Yr1 Weekly Update – 03/03/17
People create homes to suit their needs
Unit
On Monday we had an ‘Enviroment Day’ where the children visited five different environments and explored what kind of homes existed there. We inquired into Desert, Jungle, City, Water and Polar environments. Throughout the rest of the week children have been investigating the types of homes in those environments by identifying the structures, features, materials and purpose of the different types of homes there.
Suggested activities: Start to differentiate with your child the idea of temporary homes, such as hotels, caravans and holiday homes, and more permanent homes such as where the family are. As children are becoming more aware of their surrounding world they are sometimes confronted with a world in contrast to their own. Support your child to be empathetic and caring to those less fortunate than themselves and explain words like ‘dirty’ or ‘smelly’ are not caring words to use when describing other people’s lifestyles.
Questions: Why do you think their homes are different from yours? What materials would be used in building a home in the city/jungle/desert etc? Why do some people build their home on water/stilts/in the snow? Who builds their home? How do you plan to build a home?
Phonics and Literacy
We are continuing to develop our skills and sounding out words for reading and writing. We are learning to apply multiple strategies for this and practice using these strategies to make sense of words we are finding tricky. Children are being encouraged to use the picture cues to check for meaning and, if the pictures and words don’t match, reread the words to see if they can read it differently with the idea of the picture in mind. During Literacy we have continued to look at informational texts and sentence types that help us share information. Children have used this in their writing to share their knowledge such as ‘A jungle home is made from wood. It has stilts. It is for keeping you safe’.
Suggested activities: Try to make some informational pictures about your child’s favorite topic. Ask them to label the picture and write a caption for it. Look at some informational texts and ask your child to explore how the photos and illustrations share information.
Questions: How does a picture share information? How is this picture different from a story picture? What did you learn from this informational text?
Maths
We are starting to apply our knowledge of 2D and 3D shapes to build different homes. Through the use of shapes and other materials to create shapes, children are beginning to understand how lines, corners and faces are connected. As they describe their constructions we are asking them to pay particular attention to the shape vocabulary they use, changing it from 2D-shape names to 3D-shape names. In number we are continuing to use problem-solving skills to show the value of numbers. Children are asked to find as many ways possible to make the value of a number, such as 15, and use different tools to show it such as dice, counters, numbers, fingers etc.
Suggested activities: Start to look at a calendar with your child, print a month off for them to see the dates and days. Have them write important dates on the calendar and count up to how many days before that event arrives. Look at it every day to see how the numbers represent the days.
Questions: What day is it today? How many days until the weekend? How many days in this month? How long until the end of the month?
