Home Learning
Click on the links below to help you improve your English skills.
Rainy Day Poems
Memorizing and reciting a new poem each month is an excellent goal that will sharpen the mind as well as broadening language skills.
www.rainydaypoems.com/poems-for-kids/poems-for-kids-to-recite
Pobble
The website, Pobble, provides exciting visual stimuli, story starters and thought provoking questions to support creative writing.
Humility and Doxology
The 12 poems every child should know.
Bitesize Daily
BBC Bitesize has a range of videos to support your child’s development of skills in English.
Literacy Shed
The website Literacy Shed – the original site and not the premium site has videos to watch and teaching notes to support parents, if needed.
The Children’s Poetry Archive
Listen to the world’s best poetry, read out loud.
If you are wondering which books to choose for free-reading with your child at home, then look no further than www.booksfortopics.com where you will find an abundance of high quality fiction and non-fiction texts. On this website, you will see drop-down menus for the age range of your child and you can even find books surrounding your child’s topic in school. Only the richest of texts gets promoted on this website, due to their high-quality literary features and great use of English grammar.
Once you have found a text that you think your child will enjoy, then head to www.lovereading4kids.co.uk where you can find reviews for many, many books (written, of course, by children for children) and then read an extract to see if it is truly for you. A free subscription is required for this website.
Activities to support the development of spelling strategies
For ideas on ways to support students in developing spelling strategies, please see suggested activities with explanations on how to implement them, below:
Words within Words: Chant a memorable phrase and the spelling. Children to write and decorate/illustrate the word eg kn-owl-edge = I was kneeling on an edge with an ow; Island – an island is land surrounded by water; Piece – a piece of pie.
Speed-write: Children have to write the word correctly as many times as they can in one minute.
Rainbow Words: Write the tricky bits of a word in a different colour to the rest of the word to help it stand out.
Shapes of Words: Children to draw the shapes of the words to support them in visualising how the words should look. Then fill the letters in, eg
Staircase Words: Children build up the words one sound at a time. Focus on saying the words as they look eg Wed-nes-day / def-in-ite Use this to highlight prefixes / suffixes. Variations include using colours for each sound and also playing games where some sounds are filled in and children have to guess / come up with alternatives which would fit these – including investigating the meanings of prefixes or how changing the prefixes and suffixes change the meaning / class of the words or if any of the previous segment have to change, eg
| def | |||
| def | in | ||
| def | in | ite | |
| def | in | ite | ly |
Hidden Words: Write in white crayon and then the children have to colour over it to reveal the word. Variations include missing letters which the children then have to fill in to complete the word – like a letter treasure hunt!
Spelling Scribble: Children create a ‘scribble’ with spaces for writing in. Each space is filled with a different word, perhaps using different colours for each word. Children choose the words they feel most confident about to go in the smaller spaces and the words they feel least confident about to fill the larger spaces, eg
