Class News

Sharing homework.

This will be the first of many homework sharing posts that gives the children chance to share their good work beyond the classroom and will (hopefully) become a useful source of ideas if you’re stuck with a creative homework.

Last week’s homework was to show what you have learnt about a period in history. I had information from Celts, Vikings, Romans, Victorians and even the Industrial Revolution. Lots of interesting stuff and here’s but a few…

 Ben’s model of a Celt house. which came with some information too.

 

What’s going on this week?

Some parents have mentioned that it would be helpful to know what we’re learning each week to allow you to know how to help at home. In response to this, there’ll be a short post each Sunday/Monday about the main areas for learning in the following week.

Maths

This week, we’ve returned to division in Maths and have started by sharing objects into groups and recognising this as a division calculation. This then leads to understanding how we can use our tables to solve division (eg 15 divided by 3 can be solved by counting in 3s until you reach 15). Once we’re confident using this skill, we can start thinking about division in real life particularly when things don’t share equally.

How many egg boxes do I need to hold my 23 eggs? Each box holds 6 eggs.

English

We’re entering the weird and wonderful world of poetry in English. Lots of reading of poetry helps us to hear the patterns, rhythm and understand the poets choice for how to structure it. Through poems by Tony Mitton (Old Noah’s Dance Hall Ship, Elegant Elephant Delicatessen, Instructions for Growing Poetry and My Hat) we will also explore techniques like rhyming and alliteration before attempting to write a poem of our own about our favourite piece of clothing.

Topic

It’s the final week of Time Travel which means we’ll be reflecting on what we’ve learnt over the last eight weeks. Here are some things you could ask at home…

• What have you learnt?
• What did you enjoy most?
• What would you still like to find out?
• What did you fin the most challenging?

Sorting 3D shapes

We explored all things 3D this week and a great way of showing whether you are confident with you edges, faces and vertices is to try sorting shapes.

…or a Carroll diagram. It’s interesting to see how the shapes move around when you change the criteria you’re sorting with.

Can you spot any mistakes we made?

It was quite tricky sometimes, especially when you’re trying to think about four things at once!

Artists once more

After our Katie and… Big Topic, we had a bit of a break from art… but it’s back!

We started off using different types of pencils to sketch Tudor houses. We really tried to capture the dark strips of the buildings and their often wonky shapes.

Then we went very abstract! We looked at Jackson Pollock’s Number 8 which was a great contrast to the real-life sketches we’d created. Using all things bubbly, we created our own bubbly backgrounds for our serious Tudor houses. It was great fun and our finished pieces, when we combined the two, will follow.

Amazing inventions!

There were some fantastic creative homeworks this week. Children were asked to invent something which would make our lives easier. Below are five of the homeworks the children particularly liked this week. A special mention should also go to Ahmed, Jennifer and Ravinder, who produce some amazingly creative digital homeworks.

Brandon’s invention to solve the problem of annoying siblings:

Linda’s brain bending invention:

Sam’s genius spaghetti fork:

Jaskirat’s very useful ipad case and stationery box:

Molly’s maid:

Creative homework

A few samples of this week’s homework which was to respond to a piece of art.

Building the dream

Iggy Peck, Architect inspired Year 1 to become architects themselves today.  World Book Day was celebrated with drawings, thoughts, painting and actual building.  Iggy Peck built towers out of nappies (dirty ones!) – you will be glad to hear we didn’t do that but we did construct our own structures:

We did some sketches and line drawings:

…and we did some printing:

What a creative day!

Class assembly

Thank you to those of you who could make it to class assembly today. We really enjoyed preparing for it and, from my point of view, it was made an easy task because of the children’s concentration and naturally clear voices.

• ‘Lovely assembly – liked the communal story at the end.’
• ‘Great story, loved the fire props and well remembered lines.’
• ‘Really enjoyable as always. The audience participation was a nice touch and the humour that was included.’
• ‘First time at school assembly. Could see the kids enjoy it by the number of children joining in. Well done.’

…and a well done from me too!

Lotherton Hall detectives

With a visitor from Lotherton Hall, we became history detectives again today. We started the lesson by looking at the building and thinking about what it is and when it might have been built.

Then, we each had a box of clues. We began by looking, feeling, touching and talking about what we had. Everyone really enjoyed thinking about what the artefacts were and how they were used.

Gradually we started getting more information by matching uses to the objects helping us to understand what sort of person might have used them.

Finally, the people of the house were revealed and we had to use all of the information have learnt to decide who each set of objects belonged to. There were some great discussions while we tried to explain our reasons and opinions to each other.

We had objects belonging to the Lord and Lady of the house and their maid and cook. There was a real difference between the rich and poor people of the house and (not surprisingly) most of  us decided we’d want to be one of the rich people of the house if we’d been alive then.

Time to learn your times tables

Practising times tables at home is really important. Knowing times tables facts really helps your child to feel confident in Maths, and enables them to make progress in areas such as calculating, fractions… even shape work can involve times tables – when we think about angles, for example.

The National Curriculum sets out expectations for times tables knowledge:

• Year 2: recall and use multiplication and division facts for the 2, 5 and 10 multiplication tables, including recognising odd and even numbers
• Year 3: recall and use multiplication and division facts for the 3, 4 and 8 multiplication tables
• Year 4: recall multiplication and division facts for multiplication tables up to 12 × 12

If your child is in Year 5 or 6, they need to know all the tables facts so they can start thinking about prime numbers, factors etc. Knowing the tables facts (including division) means having rapid recall – being able to say the answer within about five seconds, not counting through the times tables to work it out.

Each week, your child is asked to learn a particular times table. We might also work on a pair of tables which are related, such as x4s and x8.

Please make sure your child practises as home: in the car, in the bath, on the way to school, straight after school as a matter of routine. Your child needs to know that something like this involves effort and there aren’t any easy solutions!

It’s really helpful to test them two or three times during the week to make sure their ‘score’ improves, and also try to build in some multiplication and division games and references:

• play ‘tables ping-pong‘, where you and your child counts through a times tables forwards and backwards, alternating the counting: 0, 4,8, 12, 16, 20…
• look out for arrays, where you see a grid of something: eggs in a carton is a simple 2 x 3 or 3 x 2 array, and there are arrays on your mobile phone (to log on to mobile phones, you might see a 3 x 3 array – a square number), on buildings (the window panes of a block of flats are useful for larger numbers), tiles in your bathroom, chocolate and other food products…
• download an app to practise on a phone or tablet (there are loads of free ones)
• talk about when you use times tables knowledge