We have come to the end of a very busy Main Lesson on Letters in Class 1. Running alongside our Sounds-Write phonics lessons, we have been learning to write letters that come to life through storytelling. For instance, our first letter, ‘S’, developed out of a seal from The Seal-Maiden story. Class 1 enjoyed moving like seals to begin with, then using their noses to draw seals, next making an ‘S’ with their fingers in the air, on the blackboard and then finally, drawing a seal and writing ‘S’ and ‘s’ in their books.
We have learnt the letters S A T P I N so far, exploring imaginary worlds from Angels to Old Apple Trees, acting out scenes from Briar Rose, and practicing tongue twisters along the way. As you can see in the drawings below, Class 1 are vividly working with their imaginations, which will enable this knowledge of phonemes and their corresponding graphemes to embed deeper into their learning.
The final lesson of this Letters block was a chance for pupils to demonstrate what they had learnt by writing as many words as they could using the letters S A T P I N. This gave the pupils the opportunity to use their new found knowledge to write. Even if the words were nonsense words, such as ‘pas’, the pupils were still able to say the sounds and read the word that they had written. This foundation of letter manipulation will help them when they come to read unfamiliar words in books: they will be able to use their segmenting and blending skills to read new words.
We are going to make confident readers of Class 1!
