In the Classroom

Subitising in K/1 classroom

Some students in the K/1 class have been working on subitising the numbers 1 - 6 this term. In short, subitising is the ability to quickly recognise the number of objects without counting them. It may be fingers, dice patterns or dots. I have included a link if you are interested in looking more closely at what subitising is and why it is important, in fact, really important for mathematical development.

https://thirdspacelearning.com/blog/what-is-subitising/  

Some of the other students are subitising tens frames and renaming numbers. eg. 22 can be renamed as 2 tens and 2 ones or 1 ten and 12 ones or it could be 22 ones. Some clever beans have even being coming up with 1 ten, 11 ones and one more one to rename 22.

We have also being working in the area of length with lots of comparing and learning that when we compare the length of objects we need to line them up from the same start position to be able to fairly compare their length. Finding 5 things shorter and 5 things longer than our shoe was a rather smelly lesson!!!

Phonics in K/1 classroom

The Kindergarten students are well underway with learning some of the phonemes. We have so far been working intensely on learning to read, write and recognise the phonemes, /s/a/t/p/i/n. In addition to these we will be looking into learning /d/m/g/.

Some students have been working on reading, spelling and writing CVC words with the a as the vowel sound. CVC words are consonant/vowel/consonant words like c-a-t and 

r-a-g. These students have made me very proud this week for their hard work and focus in the classroom.

Others have being learning different graphemes for the long a phoneme. This is a big step in learning and these students are taking on the challenge with gusto. Great to see. 

We are learning that the /ay/ grapheme usually goes at the end of word like play, say, today and the /ai/ and split digragh usually are found in the middle of words.  We will be moving onto other long vowel sounds very soon!

Think While Moving (in Maths and/or English)

As the weather has been so kind, we have taken learning in the outdoors to a whole new level this year. There has been subitsing skittles, snakes and ladders and verb hunts. We have also had a follow the chalk path adventure and some number ladder jumping. Many of us learn best when we are moving and it also helps us to keep fit and healthy while we learn. Win win for everyone!!!