►Snow!

With the unexpected arrival of a Winter Wonderland on Sunday morning, I wanted to let parents know that spending time in the snow today, instead of completing all Home Learning activities, is absolutely fine-if you want to. We have not had a dusting like this in Leicester since the children were very young and the experiences and learning that they can gain from it are priceless.

Of course, if you want to complete some or all of the Home Learning activities further down the page with your child, this is fine too, I just wanted to let you know that we encourage exploration and new experiences too, especially in cases like this as they are so rare!

Here are some activities that you could complete in the snow to provide some cross-curricula learning experiences.

Snow Maths

Create snow balls and complete addition and subtraction questions with them.

Create 2d and 3d shape examples with snow.

Create snowballs of different sizes and order them from largest to smallest/heaviest to lightest.

Snow Phonics/Handwriting

Practise forming letters in the snow.

Segment some simple words to write in the snow.

Rolling snow balls to work hand muscles and develop fine motor skills.

Snow Science/Understanding the World

Create snow animals and talk about the features that you need to include and create. Talk about how many legs/eye/ears they need. You could extend this by doing some counting in twos.

Talk about seasonal changes and the affect that the snow is having on what the children see around them.

Talk about how snow is formed in the clouds - you could also find some clips on Youtube to explain this or do some research on the internet.

I hope that you have a lovely day.

Mrs Wills

►Reading 

Please read with your child for 20 minutes each day. This could be a story book which you read, a phonics book which they read or a mixture of the two.

Oxford Owl have a library of free books which can be read on a phone or tablet.

Follow the link below and sign up yourself. You can then access a variety of books which are age-appropriate. Start on age 3-4 (Oxford Level 1) and work your way through as your child gets more confident.

►Phonics

Today we are practising our sight words.

Watch the video attached below and then complete one of the following activities.

Blue challenge: place a selection of the sight words on piece of paper around your room/garden. Read them with your child a few times first and then play a game where you call out the sight word and they run to the correct one.

Green challenge: print out or recreate the Sight Word Four in a Row game which I have attached below. use small blocks or counters to play against your child. The first to correctly read and then cover up four sight words in a row wins. Repeat the game a few times. It may be helpful to 'make mistakes' and read some of your words incorrectly so that your child can tell you if you have made a mistake.

Purple challenge: print or write the sight words on separate pieces of paper so that your child can read them and then rearrange them to see if they can make sight words sentences.

►Maths

Today we are learning about time.

Watch the video below and then create a clock similar to the image that I have attached below. 

Whilst you and your child are creating your clock, talk about the numbers and how they continue around the clock. Ask them which number comes next and how they write that number. 

►Topic

Today we will be conducting an experiment about melting ice. 

Hopefully you have some ice that you have prepared and some various ways of melting it.

Talk to your child about the different variables in your experiment and what they predict will melt the ice the quickest. You could also ask them to make suggestions about what else you could use to melt your ice.

Explain that an experiment has to be a fair test so that means that you need to use the same timer when timing how long is takes and also the same amount of ice (whether is be cubes or tubes which you have filled) for each different melting resource.

Print or recreate the experiment sheet which I have attached below and then talk about the results of the experiment. Were your child's predictions correct? What could they have done differently?