This week’s maths learning
This week, in maths, we’ve been learning all about measures.
After exploring mass through weighing items using different methods, we moved on to capacity. We spent time measuring, estimating and converting between units. (Remarkably, we didn’t make much mess!)
You can help at home by:
- Encouraging your child to find examples of measures in every day life
- Encouraging your child to estimate the mass/capacity of things you find in the house (eg what do you think is the capacity of that glass? What do you think is the mass of the laptop? What do you think is the capacity of our bath? Hint: benchmarking helps – ask you child about this!)
- Practising converting between units (eg ml to litres, g to kg)
- Using the revision books handed out last week
We’ll continue our learning by solving problems involving different measures.
Marvellous Mathematicians
We’ve been learning about multiplication this week. We began by looking at groups of objects. Here, one marvellous mathematician has shown us that 10 groups of 10 is 100! After drawing 10 groups and placing 10 items in each group, she counted in 10s to find the answer. Wow!
This marvellous mathematician really wanted to try out her new skills with some large numbers! 2 groups of 100 is 200!
5 groups of 6 is 30. What a great way to show that calculation using a picture! Notice the repeated addition: 6+6+6+6+6+6=30. In lessons, we are mainly working with groups of 2, 5 and 10 as we can count in multiples of these numbers. This marvellous mathematician did this work independently and chose to do groups of 6 and 7, however, Year 1 are only expected to count in 2s 5s and 10s. Keep practising this at home!
I wonder
In the library today, we have been researching our own “I wonders”.
Why not ask your child what they wondered today!
Board game fun!
We all really enjoyed learning about different types of punctuation through a board game last week. Sometimes we landed on a ‘tricky tester’ and had to answer a test question. On our next go we could land on ‘dastardly dictation’ where we had to listen to a sentence and write it with the correct punctuation.
Everybody had fun while making sure they were checking their answers and learning from it, too.
Where is Goldilocks?
Goldilocks has been spotted in different locations around school. This has given the children an opportunity to practise and learn new words to describe position.
This week
Plant News
Our plants have really started to grow. In class we have been making observations and predictions about our plants.
What will the mystery seeds be?!
Pirates of the Curry Bean
We have been hard at work rehearsing our Easter production. We can’t wait to show you the finished results in a few week’s time.
Eat, digest, do!
As part of the Science in school workshops led by Leeds University students, Year 5 and 6 took part in an interactive session all about the digestive system.
This included learning about what happens to food inside our body, the different parts and functions of the alimentary canal, what makes your tummy rumble and how far your food has to travel from one end to the other… A great addition to our current Life topic!
Thank you to Miss Mathias for providing this informative session.
- ‘I learnt how long the small intestine is – child is 5m and adult is 6-7m.’
- ‘I learnt how food gets through your body.’
- ‘I learnt what things are called in the digestive system and what everything does.’
- ‘I have learnt that your digestive system has lots of different parts.’
KidsHealth website provides a summary of what we learnt.
Computing with ‘Lego WeDo’
This half term, as part of our computing curriculum, we have been using a resource called ‘Lego WeDo’. We have built models of animals from Lego blocks and then programmed them to perform actions using the accompanying computer software.
So far, we have focused, and will continue to focus, on using and applying computational thinking concepts.
You can help at home by:
- Discussing your child’s learning with them;
- Talking about how computational thinking concepts effect our everyday lives;
- Encouraging them to think about how they may use some of these concepts without realising.
If, like me, much of this is new to you, or, if you’d like to brush up your own computing knowledge, there are some great websites that can help. Although it’s aimed at teachers, Barefoot Computing offers lots of support with the new curriculum, its key concepts and a breakdown of technical language.
07 March – plant update
This weekend, new life has been brought into Year 3. Our plants have started to sprout!
I can work with money
Last week’s Creative homework was based on Maths and the children really got their creative juices flowing to produce some great pieces of work.
Lots of our money homework is now on our Maths challenge table so the children can practise their skills through games, questions and challenges that have been set by each other.