National Poetry Day
Yesterday was National Poetry Day and we celebrated at school by having a special poetry assembly. We’ve been practising our Wordsworth poem all week and the children delivered it beautifully. They had superb voice projection and excellent prosody. I have been really impressed with the children’s dedication to learning the poem off by heart too.
Well done Year 5!
Help at home by exploring more poems. The children’s poetry archive is a great website to explore.
Maths – Wholes and how they work.
In maths this week we learnt about parts and wholes. Firstly, the children learnt about what a whole is and how we can identify one in individual objects. They then learnt how to make something whole again by splitting objects into parts and putting those parts back together. Following that, we then learnt that whole individual objects can come together to make a whole group of something. For example we need six whole eggs to make a whole box of eggs. The emphasis was on the individual objects coming together to make a whole group. The children explored this by working with different objects creating whole groups of items. Then after this they took part in a game where they were given a number and a hoop, for example 3 children makes a whole group in the pink hoop and 2 in the green hoop. They worked really well on this and I look forward to seeing them improve their knowledge on parts and wholes.
National Poetry Day!
Last week, the children were given the task – as homework – to learn a poem off by heart ready for today – national poetry day! We had an assembly to celebrate. Each class performed a poem. Year 6 performed ‘Daffodils (I wandered lonely as a cloud)’ by William Wordsworth and ‘The Spider and the Fly’ by Mary Howitt.
This website tells you more about the day and why it is celebrated: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/national-poetry-day/
Help at home: Explore the website above. Can you find out 3 things you didn’t know before?
National Poem day – Our wonderful poets.
Throughout this week, the children have been learning about poetry. With National Poetry Day coming up on Thursday 2nd October it is only right that we have learning about different poems. The children have been working hard on learning Kitty by Doug MacLeod for their big performance coming up in assembly on Thursday. They have really impressed us with their reading skills and their ability to perform! Here is a look behind the scenes:
Maths: tens and ones
This week, we’ve been exploring numbers to 100 in lots of exciting ways! Using part-whole models, 100 squares and place value charts, we’ve been breaking numbers down into tens and ones. Take a look at our brilliant work!
Help at home: Pick a number between 20 and 99. Work out how many tens and ones it has, then write it as a number sentence.
Example: 45 has 4 tens and 5 ones → 40 + 5 = 45
Visualising Podkin One-Ear
During our Book Club session, we used one of Authorfy’s 10 minute challenges to visualise a part of our class novel.
Our class novel is called Podkin One-Ear by Kieran Larwood. It is the first of a series of eight books: https://www.goodreads.com/series/205224-the-five-realms
The class have been asking to read it whenever we have a spare moment!
We re-read the last pages of a chapter we finished and tried to visualise what we were hearing. Some of us did it from different perspectives and others even wanted to change how the chapter ended.
Visualising is a great activity to help understanding of a text. Help at home by visualising what you and your child have read at home.
National Poetry Day!
It is National Poetry Day tomorrow and to celebrate, we have been reading and learning a poem to perform in an assembly tomorrow. National Poetry Day’s a chance for all of us to share in the pleasure of poetry.
This website tells you about the day and why it is celebrated: https://forwardartsfoundation.org/national-poetry-day/
Our poem is Let No One Steal Your Dreams by Paul Cookson. This is same as the poem on their homework. Help at home by practising reading the poem.
The children have practised reading with prosody, projection and they’ve added actions too.
Living and Learning: I respect others.
In our Living and Learning lesson this week, Year 6 learnt about discrimination and the protected characteristics.
Discrimination is defined as ‘the unfair treatment of people because of who they are or because they have a certain characteristic(s)’. We discussed examples and the impact of discrimination.
The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination based on protected characteristics.
We remember the protected characteristics by using the mnemonic:
DR S GRAMPS
Disability
Race
Sex
Gender reassignment
Religion or beliefs
Age
Marriage or civil partnership
Pregnancy and/or maternity leave
Sexual orientation
Help at home: Name the protected characteristics without looking. Who makes sure these characteristics are protected?
Geography: Fantastic Fieldwork!
Today, Year 6 ventured to Moortown Park – an urban green space – to conduct their Geography fieldwork. The children were trying to measure carbon stores in the locality. Carbon stores are known as ‘places where carbon is stored in the environment’. To calculate this, they measured the girth (the distance around the outside of something thick) of different trees. They did this by sampling: a way of collecting fieldwork data without measuring everything.
This coming week, we will use this information to work out how much carbon is stored in the trees.
Have a look at us being geographers:
Help at home: To link with our writing skills, spot the parenthesis used in this post!
Writing: character descriptions
This week, Year 4 are writing their character descriptions of Podkin One-Ear. This is the main character from our class novel by Kieran Larwood.
Purpose: to give the reader information about a character.
Audience: children and adults
We’ve spent the last few weeks exploring Podkin One-Ear. We’ve discussed how we could describe both his appearance and his personality to somebody who hasn’t read the book. Our aim has been for the reader to get a detailed and clear picture of Podkin in their heads, without needing to see a picture.
As a class, your children came up with some fantastic adjectives to describe Podkin which they are using in their writing.
Stay tuned to find out how they go…
Help at home: close your eyes and ask your children to describe Podkin for you in as much detail as possible. Can you picture him?