I hope everyone had a lovely weekend and tuned into the live kids workout at 9am this morning! We have made brilliant progress in our writing since September. I hope that you are all continuing to practice your writing everyday. This can be writing with chalk on the ground, writing on a whiteboard, writing lists, writing cards, writing stories, writing your name, copying lines from your favourite storybook. Anything that encourages you to write everyday! Remember the 3 P’s when we write:
- Posture: chair pulled in, straight back, two feet on the floor.
- Pencil Grip: we use the frog leg grip (tripod grip) i’ll attach an article to explain this further. http://www.abigailsteel.com/blog/8-steps-to-froggy-legs-tripod-pencil-grip
- Page: one hand holding the page for support, other hand holding pencil.
Before writing encourage your child to warm up their fingers using this fun video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2tBH_XyeJc
Every Monday Junior Infants love to tell me their news and what they got up to over the weekend. This could be a nice writing activity for you to do today. Ask your child to tell you what they did at the weekend. For example: “Today is Monday. It is warm, but dull outside. I went for a walk to the park. I played on the swings”. 3-4 sentences is plenty. Mum/Dad or even an older brother/sister should write the news first on a piece of paper for the child. They should copy it into the copybook that was provided in the work packs. To finish draw a picture at the top half of the page illustrating your news.
I hope you have been practicing your counting and trying out some of the mental maths activities i mentioned last week. Numberblocks is a great cartoon which helps children to learn about counting and numbers in a fun, creative way. There are lots of episodes available on YouTube or the BBC iplayer. Before we finished up in school we were learning how to write the number 5. Here’s a Numberblocks episode all about 5 that the children might enjoy.