found it tricky!
Amazing work Foundation! 🙂
Foundation have been learning Phonics. We learnt all about the letter ‘s’ and the sound or phoneme that it makes. We even had a go at writing it. It was a real challenge but we were ‘Stickasaurus’’, and showed our resilience by not giving up. We even used some Metacognition questions during our learning time to explore our understanding further.
Then we snipped snakes with scissors in the ‘finger gym’. This helped us to practise the letter ‘s’ and we were working the muscles in our fingers.Â
We also made spaghetti soup and mixed up lots of ingredients with our spaghetti. Yummy!
Can you remember any things that have ‘s’ as the initial phoneme?
 
Wow, Foundation! What an amazing 8 weeks it has been. You have blown us all away with your fantastic attitudes towards your learning and the challenges you have faced. We are SO PROUD of each and every one of you and your phenomenal resilience. It has been a pleasure to teach you all at home! I can’t wait to see you all on Monday! 🙂
This week, in literacy, we have been learning all about dinosaurs. We labelled dinosaurs, wrote a postcard to a dinosaur and even went on a dinosaur themed reading treasure hunt! This linked to our Cornerstones topic ‘Dangerous Dinosaurs’. We have been looking at Julia Donaldson’s ‘Cave Baby’ and identifying prehistoric animals.
In phonics, we have been continuing our learning on adjacent consonants or consonant blends. We have read, written and used adjacent consonants. We are even fantastic at putting our words into context to help us understand what they mean. We are now so confident!
In maths, we have been looking at our number of the week – number 9. We have been using the bar model to partition number 9 and have been learning about measuring. We have been looking at different ways of measuring using different resources like rulers, cubes and feet! We even extended our understanding by discussing what we can measure. We knew we could measure many things such as time, length, height, width, speed and weight. We used our metacognition minds to plan, monitor and evaluate our process for measuring the witches broom from ‘Room on the Broom’ on World Book Day! We found that the broomstick was 7 cubes long.
 
   
On Wellbeing Wednesday, we talked about returning to school and how we might be feeling. We also looked at our new social story and discussed the things we are looking forward to on Monday.
On Friday, we had a celebration of our amazing learning over the last 8 weeks. We feel so proud of our resilience and enthusiasm! We watched a video of all of our fantastic learning, here is a short clip:
Here we are sharing our favourite pieces of work with our friends:
Well done again, Foundation, for being home learning heroes!
Foundation have been working so hard this week, displaying their amazing growth mindsets! They have been using their ‘metacognition minds’ to justify and reason. Well done Foundation for another fantastic week! 🙂
We have been developing our oracy skills by trying a daily ‘odd one out’ challenge. We collaborate and share ideas using key language such as ‘I agree…’ and ‘I believe…’ Here is an example of an odd one out challenge:
We have been so excited to start our new Cornerstones topic ‘Dangerous Dinosaurs’! We have learnt lots of interesting facts. We now know that the T-Rex had teeth that were bigger than bananas! We have been making dinosaur footprints, creating dinosaur silhouettes and writing dinosaur speech bubbles! We also created our own dinosaurs!
 
In literacy, we have been learning all about winter. We even made some bird food ‘cakes’ to make sure the birds are keeping warm. We also looked at some pictures of snowflakes and made a list of all of the adjectives we could think of. We then up-levelled our adjectives to make them even better with shades of meaning! We used some fantastic adjectives such as ‘twinkly’ and ‘transparent’.
In maths, we have been learning about the number 9. We have been looking at how it is a square number and can be made from 3 lots of 3. We have used lots of different resources and approaches such as numicon, part-whole models and dominoes to help us learn all about the composition of number 9. We have been using the metacognition cycle and have been planning, monitoring and evaluating our learning!
We have been challenging ourselves in phonics as we have been learning all about adjacent consonants and vowels. We added the word ‘adjacent’ to our vocabulary as we now know that it means ‘next to’. Throughout the week, we have been looking at different adjacent consonant or ‘consonant blend’ words and have worked at putting them into context by using them in sentences!
 
We have also been engaging in lots of additional activities to support our wellbeing such as going for beach walks, learning about Chinese New Year and water play!
 
Foundation have been very busy this week! We have been learning all about 2D and 3D shapes in our maths learning. We went on a shape hunt, created some shape pictures and even challenged ourselves to create repeating patterns. In phonics, we have been practising our tricky words. We extended ourselves using our oracy skills to put the tricky words into context! In literacy, we have been learning about the North and South Poles! We made some beautiful pictures and labelled them. We have also been creating our own winter themed songs and used our metacognition minds to challenge ourselves in all areas of our learning. Some children had a go at redrafting their work to make it even better! We have really enjoyed our Cornerstones topic “Starry Night” and this week, we completed some interesting ice experiments! We even wrote our hypothesis (vocabulary word)! Well done Foundation for your amazing enthusiasm, eagerness and positive attitude towards your learning. You are superstars and we are so proud of you!
We watched a video to celebrate and reflect on all of our brilliant learning. Here is a short snippet:
A huge thank you to all of the parents and carers of Ash and Beech for your continued support! Have a lovely half term! 🙂
Have a look at our incredible learning below:
Ash and Beech have been working incredibly hard this week. In phonics, we have been recapping some very important trigraphs. We have also been extending our learning by putting our words into context and using them in sentences. In maths, we have been continuing with our learning about number 8 and have even challenged ourselves to look at number 18 and how it is made from a ten and 8 ones. In literacy, we have been continuing our learning about ‘Dear Zoo’ and even made our own story books, they looked amazing! We have also been having lots of fun learning all about our Cornerstones topic ‘Starry Night’.
We have also been thinking about keeping our minds healthy for Children’s Mental Health Week. We thought about ways to support our friends and discussed the importance of talking about how we are feeling. We all made sure that we took 15 mins on ‘Wellbeing Wednesday’ to look after ourselves. Here is a fantastic example of one of our wellbeing activities:
Foundation have worked particularly hard at using their ‘metacognition minds’ this week. We learnt all about the metacognition cycle and how we can plan, monitor and evaluate our learning. Ash and Beech worked so hard and planned their response to a maths activity. They explained what resource they would use and why it would be useful, they then monitored their progress and evaluated how well it worked! We even ensured we used our oracy skills to communicate our answers effectively! WOW, Foundation, you really do have magnificent metacognition minds!
We are so proud of you all! 🙂
Take a look at our amazing learning below:
Foundation have been working so hard this week and I have been so impressed with their enthusiasm and resilience. We have had a really exciting week on zoom! We have been playing ‘I spy a tricky word’, feeding polar bears fish and enjoying lots of fun games. In maths, we have been continuing to explore the number 8. We looked at composition of number, worked with number lines and used our ‘metacognition minds’ to extend our learning and make our brains bigger. In phonics, we have been recapping our digraphs and reading sentences with capital letters and full stops. For our Cornerstones topic of ‘Starry Night’, we have been making bat caves, finding out interesting facts about stars and discussing bedtime routines. In Literacy, Gerald the giraffe came back to visit and we wrote some fantastic sentences about what zone he was in. We used words like: frustrated, thrilled and heartbroken to describe Gerald’s feelings. We also worked hard on up levelling our adjectives to describe the animals in Rod Campbell’s ‘Dear Zoo’ and I was amazed to see words like: colossal, immense and towering! What fantastic vocabulary we have in Foundation!
Amazing work Foundation, you are making us so proud! 🙂
Have a look at our amazing learning below:
Foundation have blown me away this week with their phenomenal attitude towards their learning! They have been ‘Tryatops’ by trying their best and have challenged themselves in all areas of their learning. We have been talking about the ‘Zones of Regulation’ this week and are making sure we are discussing our feelings with our adults. In maths, we have been experimenting with the part-whole model and the bar model. In literacy, we have been writing some beautiful letters to Gerald the giraffe from ‘Dear Zoo.’ We have also been practising our digraphs in phonics and challenged ourselves to read some adjacent consonant words! We have been developing our skills in oracy and have been debating on whether or not zoos should exist. In our zoom sessions, we have been playing some games such as ‘Blankety Blank’ and ‘The Chase!’
Amazing work Foundation, you all deserve a huge STAR!
Take a look at our incredible learning below:
 
Foundation have continued to blow me away this week with their amazing learning. They have been working so hard on developing their understanding of number 7 in maths. We have looked at different representations and how we can see number within number. The children have also been recapping digraphs in their phonics learning and have been continuing with our topic of Dear Zoo in Literacy. They have created some fantastic story maps to support them in retelling the story and worked hard to learn the Makaton actions to accompany it.
During our zoom lessons this week, we played ‘The Masked Singer’ and fed some of our phonics words to a dinosaur!
Well done for an excellent first full week of home learning Foundation! You are making all of your teachers so proud with your resilience and attitudes towards learning! A huge thank you to all of the parents and carers of Beech and Ash for your support! 🙂
Have a look at some of our phenomenal learning:
Foundation have blown me away this week with their amazing remote learning. They have all been so resilient when facing a new challenge and have made Miss Banning and Miss Redwood so proud. It has been so lovely to see your smiley faces on Zoom and I have enjoyed playing lots of fun games with you all. This week, we have learnt lots about our new topic of ‘Starry Night’ and have introduced our new Talk for Writing topic – ‘Dear Zoo’. We have also been learning about one more and one less in maths.
Well done Foundation, you are SUPERSTARS! 🙂
Look at all of our fantastic learning:
 
 
   
  
 
    
Wow Foundation! You are continuing to make us very proud. We love getting photographs of all the great work you have been doing. Well done!
Look at this fabulous phonics and what an amazing frog!
We have also enjoyed reading your responses to the questions for your reports! It’s great that you are proud of all you have achieved and you have even more goals which you would like to reach. Keep practising and you will get there. 🙂
We have been learning more of the phase 3 digraphs this week. Look what we have been doing to support our learning.
We decorated cars when we learnt the ‘ar’ phoneme and we used torn paper when we learnt ‘or’.
Look at this writing! We all tried so hard.
The children in Foundation had great fun with the activities relating to the ‘u’ sound they had learnt in their phonics lesson! They made umbrellas using cup cake cases!
The children in Foundation had great fun making glasses to help them remember the letter ‘g’ and the sound it makes. Everyone decorated their glasses and wore them in the classroom whilst practicing pronouncing the ‘g’ sound. They looked great!
We have learnt ‘c’ and ‘k’ this week, so we made crowns for kings!
We have even had a go at writing the letters.
What hard work we’ve been doing! Â Can you think of any words which begin with ‘c’ or ‘k’?
Today we have learnt the letter ‘g’ in our phonics lesson. We then made ‘goo’ by mixing cornflour and water. We had to describe how the goo felt and we even tried writing in it!
Can you think of any other words which begin with ‘g’?
There are lots of useful apps to help support your child’s phonics learning at home on a tablet or iPad. We use the twinkl app in school as they have a fab trash and treasure game with real and alien words!
Like discussed in the meeting yesterday, phonics play on a laptop is great! Games like obb and bob and buried treasure are great to use in preparation for our screening test.
This afternoon we had great fun playing phonics. We collaborated to segment and blend words and matched the aliens to the alien words and pictures to the real words. If we completed our board we shouted BINGO!
This morning we focused on the ‘ai’ diagraph. We played a game that involved us walking around our classroom and writing down the words that had been dictated to us with the ‘ai’ sound in. We did some great segmenting and blending! 
We have been learning about adjacent consonants in phonics. There is an ‘adjacent consonant’ in the word ‘band’. So, of course, we decided to start our own band!
This morning we have been looking at real and nonsense words! We know that nonsense words have an alien next to them and they sound a little bit funny! However, today the aliens had disappeared! It was our mission to do some fantastic segmenting and blending to sort out the real and alien words.
Today in phonics, year 1 have been developing their knowledge of alternative spellings of ‘ie’. We played a reading and matching game to help us to develop our knowledge of the ‘ie’, ‘igh’ and ‘i-e’ spellings.
Can you remember which spelling is the digraph?
Which one was the trigraph?
Which one was the split digraph?
Wow, we are doing well in our phonics lessons. Today we learnt the letter ‘g’. We played with ‘goo’ and made glasses. Look how fabulous we look!
Can you think of any words which begin with ‘g’?
Our ‘Must’ activity this week was writing words with adjacent consonants. Look at the frogs we labelled. The second sound in these words are often trickier to hear. We listened carefully for the ‘r’ in ‘frog’ and the ‘p’ in ‘spots’. Some of us even wrote a sentence. We wrote ‘The frog has spots.’
Try writing some words with adjacent consonants:
flag
crab
green
slug
Today we learnt the ‘ar’ grapheme in phonics. It’s phoneme sounds like a pirate, so we made eye patches and pretended to be pirates!
 
Can you think of any words which contain the phoneme we learnt today?
What fun we had in our phonics again today!
From reading our tricky words as fast as we could before they disappeared behind Mr Messy, to orally blending words containing the ‘ew‘ digraph and counting the letter sounds with our phoneme fingers, making real and nonsense ‘ew‘ words and blending them out loud, before writing ‘ew‘ words in our phonic jotters and thinking of sentences for each word.
Explain to someone at home what happened when we spelt blue and blew. What about bew and boo? What did we discover?
How many more ‘ew‘ words can you think of? Use your phoneme fingers to orally blend out loud each letter sound and say the word to someone at home. Make a list of all the different ‘ew‘ words you can think of and bring them in to show us!
The children amazed us all today with their super sitting as they experienced their first ever phonics lesson. There was lots of learning about the phoneme ‘s’ , its sound and how to write it in cursive script. We printed and cut out spiral snakes, we traced s letters in the sparkly glitter and coloured our own snakes. The children were able to think of lots of words beginning with s for our working walls. Super stars. Can you spot anything that begins with the letter ‘s’ ?
Our phonic’s mission today was to find a tricky word on the playground, read it, then find someone else with the same word to match it, then write it and say a sentence with it it. The extra challenge was to write a sentence with the tricky word in it. Keep practising the tricky words at home. Your hard work is paying off.
 
We discovered that Homophones are words that sound exactly the same but are actually spelt differently and have different meanings.
We identified the different spelling patterns and had lots of phonic foam fun writing our homophones.
We then collaborated to create rhyming homophone sentences!