Year 1 Update Week 18

Tuesday 14th January – Year 2 Bake sale

Monday 20th January – CNY Dim Sum Trip (please see e-notice)

Thursday 24th January – Chinese cultural activities day, children to wear traditional Chinese clothing. School closes 3pm for CNY holidays

Monday 3rd February –  BHS CPD day, school closed for children

Tuesday 4th February – School resumes

Happy faces and lots of chatter were found in Year 1 this week as the children excitedly reconnected with friends and teachers. We are beginning our preparations for Chinese New Year and children will be given the task of creating and arranging the decorations in the shared area. 

All vaccination records should now be back at home with the children, please check in their home school diaries if you have not seen theirs yet.

                                                                                                       

  It is time to revisit the children’s understanding of place value. We will build on knowledge of teen numbers and look at how we can make numbers up to 100 using different amounts of tens and ones. The children will be encouraged to show as many different possibilities and ways of thinking as they can. We will also continue to consider how the 100 number square is composed looking out for any patterns and how we can use it to help us answer different questions.

                                                     How do writers and illustrators make their books interesting?    

We will continue to look at how authors create their books. We will consider the impact of layout, illustrations, different fonts and layout features. We will look for the ways that illustrations can give us more details and can show us the words author’s didn’t use.

 Phonics 

The Unit 3 Phonemes are: v w y z j n k e . The children will be learning to blend the phonemes for reading and segment the phonemes for writing and spelling.

The camera words for this unit are:  all  is  me  no  they  said  These are sight words and we teach the children to take a picture of these words in their mind.

Please continue to use the phonics bookmark that will be sent home next week for games and activities that you can play together to support our phonics teaching.

Please also use the new laminated bookmarks that highlight the reading strategies that we are teaching the children in class to decode unknown words that they encounter when reading.                          

 Get Ready to Talk 

As we work on developing the children’s language skills, in the Updates we will be asking you to take some time to sit with your child and talk about something linked to our unit of inquiry. 

Imagine if you could fly. Where would you go and what would you see?

extract taken from 

https://www.brighthorizons.com/family-resources/importance-of-pretend-play-in-child-development  on January 9th 2020

How Pretend Play Helps Children Learn

Pretending is important in child development. Through pretend play:

• Children learn about themselves and the world. Dramatic play experiences are some of the first ways children learn about their likes and dislikes, their interests, and their abilities. They experiment with role playing and work to make sense out of what they’ve observed. Just watch children playing with dolls to see examples of this. Dolls often become versions of the child himself and are a safe way for children to express new ideas and feelings.
• Children work out confusing, scary, or new life issues. Have you ever witnessed children pretending to visit the doctor? One child dutifully holds the mock stethoscope as the others line up for a check-up. More often than not someone gets ‘shots’. This is a child’s way of exploring an experience that is common and sometimes confusing or scary. Through these role plays, children become more comfortable and prepared for life events in a safe way. Children often use pretend play to work out more personal challenging life events too, whether it is coping with an illness in the family, the absence of a parent or divorce, or a house fire.
• Children develop important complex social and higher order thinking skills. Pretend play is much more than simple play activities; it requires advanced thinking strategies, communication, and social skills. Through pretend play, children learn to do things like negotiate, consider others’ perspectives, transfer knowledge from one situation to another, delay gratification, balance their own ideas with others, develop a plan and act on it, explore symbolism, express and listen to thoughts and ideas, assign tasks and roles, and synthesize different information and ideas. In this creative play description, we could just as easily be describing the skills needed to successfully manage a work project for an adult as describing children’s pretend play.
• Children cultivate social and emotional intelligence. How we interact with others is key to our lifelong success and happiness. Knowing how to read social cues, recognize and regulate emotions, negotiate and take turns, and engage in a long-term activity that is mutually beneficial are no easy tasks. There is no substitute for creative and imaginative play when it comes to teaching and enhancing these abilities in children.
• Children synthesize knowledge and skills. Because learning and child development doesn’t happen in discrete pockets of time or during isolated activities, children need opportunities to blend their skills and knowledge together. Pretend play is an ideal way to do this. Think of children playing ‘grocery’ store. They sort by attributes as they group similar foods in sections of the store, use math concepts to tabulate amounts as they determine prices and calculate grocery bills, use writing to communicate by making signs, experiment with shapes and weights as they organize the store, work collaboratively as they assign roles and play together, and much more.

Dramatic Play Ideas & Activities for Children

As a parent or caregiver, you further encourage learning skills and child development as kids engage in pretending. Here are a few children’s activities and tips for pretend play.

• Use stories: Invite your children to recreate a favorite story or take it further and add their own twist. During your pretending game, prompt their ideas by asking questions like: “What do you think happened next?” and “What if the dog didn’t find his bone?”
• Provide dolls and puppets: Make sure your child has ample and regular access to things like dolls, stuffed animals, or puppets. These don’t have to be store-bought; they can be cut out of paper or made from socks. Through imaginative play, children easily ascribe feelings and ideas to these ‘people’ and ‘animals’ and often use them to express, explore and work out their own ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
• Create “prop boxes”: Prop boxes are something most high-quality early childhood programs have plenty of. They are boxes (or bins, crates, or bags) with themed dramatic play materials in them. It’s like having a creative experience in a box. Examples of popular prop boxes are a flower shop, office, restaurant, post office, and shoe store. Have a few materials in prop boxes and let your children’s creativity take it from there.
• Make time: No material, environment, or story can take the place of uninterrupted time to play and explore ideas. Pretend play doesn’t fit nicely into twenty minute segments. Be ok with leaving a post office in the living room for a few days to allow your children to fully explore and enhance their creative explorations.