The Week After Next in Year One
Week Beginning 31st October 2016
Time is a strange thing; the last seven weeks have flown by, but yet, it feels like the children have
a lot more than seven weeks of Year One under their belts – they certainly act like that anyway.
Our next topic is ‘Here to Help!’ where we’ll be finding out all about professional people who
help us; doctors, nurses, fire-fighters, police, ambulance crews, dentists, opticians, coast guards,
mountain rescue and the like. We’ll be looking at what they do, where they do it and the special
equipment and vehicles they do it with. We’re always looking for guests to talk to the children, so
if you or any of your family work in any of those (or similar) fields and would like to come in and
have a chat to the children, let your class teacher know!
What we will be doing in school
English
We’ll be finding out the children’s experience with
health professionals and doing some writing based
what doctors, dentists, opticians or similarly qualified
professionals have helped them with. The children will
also be coming up with questions about professional
helpers that they would like answered during the topic.
Maths
We’ll be looking at sorting and sequencing a variety of
different things first week back. We’ll be sorting and
sequencing odd and even numbers, shapes, colours
and finding different ways of sorting pictures of people
who help us that the children will have to come up
with their own criteria for.
Science
We’ll be investigating how many names of body parts
the children know and making our own class version of
‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ using lesser
known names of body parts. Perhaps your child will
sing it to you. Perhaps they’ll sing it to you in car.
Perhaps they’ll sing it to you in shop. Perhaps they’ll
sing it to you in the next shop. Then in the car again.
Then at bath time. Then at bed time. Then you’ll never
want to hear it again, but you’ll be safe in the
knowledge that your child knows the names of
unusual body parts.
Phonics
We’ll be starting Phase 5 Phonics;
ay as in pay, ou as in house, as in yummy, yummy pie,
and as in leaf.
Words of the week
These are high frequency words that we’ll be
highlighting for the children during the week across
different lessons.
This week’s words:
of, school, here, by, pull.
How you can help at home
Which professionals have helped your child?
They may not even remember that they’d been
to have their teeth or eyes checked. What was
the experience like? Can they write a sentence
or two about it? If they do – remember those
capital letters and full stops!
Can your child count in 2s for odd numbers?
Counting up in even twos (2, 4, 6, 8 etc.) isn’t
too hard, but can they go up using odd
numbers; 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and so on? How
high can they get?
How many body parts can your child name?
Can they tell you the name of the groove
above their lips? The space between their
forefinger and thumb? The place where their
upper and lower eyelids meet? The back of
their elbow? The back of their knee? You
could do a little research into the more
unusual body parts names and get your
child to write them down as sentences; ‘The
name of the back of the knee is…’ make sure
they use capital letters and full stops!
See how many of the sounds your child knows
and how many they can spot inside words;
trickier than just spotting them at the start!
You could practise reading and spelling
these words at home. Can your child put
them into a sentence or two?