Showing posts with label literacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literacy. Show all posts

Saturday, September 21, 2013

{ Traditional tales }

Finally the open days at school are over. It is so difficult to teach when families walk into your class and you have to pass over to a teaching assistant to pick up exactly where you stopped. We had three days of this...and on the third day we had 19 families, 60 people in total!! Poor kiddos were a bit like fishes in a fish bowl with everyone staring at them and expecting them to be quiet and engaged in work independently. They did so well :-) 

We did get in a little bit of literacy this week which was a follow up from last week. We have been looking a traditional tales ( I know a few people from America read this, but I don't know what you call these stories, maybe someone could enlighten me :-) ) 


We looked at our story mountain and going over what happens at various stops along our climb. They really liked the analogy of writing/reading a story being like climbing a mountain. 
We talked about how traditional tales start and had a look at different stories to check that we were right. This was great to do because my little ones always struggle with writing and spelling 'Once upon a time' and this reinforced it. 


We thought a bit about our character (Goldilocks) and thought of some character traits for her. We discussed how yellow hair and pink dress are not character traits but adjectives to describe parts if the character. Then in the next lesson we also looked at adjectives which lead us into our next task.


We created wanted posters about the Wolf in Goldilocks to help my (fake) police officer sister find him. We talked a lot about how we need to use descriptive words to help the police find this wolf or it would be too hard. Instead of,  'he is a wolf' they were writing, 'He is a tall wolf with long furry ears and eyes as big as dinner plates. He has a wet, black nose and teeth that are sharp and pointy.' :)


Saturday, September 14, 2013

{ Camera juggling }


First of all an apology. I have got to get better at taking pictures. The problem in class is that I want to take pictures on my iPad or my camera but I have to use my school camera for any photos that go onto our school website so juggling three cameras hasn't been easy. 

This week in literacy we have been looking at traditional tales. We started off by retelling the story using puppets that I got on Early learning headquarters, the kids loved these! They retold the story sooo well using time connectives of course. Then will be moving on to character traits...ill be honest, I am pulling my hair out at this but I think we will get there in the end!

Next week I won't be teaching too much because we have school open days in the mornings and the kids are meant to be working quietly and independently so that I am free to chat. In reception, year one and year two we work through early English skills so I will be leaving them to get on with that. 



Any ideas for independent activities for 5 year olds to do quietly for 2 hours? 





Sunday, August 18, 2013

{ Busy Bee }

So I have so much work to do before school starts back in two weeks!! That's right two weeks and I will have the pitter pat of tiny little 5 year old feet cautiously stepping into my classroom. I don't know about everyone else but everytime I complete something on my to do list I'm adding another five things. 

I am new to the world of teaching blogging {writing not reading them!} but I thought I would try and share. I saw these helper sheets by Michelle from Fabulous in First and was so jeaslous of them that I got straight to work creating a year one helper sheet that fits into the English curriculum {or lack there of}. Hopefully my year one helper sheets will be helpful to anyone who has the joy of teaching in year one in the U.K.

As I've said I'm new to this world so I have no idea about how to set up downloads so if you can't work my link for my U.K helper sheets then leave a message with your email address and I will happily send over a copy.  If you have any other ideas of information that is always useful for children to have to hand, please drop a line and I will update the sheets. :)

God Bless
Lo

**Update**
When I look at the document in google pages it overlaps and looks awful. The originals do not do this!