Turtles Spring 1 2019 Newsletter

We're walking in the air!
This half term our topic will be linked to Winter and called, "We’re walking in the air". We will be using the story of The Snowman by Raymond Briggs as a stimulus. You can help by spending time at home either reading the book or watch the film of The Snowman. You could talk to your child about their favourite part of the story and why they liked it? We will be using the story to encourage the children to think about feelings and how people show their feelings in different ways. Why not watch the video below of the feelings song, which looks at different feelings and emotions. See if you can think of your own words to describe different feelings. You could practice making different faces to show different emotions such as happy, cross, excited or disappointed and talk to your child about a time when they have felt one of these emotions and how they did or could have dealt with it.Remember 'It's Ok' to talk show and talk about your feelings.  We will also be having dance and movement sessions linked to the story.
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As yet we have not had any snow this year, but we will be keeping our fingers crossed that we get some more, maybe even enough to build a snowman! Why not click on the link below to design your own snowman.  As part of our learning about Winter we will be learning about staying safe at this cold time of year. We will be talking about how wearing the correct clothes help us to stay safe and warm, as well as not going near frozen water such as ponds or streams. 
Read Write Inc 
We be will consolidating and using Set 1 sounds to support with our reading and writing. You can help by reading as much as possible at home. We have already had some Turtles in the 'Dippy' box as a reward for their great reading at home!  When reading encourage your child to segment the word by saying each sound– in school we call this Fred Talk the children saying each of the sounds in the word for example "b-e-d" and then blending the sounds together to make the whole word "bed". The more practice the children have at doing this the more confident readers they will become. Why not spend some time at home practising blending with your child by playing this blending game online. Remember words such as the, was, he, she and said are red words ‘“You can’t Fred a red you just have to know it,” these are words that the children should be learning as part of their sight vocabulary. We will also be using the sounds we know to practice writing simple words and sentences. To support with writing we encourage the children to use their Fred Fingers to identify the sounds they can hear in words and then write them. 
Maths
We will continue to develop our understanding of addition and subtraction through lots of practical activities using a range of resources. The children will be working with numbers up to 20 and some beyond to solve simple problems. We will be looking at teen numbers and learning about tens and ones. Why not have a number hunt using Splat Square,  tell your child I'm looking for a number with 1 ten and 4 units, can they splat on the correct number?  We will be starting to count in numbers other than one, such as counting in 10's and 2's. We will use this skill to help count winter clothing including socks, wellies and of course gloves. We will be using 2D shapes to create snowmen and discussing the properties of the shapes too. To help us to gain a deeper understanding of repeating patterns we will be creating our own scarves which any snowman would love!