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
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
Phonics
This week, we begin phase 4 of our phonics programme.
During this phase, your child will continue to practise previously learned graphemes and phonemes and learn how to read and write words with four phonemes. These are called CVCC words (consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant) and include words such as, tent, damp, toast and chimp. Although ‘toast’ has five letters, oa work together to make the long vowel sound o, pronounced ‘oh’; similarly, c and h in ‘chimp’ work together to make the phoneme ch. For example, in the word ‘toast’, t = consonant, oa = vowel, s = consonant, t = consonant.
Your child will also learn to read and write CCVC words such as swim, plum, sport, cream and spoon. For example, in the word ‘cream’, c = consonant, r = consonant, ea = vowel, m = consonant.
In addition, they will be learning more tricky words and continuing to read and write sentences. There are no new phonemes taught in this phase.
Tricky words in phase 4:
- said
- so
- do
- have
- like
- some
- come
- were
- there
- little
- one
- when
- out
- what
Ways you can support your child at home
Practise reading and spelling some CVCC and CCVC words but continue to play around with CVC words. Children like reading and spelling words that they have previously worked with as this makes them feel successful. Make up captions and phrases for your child to read and write, for example, a silver star, clear the pond, crunch crisps. Write some simple sentences and leave them around the house for your child to find and read.
Please look at the homework pages on our website for more sentences to read and write with your child.
Hockey
For PE this half-term, we’re focussing on hockey. Here are a few pictures of our first session this week. Keeping the ball at the end of our hockey stick proved tricky at times.
Value of houses – Maths
There’s all sorts of maths to explore through our Time Travel topic. Today, we tackled the big numbers by looking at the cost of houses today. By the end of the lesson, we were all comfortable reading tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions numbers. We ordered house from cheapest to most expensive and discussed what it was that affected how much houses are worth.
Encourage your child to keep up this practice by searching on Right Move and estate agent websites and asking how much the houses are. You could also discuss how house prices have changed, not only in the last 2000 years, but the last 20!
Welcome back!
It’s been a great couple of days back at school and we’ve been very busy.
Year 1 and 2 spent yesterday working with SPLATS – a drama company who helped us to create a performance about the Romans taking over Britain. We took the roll of prop designers in the morning with the whole class chipping in to make leaves for our chase scene through the forest.
Our afternoon was then spent rehearsing for our two scenes before the big performance at the end of the day.
Everybody tried their best and showed that we have some budding actors and actresses in the making.
End of half term
Well, it’s nearing the end of half-term already and what a busy one it has been!
Continuing our Time Travel theme, this week we’ve travelled back to the “Stone Age”. Check out our Stone Age artefacts below.
There will be no homework or spellings to learn over half-term, but extra practice of times tables and spellings would be a good idea. Please continue with lots of reading, Lexia and Mathletics at home, too!
Parents’ evening
Many thanks to all the parents who recently attended parents’ evening. It was a pleasure to meet so many of you. The children are all working hard at the moment and are demonstrating a positive learning attitude – as noticed by all the staff around school.
Happy half term
The end of another half term has whizzed around and I just wanted to wish everyone an enjoyable and relaxing half term. There will be no homework or spellings over the holidays but keep up with reading each day, Mathletics and Lexia.
After half term, we’ll be sending times table practice home and there will be a test each Friday alongside spellings.
As our plants are now thriving, each child will be bringing their herb home to keep and take responsibility for watering it every few days. It’d be great to see how you get on with this – particularly if you end up being able to use it in your cooking!
Enjoy the break and we’ll see you in a week.
Dance!
This week is our last week dancing with Mr Lynch. He’s worked us really hard over the last six weeks; working on our technique and our fitness. This week, we’ve mostly been practising and refining our Time Travel routine.
The Tin Forest update
Our Tin Forest will be heading home to you on Friday to see who can keep their herbs growing over half term and beyond. Here’s how they’ve grown since we planted them.
Friday 16th January 2015
Friday 30th January 2015
Thursday 12th February 2015
They’ll need plenty of water, warmth and light!