Lyn Harris Junior Primary School

It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of our school as Lyn Harris has decided to retire and focus on a new chapter. Lyn will now dedicate her time to producing workbooks and teaching guides designed to help parents and teachers teach reading, writing, and spelling more effectively.

While this marks the end of an era, we are excited for the impact her future work will have on education. You can continue to follow and support her work at .

Tips for helping your child settle into the new academic year.

Whether your child is attending school for the first time, or starting a new grade, there’s lots to be done to prepare for the year ahead.

1. Establish a bedtime routine
To get enough rest, children should be in bed by 8 pm. Routinely take away cell phones at this time. Lay out school bags/satchels, clothes and anything else needed in the morning to cut down on morning chaos.

2. Make preparing for the new school year fun
As a child, I loved getting new stationery, notebooks and other items like school diaries and lunch boxes. It made the prospect of returning to school exciting - emphasising that it is a fresh start where anything is possible.

3. Meet the teacher
Build a relationship with your child’s teacher before the first day. Make them aware of any struggles your child may have had last year, and let them know that you want to be involved.

4. Be on time
Avoid having to rush in the mornin. Give your child enough time to find their way. It sets a good impression.

5. Plan something fun to do after school.
Reward your child’s bravery with a treat - for example, take them out for a milkshake. Starting the new school year is nerve-wracking. They've earned it and so have you!

Do share with us your suggestions for easing a child’s transition back to school

I am always buzzing with excitement at the start of a new academic year. I will be up bright and early to welcome our 2023 intake. Your child could be one of them!
We still have places
in grades 0 - 7.

The world needs more innovators, inventors, artists and orginal thinkers. Unfortunately it takes a lot less effort to conform and limit oneself to maintaining status quo. When the imagination isn’t stretched, it becomes dormant.
To encourage creativity, set learners creative tasks.
A creative task is one where a class of 100 can produce 100 different outcomes yet all answer the same brief.
In the comments, suggest a creative task for a child to complete this weekend.

We are surrounded by words wherever we go. Road signs, billboards, fliers, car stickers… the list is endless. These present opportunities for children to practice reading. Point out words when you see them and explain how to decode the letters to interpret the word. You can turn this into a game.
Award one point for every correctly identified word that meets a certain requirement, for example, words starting with the short sound of a certain letter or words where certain spelling rules are in effect, such as fairy e” words (where “e” at the end of a word, makes the middle vowel a long sound).

The first to get 10 points wins a prize.

Have you met the ghosts?

Helping with homework:

What some parents think “helping with homework” means:

- Giving their children ideas
- Helping to write their speeches, build models or finish projects
- Ensuring that homework does not have any mistakes
- Complaining about the amount or type of homework the child has received.

What helping with homework should mean:

- Allowing children to make mistakes. One of the reasons why homework is set is to help the teacher gauge whether or not the class are meeting their learning objectives. It should bring to the learner’s attention any concepts that need clarification. Correcting a mistake is not shameful and does not mean they are being punished.
- Encouraging specific questions, rather than general open ended ones like, “I don’t understand any of it”.
- Helping them to organise their time. Make sure they have a designated place to do their homework, away from the television and distractions from cell phones and other people. Aim to have a routine where homework takes place in the same place and at the same time.
They will need guidance to forward plan for larger assignments and exams.

Homework is a reality, as are many responsibilities in life. Think carefully before colluding with your child to avoid work because it is difficult or tiresome.

Children look to adults for a “safety cues” - the signals that indicates whether an activity is safe or unsafe, pleasurable or painful. If a child sees a parent enjoying an activity, they become curious and seek to experience or engage in the activity themselves. It is harder to persuade a child to do something if they will be the only one expected to do it.

You can influence your children in this way to:

- take on healthy habits like brushing their teeth
- help with tidying up
- eat vegetables and fruit

… and enjoy reading and writing!

How does your behaviour promote reading and writing to your children?

What are sight words?

These are words that cannot be read by sounding out the letters and blending them together. It is difficult to write sentences and stories without using at least a few of them. Therefore, we teach children to recognise them from memory. Examples are “I”, “have”, “their”, “look” and “the”.

Games to play:

Sight word fishing: Print out several sight words and stick them to coloured pieces of cardboard cut into the shape of fish. Glue a magnet to each one and put them in a bucket. Make a fishing rod by attaching another magnet to the end of a piece of string and then tie the other end to a stick.
The learners ”fish” words out of a bucket and read them. If they can’t identify a word, put it back in the bucket. The game ends when they have read all the words in the bucket.

Encourage small children to always draw circles anti-clockwise starting at the “2 o’clock position”. When this is second nature they will quickly take to forming the letters “c”, “o”, “a”, “d”, “g”, “f”, “q” and “s”.

When learning the alphabet, we first want our learners to identify each letter by its sound rather than its name.

This is because children learn to read simple words by “sounding letters”. They blend the sounds of letters together.

When choosing an alphabet chart or poster, ensure that the words given as examples start with the sound of the letter and not it’s name or a distorted form of its sound.

For example:

“a” as in “apple” and not “a” as in “apricot”.
“c” as in “cat” and not “c” as in “city”.
“x” as in “fox” and not “x” as in “X-ray”

We teach learners the essential sound of each letter first.
Once they have learnt each one, we can start to slowly introduce the instances where the letters are articulated differently.