November in P2 Birthdays Numeracy Nurturing Writing Helpful Sites: This month our topic is ‘Birthdays’. Does your child know the month and date they were born? Look at birthday photos with your child and talk about how they have changed from year to year. If you have a few to spare please bring them into school and we will add them to our display boards. We are reading ‘Kipper’s Birthday’ by Mick Inkpen. He makes a mess of organising his own party and needs P2 to help! We will be writing cards, invitations, shopping lists and recipes and making maps as we plan a big party for Kipper. We plan to make buns and sandwiches and use a science experiment to make our own lemonade! Our birthday bash for Kipper will take place at the end of November, celebrating all our wonderful efforts! Numeracy In ‘Kipper’s Birthday’ he gets the time and date wrong in his invitation. We plan to make analogue clocks in class looking carefully at where the twelve numbers go around and what the short and long hands mean. We will teach the children to read ‘o’clock’ times. Take opportunities at home to read o’clock times and what activities we do when eg, 2 o’clock is home time. We are continuing to build our number facts up to ten. By the end of the term children should know all the ways to make 4,5,6,7,8,9&10 using two numbers. For example: facts for seven are: 2+5,3+4,1+6,….. We encourage the children to have quick recall of these facts. Each week for homework we will send home a set of number facts to learn. Please use the numicon pieces to make up the numbers and then spend some time learning them until your child can recall them quickly. Eg what goes with 6 to make 8? Nurturing Writing Our chosen topic offers many fun, child friendly writing experiences. In addition, over the next few weeks we plan to include a writing activity in the homework pack. At this stage of P2 children have super ideas of what they want to write but often when they go to write it down things get a little jumbled! Use these tips to help your child write each week: Say the whole sentence out loud together first. Use a capital letter for the first word. Encourage your child to spell key words independently Try writing the sounds in order to spell words eg: b-u-n-s Get your child to read over what they have written and check it makes sense. Finish with a full stop. Helpful Sites: In class the children have greatly benefitted from literacy and numeracy activities and games from educational websites: Here are a few some of which also have helpful tips for parents: www.letters-and-sounds.com phases 2 and 3 games www.phonicsplay.co.uk www.topmarks.co.uk/Interactive www.primarygamesarena.com New Sounds As we progress through the ‘Letters and Sounds’ programme we are starting to teach a range of new sounds. So far your child has learned sounds where one letter makes one sound. From now on, we will be teaching sounds which can only be made using 2 letters. We will begin with the simpler of these which are: qu, sh, ch, wh, th, ck, ng Look out for activities in our homework packs using these new sounds and point them out to your child when they appear in reading books.