There are plenty of opportunities to help your child with their school work and prepare them for a lifetime of learning. If you use the Parent’s Section at the side you will find more activities and online resources under Literacy for All, Numeracy and Health and Wellbeing.
Below we have posted some useful information and ideas you can continue throughout the year.
- Help your child to recognise her/his name and the sounds in it.
- Count forwards and backwards to and from 10.
- Sing or recite the alphabet. Practise going over the letters.
- Share stories. Reading to your child improves their vocabulary and listening skills, and acting out stories is a great way to practise communication. Seeing you enjoy stories also primes your child to be an enthusiastic reader. You can find Miss Reynolds on our YouTube channel reading stories and free eBooks in the Oxford Owl free eBook library or Youtube channels.
- Hone fine motor skills. Building hand strength, fine motor skills, and hand-eye co-ordination helps prepare your child for writing. Making Lego models, practise using scissors safely, doing jigsaws and threading beads onto string are fun ways to develop hand strength. Drawing and colouring activities introduce your child to mark-making tools.
- Go on a letter, number or shape hunt around the local area, looking at signs and car registration plates.
- Foster independence. Encourage your children to get ready themselves, change into PE kit, open their lunchbox/snacks themselves and use toilets and sinks properly.
- Build social skills. Practise greetings and simple manners. Saying please and thanks, holding doors open and sharing resources or toys. Help them to practise turn taking and waiting patiently.
- Help recognise and spell their whole name, their sibling’s names, their teacher’s name, their school name and their local street and city.
- Count forwards and backwards to 100. Count in 2s to 20. Count in 5s, 10s etc.
- Recognise numbers can be EVEN or ODD.
- Try to share things around the house. If there are 10 grapes and 2 people, how much can they each get.
- Ask about the number BEFORE and AFTER to 100.
- Know the words MOST and LEAST, BIGGEST and SMALLEST.
- Continue simple patterns of shapes.
- apply phonic skills as the route to decode words when reading and writing. “RAIN: R AI N”
- learning to appreciate rhymes and poems, and to recite some by heart
- Begin to use prediction to guess what might happen in stories.
- Form all letters of the alphabet and numbers 0-9 correctly recognising there are ascenders (tall letters) and descenders (letters that go below the line).
- recognise the place value of each digit in a three-digit number (hundreds, tens, units)
- practise strategies for adding and subtracting.
- identify, represent and estimate numbers using different representations, including the number line.
- Understand how to estimate.
- Write numbers in word form.
- Partition numbers. 36 = 3 tens and 6 units = 30 + 6
- Understand o’clock and half past on a clock.
- Practise counting in 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, 10s and 20s.
- Recognise coins and count change.
- Look at examples of different kinds of non-fiction reading around the house (newspapers, letters, menus)
- Learn some differences between fiction and non-fiction.
- Learning how to use both familiar and new punctuation correctly, including full stops and capital letters.
- Find examples of proper nouns (that need capital letters) at home, like Scotland, Barlanark and Friday.
Practise different strategies for add, subtract, multiplying and dividing.
- Practise and recite the times tables.
- Begin to see some links between adding and subtracting. If 12 + 9 = 21 then 21 – 12 = 9 and 21 – 9 = 12
- Compare numbers using > (greater than) and < (less than). 12 > 7
- Know the difference between 2D and 3D shapes and name the basic ones (cubes, cones, cylinders). Find some at home.
- Practise putting numbers in ascending and descending order to 1,000.
- Practise rounding numbers to the nearest 10 or 100.
- Practise cutting objects or shapes into 2 equal parts (halves), 3 equal parts (thirds) and into 4 (quarters).
- Practise telling the time on a 12 hour and 24 hour clock.
- Sort different words into nouns (things), verbs (doing words) and adjectives (describing words)
- Look at a photograph, picture or something outside. Ask your child to describe it to you. Can they use the senses (see, hear, smell, taste, touch) to add to the description?
- Write a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
- Read together and stop to ask questions for clarity, ask your child if they can discuss the character’s appearance/traits. Can they describe the setting?
Practise changing between 12-hour and 24-hour clock.
- Have times-table competitions while driving or walking together.
- Learn about decimals together, look for examples in real life. (Timing each other to run up and back down the stairs, measuring the length of things, looking at the signs while filling up petrol).
- Give your child small amounts of pocket money each week and ask about saving/spending. How long before you can afford your favourite chocolate bar if you get 10p each week?
- Find examples of shapes in real life – what shape is the STOP sign? What shape is a 50p?
- Come up with a set of directions to get from one part of the house to another.
- Practise using a dictionary properly. Put all your friends names into alphabetical order.
- Practise using adverbs to describe a verb. I walked quickly.
- Listen to your child read. Are they using punctuation to help them e.g. pausing at commas and full stops, lifting their voice for a question mark? Are they using expression to make the meaning clear? Can they change their voice when characters speak?
- Look up new and tricky words together that you come across in books, films and newspapers.
- Write a poem together. They could be acrostic poems or limericks.
- Practise handwriting together and write cursively - it could be writing letters to family, friends, teachers, favourite celebrities, it might be birthday/Christmas/other events cards or letters of thanks!
Find quick ways to multiply and divide by 10, 100 or 1000.
- Roll a dice 5 times, can you read that number? Can you write it in words? Can you round it to the nearest 10, 100 or 1000?
- Practise working out the duration of how long things last when given a start and end time.
- Learn about fractions and how to draw them together. Look at different flags of countries and how they are made up of parts.
- Work together to find fractions of things. What is half of 30?
- Learn about square numbers together.
- Practise using a thesaurus properly.
- Compare costs of the same thing in different shops, what was cheaper? How much would you save?
- Try sums mentally and THEN use a calculator to check your answers.
( 23 + 18: You could start with 23 and then add 10 then 7 then add 1)
- Learn about homophones together – can you think of some at home? (eye/I, son/sun, blew/blue)
- Find 10 words in your book that drop the ‘e’ and then add -ing when they change tense. (change – CHANGING, write – WRITING)
- Learn about FACT and OPINION together. Ask your child questions to see if they can tell the difference between both.
- Ask your child to write a set of instructions on how to do something i.e. play Rounders, play a boardgame they enjoy.
- Write a persuasive letter to your favourite celebrity or footballer asking if they could visit the school.
- Find non-fiction books around the house that have contents, glossary and index pages.
- Write a silly sentence that uses alliteration of sounds. (Suddenly, seven snakes slithered sneakily.)
Begin to see some links between multiplication and division. If 3 x 7 = 21 then 21 ÷ 3 = 7 and 21 ÷ 7 = 3
- Find quick ways to multiply numbers that end in zero. (30 x 40 = 3 x 4 x 10 x 10) (3 x 4 = 12 then add zeros from the question so 1,200)
- Work together on long multiplication drawing out Grids to help work out answers.
- Practise telling the time on an analogue clock to the nearest minute and understand that 13.50 is the same as ten minutes to two.
- Learn about factors, multiples and prime numbers together. Find the prime number houses on your street!
- Find examples of percentages and the % sign in shops. Can you work out the new costs of things in shops?
- Go shopping for food and calculate costs. Then, measure out ingredients and help follow the recipe.
- Write a set of instructions on how to cook your favourite meal.
- Write a review of a restaurant or a meal that you eat together.
- Write a sentence which uses speech together.
- Learn about palindromes together (spelled the same forwards and backwards). Can you think of your own? (mum, sees, Hannah, level)
- Ask your child questions about their book which must be TRUE, FALSE or CAN’T TELL.
- Ask your child to summarise something they have watched, read or played in their own words.
- Write a biography about your favourite celebrity.
Below find home spelling practice lists you can use with your child at home - or anywhere using any device such as a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or PC. Encourage your child to read and say each word, then spell each correctly - orally and/or by writing.
You can either:
They are arranged below, in order of class stages - but choose the list which best-suits your child's pace:
Please check back soon for more ideas!
Our Lady of Peace Primary RC School343 Hallhill RoadGlasgowG33 4RYPhone: 0141 773 0550Fax : 0141 773 1022