School Days – open morning and shoe laces

We’re rapidly approaching another half term, and racing towards the end of N’s first school year. Eeek.  He’s definitely growing up quickly what with a first tooth falling out and finally having feet that are starting to grow…his feet are so slow to grow compared to what others seem to do – half a size has taken over a year!  I’m expecting a huge growth over the summer although I said that last year so maybe not.

Here’s this week’s school days:

Open Morning

Every term, our school have a morning where parents can go into class and look at school books and chat to the teacher.  I always go in if only to have a quick look at N’s book.  There’s not often much in it given they’re only in foundation stage (and N tells me he does more playing and ‘busy learning’ than anything else), but I was surprised at how much more there was from last time. Especially when N doesn’t do any writing at home anymore even when encouraged.

The teacher mentioned that they’re working on numbers up to 20 (N always missed out number 15 – I think he’s got a complex about it now, but don’t quite know what we can do to get him to remember it), and the main thing for N is working on getting him to sound out and write sentences.  His writing’s getting better (kind of, spaces are eluding him at the moment), and he seems fond of the work because which he must have had sounded out or copied because it wasn’t phonetic, it was correctly spelt.  I can read some of the words, so he’s getting there. Hopefully I’ll be able to encourage him to do a bit of writing at home as well.  He told me a while ago that he wanted to write a story and I said I could make it into a book for him if he wrote it, so maybe I’ll refer back to that again.

It makes me laugh when I go in though, N turns really loud and wants to show me lots of things in the classroom, proving that he can find items like his water bottle that he tells me he’s lost!

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Trainers meltdown

I posted earlier in the week about the great shoe laces meltdown. Well, curly elastic shoe lace* meltdown.  A morning of struggling to get him out of the car because he didn’t like his replacement trainer shoe laces – curly elasticated ones, that admittedly were harder to put on his feet.  But would save teachers having to do them up all the time until he can do them himself.

2 days later and he’s admitted they’re fine although there’s definitely a knack to getting the shoes on without getting the back pointed heel bits of the shoes curled in!

Grass in church

I rarely make the normal church services that the school hold once a term because there’s only so many Fridays I can leave early a term without having to take them as holiday.  I picked him up from one on Friday to find the floor of the church covered in grass.  I have no idea why – I was racking my brain to think of all the bible stories and not coming up with anything.  N mentioned the grass and told me that Class 3 told the school about why it was there.  But I’m still none the wiser.  Any ideas, let me know.

Book bands and reading

We do Read Write Inc and Oxford Reading Tree at school, so after having the time around Christmas for a long number of weeks afterwards reading Phonic Bugs (dull dull dull) basic reading books, we now have a lot of Biff Chip and Kipper.  Slightly more interesting because at least it stops me having to read N all the ones he has from a box set at home.

This term his reading has really come on a lot and they’re charging through the book levels and sets.  Moving up from books of 6 pages through to 12 and after a couple of weeks, he’s now on 16 pages and is on the next band up.  After previously moaning about longer books to read, N’s now taking them in his stride and not really noticing because he’s more interested in the stories of characters he likes.  There’s a lot of guess work going on when he’s reading rather than always looking at the words until he realises guessing isn’t going to get it right.  And, N’s turned into one of those annoying people who look at the last page of the book first.  Nooooo.

There’s  a lot of words in his current book level that he doesn’t and won’t know for a long time – but he’s learning he needs to break them down and split up the sounds.  He’s definitely turned a corner with his reading, so now we need to convert that into listening for the sounds and translating that into writing.  It continues to amaze me how quickly they can pick up reading with a little consistency and confidence.  Oh, and more interesting stories that flow rather than just words.

Forgotten jumpers

I thought we were doing quite well with remembering to bring clothing home, but this week 3 jumpers have been left at school.  At least they have all been brought home again in one go, but I do wonder how children can’t just remember to leave things on their pegs and then bring them back home in the first place.