H h Hats, hats, hats!

 We had a busy Four Stars day on Thursday! Our focus letter for the week is h so after watching Hats for Sale, we made fantastic hats.

You can help your child to remember the sound made by 'h' in many ways. Using the alphabet chart regularly and focusing on our weekly letter is a good start.... Also by highlighting the sound as you say words that have an h at the start... And just by saturating them with h words through the week! Have a look at our heavenly hats.......

D-D-D-Dinosaur!!!

Today we made DINOSAURS because our focus letter is Dd.

As well as rhe initial consonant, some of us will be finding out about d at the end of words, and dr as a blend next week.

At home you could practise the sound that d makes as it can be tricky....and practise writing 'd's as they can commonly be confused with b! (Remember "b has a belly, d doesn't!)

Here are some of our DINOSAURS.....

A is for ...... Alligator!

Today at 4 Stars we learnt about the letter a.

A is a vowel and it has two main sounds- 'a' like apple and 'a' like ape.

New students are focusing on the short a and older students are thinking about both the sounds that 'a' makes. This will help them when reading or writing trickier words!

Have a look at our hungry alligators that love eating 'a' or words that have a in them!

Cc.......The Cat in the Hat

We have Cc as our letter this week. 

C is a copycat, it borrows a sound from k and s and doesn't have one of its own! It would be great if you could share some 'c' words with your child to help them build their understanding. 

We read 'The Cat in the Hat' and then we looked at all the words that rhyme with cat.... They all have the -at chunk in them. Our older students thought about blends  that start with c, like cl and cr.

Next we made our own crazy cat hat and wrote some -at words to glue on.

We are very proud of our work, hope you think they look great too!

X and Z - Our Letters of the Week.......Welcome Back to Term 4 at Matapu!

Well the holidays raced by didn't they, but it's nice to be back with all our Room 6 friends- and to welcome Paxton Burke to our class! We are so excited that you are with us.

This week at 4-Stars we looked at the letters X and Z. We are pretty good at recognising the sounds these letters make so we knew we could study 2 letters at once!

X is often found inside words rather than at the beginning so we made fox masks to remind us about the sound.

Z is the very last letter and it likes to have a bit of fun so it is often found in words like zip, zap and  zoom! Have a look at our cute zebras that would be the highlight of any zoo!

Umbrellas up! Letter of the week is u!

We had a busy and crafty day yesterday! 

Aftr our busy B morning with pre-school, we had 4- Stars in the afternoon. Our letter this week is U so we read a delightful story about 'Tiny Miss Dott and her Dotty Umbrella' then we made our very own dotty umbrellas..... We think they look fantastic!

U is a tricky letter for sounding out so thinking "Umbrellas up... Up, up, up" is a good way to help your child to attach a sound to it.

We are beginning to learn that a,e,i,o,u are vowels and that vowels have two sounds.

We will look at the long U sound next week........

B Day with Pre- School!

The pre-school came for a visit yesterday. We had a 'B' day together making and doing 'b' things. We made buses and boats with b animals in them and we built buses with blocks. Some of us went outside where we could:            

.....blow beautiful, bouncy bubbles,                                                                                   ......bounce on the tramp

......bowl balls into a bucket

.....balance our bodies on the balance boards

.....bounce and catch the beanbags