Hello everyone!

I wanted to give you more information about your school closure pack. Children in Jellyfish class respond very well to structure and routine, so the idea is to give you a way of providing that for your children at home.

However, this is obviously a stressful time and the last thing I want to do is add to that. Therefore, please do not feel pressured to stick to the timetable if you are having a stressful day. On these days you and your children could try some mindfulness activities, do some drawing, painting or colouring, read stories together, cook something together, watch a film, do a puzzle, build a fort, get the Lego out or try some pen and paper games (may favourites are Battleships and Draw _____ with your eyes closed!)

For days when you are in the right head-space for learning, here is some advice for how best to use your pack.

Spring Maths Activity Booklet

This has a great mix of activities. Some use skills we have already looked at in school, but there are also some new skills that children might like to try. My advice would be to revisit skills they already know first and save new material for occasions where you have more time to go through something together in more detail. Over the coming weeks I will also be putting helpful tips and resources on the blog to support you with these new skills.

Maths skills to revisit:

-Multiplication

-Addition and subtraction

-Numbers to 20 in words and numerals

-Comparing numbers

-Measuring length*

-Odd and even

-Number bonds

-Counting in 2s, 5s and 10s

-Division*

-Tens and ones

-Tally charts*

-Pictograms*

-Number representation

New maths skills to try

-2D shapes*

-Symmetry

-Counting in 3s

-Fractions

-Money

*Applies to Year 2 red group only

 

Writing Tasks Booklet

There are lots of prompts to choose from and these can be done in any order (pick something you like!). The idea is for children to get creative whilst also practising their sentence structure skills.

If you would like these tasks to have a clearer focus, here are some things you could challenge your child to include in their sentences:

Things everyone can include:

- Capital letters for the start of sentences, names of people, places, days of the week, months of the year and the word I

- Finger spaces

- Using phonics for spelling

- Neat handwriting

- Read your work to check for mistakes

Small challenges

- Adjectives

- Exclamation marks

- Coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or)

- Time conjunctions (First, second, next, then, after etc)

Big challenges

- Adverbs

- Subordinating conjunctions (because, when, if, that)

- Similes

- Use a thesaurus to find better vocabulary

 

Reading Tasks

These are not to support your child’s fluency (how well they read) but intended to support their understanding of a text.

In class we become ‘reading detectives’ to help us answer these kinds of questions. We highlight key words in the question and ‘scan’ the text to find them. Then we read around the word for clues to get the right answer.

If your child would like to challenge themselves further and practice their extended written responses, you could imitate our reading sessions by giving them a sentence to challenge or agree with.

Here is an example:

‘The farmer’s sons weren’t bothered about the treasure.’

I challenge because when they didn’t find any treasure they were upset. One of the son’s said that all the hard work was for nothing. He was annoyed he didn’t find anything.

 

Spelling and phonics booklet

The purpose of the phonics booklet is for your child to practice and apply sounds they learn in their phonics sessions, whereas the spelling booklet is to help children learn ‘tricky’ words that you can’t use phonics for. Therefore, I would not encourage children to decode and blend the tricky words. The simply have to know the word when they see it.

Some helpful hints for supporting children with tricky words are:

- Make some flashcards for speed reading. These can be whipped out at any time during the day and only take a minute to go through

- Draw a simple picture to go with the word. This will give your child’s memory something to hook onto

- Check out videos on Youtube! There are lots of videos for common exception words and tricky words. We use the ‘tricky words song’ but I must warn you, it will get stuck in your head!

 

Topic activities

In each pack there is a double-sided Knowledge Organiser sheet. This is not an activity to complete but is intended to give you an overview of everything we were going to cover this term. We have already had a go at researching and creating bridges and we had just started to look at castles, but feel free to research any of the areas and do any activities you like!

The main focus for this topic is Design & Technology, so if you are feeling crafty, now is the perfect time to put those skills to use! Get creative and see what kind of structures you can make using objects around the house, play a game of Jenga, come up with your own attack and defend games, create a ‘den’ in your house – anything related to structures would be perfect!

 

Hopefully this information will help you to get started. Don’t forget to access online games and resources too via DoodleMaths, Times Tables Rockstars, MyMaths and Reading Eggs.

 

Sending you all lots of love and positivity! 😊