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
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!