Mrs Rebecca Carroll: Weekly Update 24/11/17

Phonics and the Early Years

Our Early Years staff have been running a series of workshops over the last few weeks and this week it was Ms. Cheska, Ms, Catherine and Ms. Tamara who led a session called ‘Funky Phonics’. Phonics is an approach to learning the sounds that letters make so that children can start to word build and begin to read.

Phonics, or Letters and Sounds as it is also known, has six phases. The first phase is about listening to sounds; identifying sounds in the environment; and making long, short, loud and soft sounds, as it is important for the children to hear and distinguish sounds.  The next five phases are learning and consolidating sounds; and that the sounds begin with s,a,t,p,i,n rather than a,b,c,d,e,f. This is so that as soon as the children have learned six sounds, they can start to build words e.g. sat, pin, as, sit, pat, in, an, at, and begin to read.

It is not just the children in Early Years who are learning phonics; it is also taught in older year groups to help our students in EAL develop a solid understanding of the sounds that letters make, as English has some rather challenging sounds such as:

Same sound, but different spelling - rain, same, days,

Same spelling, different sound – bough, cough, thought,

Our Early Years staff shared some useful websites, if you would like more information on this.  

www.letters-and-sounds.com

www.phonicsplay.co.uk

This link also shares a video of how to say the sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksblMiliA8

World Children’s Day

I was getting a little worried this week when some Primary students started taking over my job. They were on the door welcoming the students with Mrs. Wild and Mr. Webb and then later in the day they called a meeting with Ms. Hill.   

Fortuntely, they were taking part in World Children’s Day activities and were part of the #KidsTakeOver activities that had been planned for the day.  It was great listening to the agenda items they had brought with them to the meeting and they had several action points to take away with them. Ms. Hill  and I look forward to meeting with them again soon.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend.

Mrs Rebecca Carroll, Head of Primary

FINE DINING
Congratulations to our fine diners this week:
-    Cam Tu 5I
-    My Anh 5I
-    Jae Hoon 6I
-    Gia Bao 6S
-    Simon 6S
-    Magnus 6S
-    Coco 6H
-    Son Phat 6B