08 May 2015
The homeworks this week are Talk Time and Practice Makes Perfect.
The Talk Time homework is:
Is it ever ok to lie?
This homework will link with next week’s SEAL focus about telling the truth and saying sorry. Children should discuss the homework and make notes in their homework books ready for the class discussion on Wednesday.
The Practice Makes Perfect homework are two Mathletics activities about fractions, decimals and percentages. These activities follow the learning in maths lesson on this from the previous week.
01 May 2015
The homeworks this week are Creative and Practice Makes Perfect.
The Creative homework is:
I can show what I have learnt about the General Election.
In this homework, children have to produce a piece of work which demonstrates what they have learnt over the past two weeks about the upcoming General Election. This could be about the political parties, their leaders, their policies / ideas or their own ideas about politics.
Here are some of the ideas the children came up with:
- A profile of a politician
- An interview with a politician
- A manifesto of your political plans
- A 60 second video about a political party or leader
- An interview with you, the leader of your own political party
- A poster detailing your party, logo, slogan and political plans for the country
24 April 2015
The homeworks this week are Talk Time and Practice Makes Perfect.
The Talk Time homework time homework ties in with the upcoming General Election. Children should talk with people at home about what policies / ideas they would introduce if they were the leader of a political party. The ideas should be realistic and should be ones which would benefit the community, not just them and their friends.
The Mathsletic homework is an activity about time which we will be focussing on in Maths lessons next week.
20 March 2015
The homework this week is creative and is due in on Wednesday 25 March.
I can show what I have learnt about persuasion.
The children have been learning about the art of persuasion in English lessons recently, writing some pretty persuasive emails and letters! For the homework, I’d like them to show me what they have learnt about persuasion. As a class, we thought of some ideas:
- Write another persuasive letter/email persuading me or someone else to do or change their mind about something.
- Create a poster showing off the features of Persuasive writing. The children have learnt this as READER (see attached photo).
- Have a structured argument – using connectives (see second photo) – with a parent, sibling, friend, etc.
13 March 2015
The homework this week is Talk Time and is due in on Wednesday 18 March.
What should we, as humans, focus on inventing?
This homework aims to focus children’s thinking on inventions that would truly benefit the world rather than inventions which just make our comfortable lives easier.
The Practice Makes Perfect homework is a Mathletics quiz on area and perimeter. We’ll learn about these areas of maths in our lessons next week.
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
XXVII February MMXV
The homeworks this week are Creative and Practice Makes Perfect.
The Creative homework is to invent something which will make your life easier.
This could be something very simple or complex. Either way, you have to creatively show what your product is, how it is made and how it works. This could be done in a poster, a video presentation, an annotated diagram, a series of diagrams. It’s up to you!
The second homework is Practice Makes Perfect. This homework will be a Mathletics homework around our next unit of maths: multiplication and division.
Supporting your child’s maths at home
This article is a thought-provoking read, and might inspire you to support your child in different ways; in it, Professor Jo Boaler sets out this list of top tips for parents who want to support their child in Maths:
- Encourage children to play maths puzzles and games at home. Anything with a dice will help them enjoy maths and develop numeracy and logic skills.
- Never tell children they are wrong when they are working on maths problems. There is always some logic to what they are doing. So if your child multiplies three by four and gets seven, try: “Oh I see what you are thinking, you are using what you know about addition to add three and four. When we multiply we have four groups of three…”
- Maths is not about speed. In younger years, forcing kids to work fast on maths is the best way to start maths anxiety, especially among girls.
- Don’t tell your children you were bad at maths at school. Or that you disliked it. This is especially important if you are a mother.
- Encourage number sense*. What separates high and low achievers in primary school is number sense.
- Encourage a “growth mindset” – the idea that ability changes as you work more and learn more.
- For younger children, the ‘five-ness’ of five and then the ‘ten-ness’ of ten is really important: five fingers, five toes, five displayed on a dice, five split into 4 and one more, five split into three and two…
- For older children, if they are asked to add up 27 and 16, when they have number sense they can break the numbers apart and use them flexibly – take three from the 16 and add it to 27 to make 30, then add on the remaining 13 to make 43.
Number sense is not something you can get from simply being given an extra worksheet for homework – it develops from play, discussion and observation of number in the world around them.
More homework? No – more encouragement
We had a record number of parents / carers who attended parents’ evenings this week – thank you to all who showed up.
A small number of parents asked for more homework. Please bear in mind we asked your views about homework in the Annual Survey last year, and the findings were quite mixed: some thought there was too much whilst about the same proportion thought there was not enough. The majority agreed with us: the amount of homework we set is about right.
Taken from our Homework Policy, this is our rationale for giving homework:
Educational experience that a school by itself provides is limited; children benefit from wider, complementary experiences out of school. However, some prompts and guidance from school can direct these experiences and develop greater learning. We see homework as an important example of cooperation between teachers and parents / carers. An aim of our teaching is to promote independent learners; homework is one of the ways in which children can acquire the skill of independent learning.
We recognise the importance of quality family time; this policy should help to promote opportunities to be creative rather than labour over frequent worksheets or carry out activities that pupils and / or parents / carers may not understand.
Whilst homework develops children’s learning and independence, quality family time, play and free time are also important. Homework should not prevent children from taking part in wider activities such as those offered by out-of-school clubs and other organisations. Children develop their interests and skills to the full only when parents/carers encourage them to make maximum use of the opportunities available outside school.
Also in our Homework Policy is this statement:
We believe the frequency of homework set out here provides the right balance for pupils and meets the expectations of most parents (whose opinions we sought in the Annual Survey, 2014). Staff may occasionally provide additional homework; this will amount to two or three extra pieces across the year. As an alternative, staff will be happy to suggest to parents other ways they can support their child’s learning at home.
Please do not expect extra homework for you child to be set as a matter of routine. Governors want to protect teachers work / life balance, but – importantly – we believe extra homework would not be helpful for most pupils.
06 February 2015
The Practice Makes Perfect homework this week is two Mathletics addition activities involving large numbers. Children must ensure that they don’t try to solve these problems in their heads. They should use a pencil and paper and not rush!
