L..l...leaping Ladybugs

Today Breeia and Laura came to 4Stars and helped us to make lovely little Ladybugs.

We love our ladybugs and tomorrow they can leap around In the leaves!

l..l..l is a Stretchy sound and it is in alot of words your child will work with so it is an important letter to learn.

Don't forget to keep practising with the alphabet chart so your child is familiar with letters and sounds. Begin with the letters in their name as a great starting point.

Have a look at our ladybugs and the Lucy Lamp lady letter formation chart....              

It is so important to start letters in the right place-the children seem to enjoy these Letterland stories and it seems to helps them to recall correct formation more easily.....

Q..q..q..Queens, quilts and quiet!

Today we have learnt about the letter q at 4-Stars. 

We made Queens and quilts and we played Queenie, Queenie...Who's got the ball. It was a good game inside for a wet day!

We know that q doesn't go anywhere without u! They are always together in words.......

quick, quiet, quiz, question, quite, quack, quit, quill, queasy, quickly.....and our favourite word queue!

It was great to have Israel and Breeia joining us today with their Dads. Not long and you will both be school kids, we can't wait!

Look at our work, and read Quarrelsome Queen's rhyme so you can help with practise at home...

Here is the story we use to form a Qq correctly....

R..r..r..r

This week our letter is Rr. It makes a stretchy sound.

We watched and listened to the Rainbow Fish story and then we made our own beautiful Rainbow Fish to hang from the window.

It was great to have Blake and Dallas visiting for 4-stars and they were super workers!

Look what we made...

S-s s

Our letter this week is Ss.

This has a sound that is easy to recognise but often hard to say! If your child has trouble with this sound, encourage them to take their time and s-t-r-e-t-c-h or 'chunk' the word. It can be tricky when it is in the middle!

'Sh'is a digraph using 's'. Digraphs happen when the letters make a different sound together, than they do on their own. Say the sounds separately then join them together snd you'll see what I mean!

Talk about s sounds and the sh digraph with your child- make a list of words together. See if they recognise s blends like st, sm and sl too.

Have a look at the Sea-horses we made at 4Stars....

O-o is for octopus

This week at 4 stars we looked at O.  O is a vowel which has a long and a short sound.

This time we are focusing on the short 'o' as in octopus and ostrich.

Knowing this sound will help in reading and writing when trying to sound out words.

We listened to an octopus story and made our own octopus. We made sure we had 8 legs on our octopus because we learnt that oct means 8 - an octagon has 8 sides!

Cooper joined us today and explored our classroom. He enjoyed our Dora Alphabet cards!

B..b..Bears!

Our letter for this week is Bb..... 

So today we sang 'b'songs and read a story about a VERY grumpy bear....

Then we made our own bears and we will show them at our assembly in the morning.

It was great to have Cohen with us for his first day at school and Cooper came to join us as part of 4 Stars. 

Have a look at our boisterous bears.....!

H-h-h. We made hats

Our letter this week is Hh so today we made Lemon Squeezer Army Hats.

We learnt that Colonel Malone from Stratford invented the Lemon Squeezer hst. The top of it is shaped like Mt Taranaki and it helps to keep the rain off.

Colonel Malone wore his hat at Gallipoli.

Look at us in our hats!