To support parents, Veg Power has developed a ’60 Second Lunchbox Hacks’. It features easy-to-implement ideas and serves to make this task as simple as possible.

Sent out behalf of Children’s Therapies – West Kent

Children's Speech and Language Therapy have a new video on the  Therapies website (https://www.kentcht.nhs.uk/childrens-therapies-the-pod) called ‘A guide to generalising speech sounds’.  This takes parents/school staff through the stages between a child being able to use a new sound in words in a structured session up to spontaneous speech and has lots of clips of an SLT using the strategies with a child. 

 Within the Speech Sounds section there are lots of helpful resources  including:

-         Online workshop which covers how sounds are made, how they develop and              recommendations for supporting them at home.

-         Minimal pairs video demonstrating how to use this approach.

-         Phonological awareness video demonstrating lots of activities which develop PA skills.

-         Top tips for speech video.

-         Cued articulation video which demonstrates lots of the cued artic signs.

-         Access to the EY speech screen tool which parents and settings can use to see if their child would benefit from a referral.

Royal National Lifeboat Institution resources  

Teach water safety at home  https://rnli.org/youth-education/water-safety-from-home

Beach safety Campaign  https://rnli.org/pages/beach2020

Helpful Apps

We often get asked about apps that we would recommend for parents. The apps shown in the photographs below are the ones that we use in school. Some of them are free but others you do have pay for. 

Phonics 

My personal favourite are the Hairy Phonics apps. These are designed for children with dyslexia but can be used by all. Forest Phonics is also very popular with the children.

Maths

Mathletics is, in my opinion, fantastic and we provide each child with a login. Using mathletics, children can answer questions on a plethora of subjects. 

You may be interested in this link  https://www.mathschase.com/

Maths Chase is a completely free home online learning tool where children can play times tables games, along with many other mathematics skill-based games!  The site features many simple learning games which children can play at home.  We hope kids will find it a fun and different way to improve their maths accuracy and speed.

English 

For those of you with older children, I can’t recommend the Alan Peat apps highly enough. They are more like mini books than interactive apps but the information and examples given are all fantastic.

Handwriting 

My favourites are iWriteWords and, for those children who are forming their letters correctly, cursive.

A Simple Way of Teaching Numberbonds

Here is a quick video that was shared with the Year 1 Parents on SeeSaw with a simple idea of how to teach number bonds to children using a coat hanger and some pegs. Using this method, it is also easy to demonstrate the commutative law. 

The Writing Journey – Year One

The best thing about teaching is seeing the children progress in so many different ways. One area in which progress is particularly evident is children’s writing. Last year, the Year 1 class were so proud of their writing progress that they made a short video to show how far they had come in just 11 months. They were also super proud of the fact that all the children in the class progressed, regardless of their starting points.