Hello everybody and welcome to our mid-week blog! Firstly, a HUGE thank you to all your efforts in home schooling. Last week's blog was accessed over 800 times last week! Because it seems to be easier with all the links being in one place, we have decided to proceed with a Monday blog (which is published after school on Friday) and a mid-week blog with any updates or announcements.
Year 2 Phonics
We have been putting phonics lessons on the blog each day and although these are primarily focused on the Year 1's they are a valuable revision tool for the Year 2's in brushing up their phonic knowledge. Moving forward, however, we also want to give phonics activities that are focused more on the Year 2's.
Our primary vehicle for this will be the Phonics Play website and we will talk you through how you can explore the Investigating Alternative Spellings here!
First, login to Phonics Play:
https://www.phonicsplay.co.uk/
You will need to enter the username jan21 and the password home. Next click the Resources tab and then Phase 5.
From here, scroll down until you see Phase 5c Interactive Resources and choose Investigating Alternative Spelling - \ai\:
You will then see 3 activities - Phoneme Spotter has a text where you will need to find as many words as you can which contain the \ai\ phoneme. You could also sort them according to their spelling pattern. Word Sort gives you a word to drag into the correct spelling pattern. Best Bet gives advice on any general rules that you may have found. We advise tackling Phoneme Spotter on one day and the other two activities on another day.
We hope you find these tasks enjoyable and we will be adding a Year 2 Phonics/Spellings section to Monday's blog from next week.
Sumdog Message from Mrs Hurley
WHOLE SCHOOL SUMDOG ESSEX COMPETITION
Calling all of you amazing mathematicians!
You have been entered into the Sumdog Essex Competition. It starts on January 22nd at 3.30pm, and finishes at 3.30pm on January 28th
Why not have a go and get your class on the school leaderboard?
I will be monitoring how well each class is doing. The winning class will be announced in the school newsletter.
Let's show our community what great mathematicians we are!
Good luck.
Mrs Hurley
Whilst on the subject of maths, White Rose have Parent Workbooks which are available to download for Kindles free of charge at amazon or you can access them at the link below:
https://whiterosemaths.com/parent-workbooks/
Regarding live lessons
There have been some questions regarding whether the school will be adopting “live lessons” and we would like to take some time to explain our stance on this.
Government advice on remote learning stipulates that remote education should have “recorded or live direct teaching time and time for pupils to complete tasks independently.”
Teachers are currently in school everyday teaching the children of key workers as needed. Work in school directly mirrors the learning set on the blogs in order to provide equality of opportunity and to ensure the consistency of learning where children are in part time, so there is no opportunity to record live at this time.
What the school is providing are recorded direct teaching that is bespoke for each year group, professionally edited and presented to a high standard by both White Rose and Oak Academy (the Government endorsed remote learning platform). Another reason that we have adopted these platforms is because it allows parents greater control over the timing of their home learning so they can best balance their work commitments or if they are supporting more than one child at home.
Teachers are still available, however, to give detailed feedback on work submitted by children via email where requested. Teachers are also available via email or telephone to support you in any aspect of home learning.
We firmly believe at this moment in time the school’s current approach offers the best means of delivering quality teaching at home which both supports you as parents and enables teachers to continue to teach in class and continue to assist parents in home learning.
That's all for now, have a great rest of the week and don't forget that we asked the children to send us an email this week, letting us know how they are doing.
Take care!
Mr Jude, Mrs Yuille & Mrs O'Connor
