Author: Mr Roundtree

Attendance matters

Our whole-school attendance figure up until February half-term is just short of 96.8%.

Here are the figures for each year group:

  • Reception: 96.86% That’s brilliant – keep it up!
  • Year 1: 96.61%
  • Year 2: 97.52% The best in school – well done!
  • Year 3: 97.45% A close second – good stuff!
  • Year 4: 96.13%
  • Year 5: 96.15%
  • Year 6: 96.79% Good stuff

Let’s aim for the whole-school average to be even higher by Easter!

If you’d like to know the up-to-date score for your child, please ask at the office.

Reviewing computing

The end of the half term brings us to an end of our computing topic which lots of us are particularly sad about. The children have really enjoy this learning and many have continued it at by creating their own Scratch accounts.

We’ve learnt lots of new vocabulary through this topic and many of us now feel confident with words which we’d never heard of at the beginning of the half term. Today, we shared our knowledge as a group by creating a concept map of what we understand about our computing vocabulary.

Is your child in Year 4?

The government is introducing a new assessment for Year 4 pupils. In June, each child in Year 4 is set to complete an online multiplication tables check (MTC). Read more about this new assessment.

There will be 25 questions covering the full range of facts children are expected to know, which means questions going up to 12 x 12. However, there​’​s slightly more weighting towards multiplication facts involving 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 due to these being the most difficult to learn. For example, there will be between 2 and 4 questions involving multiplying by 6.

For each question, children are presented with a multiplication fact and an empty box. This may be written as __ x 6 or as 6 x __ .

If you’d like to practise at home, our own website has lots of spreadsheets you can download.

There are also lots of websites that you can use. This one is very similar to the MTC. It’s possible to alter the settings on this website to focus on particular times tables.

Another exciting way to practise times tables is through the ‘Times Tables Rockstars’ website. Every child has their own individual login details that enables them to access their account at school and at home. Feedback so far is that this is proving an enjoyable way to practise times tables facts at home!

Revisiting ENPs

In our writing lessons, Year 4 have been working towards writing a non-chronological report about a fictional tree. We’ve got the tree of horrible hands, the pasta tree, the forgetful tree and the sail tree. Ask your child which tree they’ve chosen to write about.

On Friday, we worked with other people who had chosen the same tree as us to create expanded noun phrases to use in our paragraph describing the appearance of our tree. 

We used thesauruses to expand our use of vocabulary and it was a great recap of the learning we did before Christmas on descriptive writing.

Using our science to make games!

Now that we know how to make a circuit and what makes a circuit complete and incomplete, Year 4 have been able to create their very own buzz maze game.

Lewis was able to explain how the game worked really well, using lots of our key words for this topic: components, circuit, conductor, insulator.

Look at these images together at home and see whether your child can explain how the game works.

Next, we’re going to combine this with our computing knowledge to program a machine to keep score of how many buzzes we make in a game.

11 February 2020

This week’s spelling focuses on adding un and dis to words. Practise these spellings – think about how creative you can be. There will be a test on Friday 14 February when ten of these words will be tested.

 

Spelling list

appear

believe

certain

continue

important

interest

learn

  

natural

notice

popular

possess

able

avoidable

aware

  

kind

usual

pleasure

advantage

obey