Dexterous skills

Judit and Sara have begun to use a sewing technique known as cross stitch.  The girls enjoyed doing this activity because it is calming and teaches patience, as well as being an important life skill. They enjoy it very much and will keep their cross stitch going till they complete their pictures.

The girls, began their learning with a story called ‘Moya the Luck Child’ by Malachy Doyle. The skills through reading this book were to look for and identify the function of adjectives. They learned that these are useful for describing and making sentences and stories far more interesting.  We talked about the rule of having three events that take place in a traditional story like Moya, For example, the rule of three in the story is there when Moya plays a trick on her three brothers which made three events. we created plans for our own stories which are going to be written up in the next week. 

Jordi and Sergi were looking at the story called ‘ Dig, Sid, dig.’ We learned the sounds ‘o’, ‘g’, ‘d’ and ‘i’. Jordi cleverly spotted these sounds within the story. He found the word Dig and Nan. He was able to write the names of the characters and the main word ’dig’ in the book.

Jordi has been able to use subtraction stories to solve simple taking away sentences with amounts that are less than ten. He was able to teach me the stories and use the correct language to explain what was happening.

Judit and Sara have been using repeated subtraction to solve some long division problems with dividing three digits by a single digit. We used a method called chunking which means that you take away big groups of a number to solve the answer. We used a dice to generate our number sentences and the girls carefully recorded the method, going back to check if they calculated correctly. Sometimes we had to deal with remainders. That was a little tricky.

    In their science work, the girls learned about forces and we focused on friction being a useful and sometimes useless force. Jordi learned about young and old for his science. He put the sequence of pictures in order showing the process of a baby to an adult.   

Sergi has been using his counting skills to talk about objects with numbers up to five. He’s been practising his coordination skills with colouring pictures and cutting different patterned lines with scissors.  

The two boys had their own version of sewing with threading laces in shapes and matching the correct object to the animal.  It helps improve their dexterous skills with their hands and there was a bit of problem solving involved.