Welcome to our mid-week blog. We hope you are feeling good and surviving Week 5. Only 8 more days until a well deserved half term break!
Today we wanted to spend some time talking about managing home learning, especially when time - or enthusiasm - is against you!
Firstly - the basics. We have been asked which aspects of the blog to prioritise if time is pressing. Certainly, if you do nothing more than the 4 things listed below then we would be extremely happy!
- Reading - read, read, read, little and often from the Big Cat bookshelf or any other books that you might have to help support your child's reading development. Don't forget to use the back cover's notes to give you ideas for talking about the book after reading too.
- Writing simple sentences - writing is one of the hardest things to support at home but keeping it simple will help. Once you have finished reading a book, create some writing about it. This could be drawing your favourite character and describing what they look like or writing something that the character did in the story. You could draw a story map showing the main events of the story or, if it is a non-fiction text, draw a labelled diagram or write down 3 facts you learnt from the text.
- Watch the maths videos - the emphasis here is that you do not always need a written outcome in maths, watching the videos and seeing the concept explained visually can go a long way to making the children more secure in that skill.
- Watch phonics video/play Phonics Play games - a secure understanding of phonics will help the children both in reading and writing so you are supporting 2 areas of learning if you focus on this subject. There are also lots of games on Phonics Play that will make this more fun!
Secondly - adapting the lessons. There are 2 aspects to all lessons: the learning objective (what is being taught) and the context (how you are teaching it). This week, for example, the learning objective is to write explanations and the context is how beans grow (Year1) or how birds fly (Year2). The context of the lesson is completely changeable and does not affect what the children are learning (how to write explanations).
The context can be tailored to the learner. You have the luxury, therefore, that if your child is not feeling the beans or birds context, that you can change it to something that they are more interested in. Your explanation could be, but not limited to:
- An animals life cycle;
- How rockets go into space;
- How to care for a pet.
This works in a similar way for story writing where you could use a different story for a model for writing. You could create characters based upon the mouse and the Gruffalo or a story modelled on the Three Pigs. All these stories have good/bad characters, problems to overcome and solutions to these problems.
We hope these points go some way to help you manage home schooling a little bit easier and make it as engaging as possible for your child.
Children's Mental Health Week
This week is Children's Mental Health Week and we wanted to provide you with some resources for this, without creating more work for you. Firstly, this clip - aimed at parents - addresses some issues around managing home learning as your mental health is important too!
Also, here are 2 books that the children would enjoy hearing that explore some issues related to their wellbeing.
Ruby's Worry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IhhCq44ar8Perfectly Norman
If your child is inspired by these books, feel free to do some drawings or an emotions map that show how the character's feel at different stages of the book and what they do to address these feelings.
Please have a fabulous rest of the week!
Lots of Love
Mr Jude, Mrs Yuille & Mrs O'Connor
