Getting green-fingered
On Friday, Year 5 braved the cold and headed out onto the field behind school. We helped dig up oak tree saplings to be planted elsewhere and kept a few ourselves to plant when we’ve get our own green space.
Creative homeworks
Below are our favourite Health Week homeworks.
Bedtime reading
We like these top tips to promote bedtime reading from Book Trust.
Although these are specifically for children who are starting to read by themselves, there are plenty of tips to support children of all ages.
(The Book Trust’s advent calendar is brilliant, too!)
Shared area learning
Lots of learning happens in the shared area!
Students become teachers
I was able to put my feet up earlier this week as the children became the experts. First, we recognised what aspects of our learning we were stronger and weaker at. We then practised how to teach somebody else something we were confident with. Finally, we paired up and had a go at teaching.
Both student and teacher were positive about this approach and asked if we could do it more often.
8Rs for learning
Resilience, resourcefulness, readiness, responsibility, risk-taking, responsiveness, remembering and …reflection.
This week we complete our 8Rs SEAL theme. Children will have the opportunity to not only reflect on their learning in general but also reflect on how the 8Rs supports their learning.
Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…
Can your child remember the 8Rs and the associated animal?
Maths and English
Maths
This week in maths, we’ve been looking at mental methods of subtraction. We started the week by looking at a method called “forcing bonds”. Let’s have a look at this in practice…
To make this calculation easier, we can start by subtracting down to the previous ten. This would mean we would subtract four to get to thirty.
Having subtracted four, how much more would we need to subtract the full eight?
We would then subtract the remaining four which gives us an answer of twenty six.
We’ve also looked at the “add and adjust” method of subtraction which we usually use when subtracting nine.
To start, we add one to our nine which gives us ten. As a class we agreed that finding ten less is much easier than subtracting nine.
We would then use a blank number line to clearly record our methodology.
We then have to “adjust” our answer because we want to subtract nine not ten. To do this we add one back on.
English
In English, we’ve been looking at how to punctuate direct speech. Here is an example of correctly punctuated direct speech.
We use inverted commas (speech marks) before and after speech in a sentence. Ask your child how their “speech hands” can help them punctuate speech.
Direct speech is always finished with punctuation – usually a comma. Can your child think of any other punctuation that could be used at the end of direct speech? Since this punctuation is part of the speech it must come before the closing inverted commas.
After speech we often see the word said or a synonym of said. We’ve been exploring said synonyms in class.
To make our speech sentences more interesting, we’ve also looked at adding in adverbs. Adverbs describe a verb and in this sentence the verb is said.
Library
I hope your child has enjoyed having a book from our library. Please could you make sure they bring their library books back to school next week as we are having a rotation of stock.
The run up to Christmas
There are two weeks left before we all disappear for the festive season. It’ll be busy, as usual, in Y5. What will we be up to?
Topic – We’re starting to round off the learning we’ve enjoyed about space through Tim Peake’s mission to the ISS (International Space Station). To celebrate what a fantastic topic this has been, we’ll be collating all of our knowledge to take on a D&T/Science project to create our own rocket for launch. We’re still using Makewaves to showcase our learning.
English – Our noses are in newspapers at the moment. We’ve explored reports of the moon landings from 1969 and we’ll be coming back to the present next week to report on Tim’s upcoming mission. For the final week, we’ll get our creative juices flowing again and see if we can write for a given audience. The aim will be to create a Christmas story book to be read to the children in Reception and Year 1.
Maths – Dig out your protractors next week as we start learning how to measure angles. We’ll recap the names of different angles before learning how to measure them and then explore angles in shapes.
I can make healthy choices
We had lots of brilliant, interactive pieces of homework this week. During our homework review, it was great fun not only looking at what we had all done, but playing the different games and challenges that had been set.
There were all sorts of different challenges: word searches, pairs game, top trumps, voting slips and much more.
Healthy drinks update – day 4
These pictures were taken on Monday. So far, the children have been most shocked by the Fruit Shoot and the Monster. We had to throw the milk away as it had started to smell bad!
