Friday 14th February 2025

 

Friday 14th February 2025  

Dear Parents and Caregivers.

What a busy term in has been and we cannot believe we are now halfway through the year! Your children have worked so hard so far and it is lovely to see them make progress. Thank you for all your support and the homework, extra times table practice and reading you do at home - it really does make a difference!

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

Monday 17th February - Friday 21st February - Half Term Holiday

Monday 24th February - INSET Day (school closed)

Tuesday 25th February - Return to School

Monday 3rd March - Year 3/4 visit to Harry Potter Warner Brother Studios

Thursday 6th March - World Book Day

There is no homework set for the half term but please keep up with times table practice and reading

Reading: 

Remember 15-20 minutes everyday is super important but we understand this is not always manageable. Make sure you are reading as much as you can - at least 3x a week and recording what you read in your child's reading record. These will be collected by teachers and checked regularly.  When you have finished your Accelerated Reader book, you can take a quiz at school. Remember that you need 3 100% scores to move up a level.

Times table practice - Please log on to TTRS and complete your challenges.

Can Do
Continue logging on to TTRS and Sumdog -  your logins are stuck in the front cover of your reading records. 

Reading Skills

Every week we encourage you to keep up all your reading at home as this makes such a huge difference. We wanted to spend a little time this week speaking more about reading skills.

Understanding what they have read (or comprehension) is vital for the children  and we support this through our VIPERS reading skills. This stands for:

Vocabulary    Infer    Predict    Explain    Retrieve    Summarise

You can explore these ideas with your child after reading using some of the following question prompts:

Vocabulary - have a good range of vocabulary in order to understand the text

• What does the word _____ mean in this sentence?
• Find a word that means _____ on this page.

Infer - understanding reached through reasoning about what you have read

• Why was _____ feeling _____?
• Why did _____ happen?
• How do you know?

Predict - what you think will happen based on what you have read

• What do you think will happen next?
• How will this character's action affect what will happen next?

Explain - what your thoughts and opinions are about the book

• Who is your favourite character? Why?
• Would you like to live in this setting? Why?

Retrieve - discuss the characters, events and setting of the story

• Who did _____?
• Where did _____?

Summarise - pick out the key events

• Retell the story in your own words.
• Pick out the important parts.

We hope this helps you discuss the books your child reads at home as the more they practice these skills the more fluent in comprehension they will become.

Have an amazing half term break and we will see everyone back at school on Tuesday 25th February!

Miss Harvey and Mrs Devlin