Tuesday

The Parent Teacher Interviews began this week.  Please check your time to see which day you are this week or next week. Thank you for making the time to come to speak with me about your child's progress.

Many parents who are listening to their children read are very good at telling their child to "sound it out" when they come across a word they cannot read.  Here is a copy of some reading strategies we use that may help you when sounding it out doesn't work. Stop and start over is useful if it doesn't make sense.  The whole purpose of reading is to gain understanding so the children need to stop and reread if it doesn't make sense.  Another idea is to 'chunk' the words.  For example if the word was information the key is to break it up     in  -  form  -  a  -  tion.  Using this skill they can find little words within the larger word that they know.  Skip it and read over is useful because they can often guess the word from the first letter if they read on and know what the whole sentence says.

I also found this video that may be useful to help you help your child with comprehension.

Today I filmed the children in our morning prayer routine to let you see what we do.  We create a reverent atmosphere with the prayer bells and the rainstick.  We centre our focus in the middle of the prayer circle with a sacred space and we begin with our class prayer.  Each child has the opportunity to hold the prayer rock and offer a prayer.  If they don't have anything to say they say a prayer in their hearts and pass the rock on. We often sing a hymn with actions. It is a calming and reverent way to begin the day.




This afternoon in History, the children got to read a selection of Readers from the 1950s to 1970s.
We then compared them to our own readers and wrote about the similarities and differences.