Three or free?
Increasingly, we’re noticing children who are not speaking clearly enough – and this is having a negative effect on their spelling.
Listen to your child as the say words like ‘three’ and ‘the’. More and more children are saying these words in a way which sounds like ‘free’ and ‘vuh’ or ‘fuh’ – all words that use ‘th’, in fact.
We know this is simply because children are not learning to stick their tongue out to make the ‘th’ sound – maybe it’s a bit lazy, maybe it’s because they never learnt, maybe it’s because the London accent (where this is more historic) is heard so much these days. When we prompt children, the vast majority can do say ‘th’ perfectly.
Does this matter?
Well, yes. This week, a child told me in a Maths lesson that the cost of something was ‘free’ – he meant £3. In the same week, a good writer demonstrating his ability to use a wider bank of words begun a sentence with ‘Furfermore, …’
If the way children pronounce words means that someone can confuse what they say, or that they end up making mistakes in spelling a simple word like ‘further’, then yes, this does matter.
As Mrs Burke tells her class in phonics lessons, saying ‘th’ is the only time your child is allowed to stick their tongue out at someone – please help your child get out of this habit, whatever their age!
18 March 2016
The homework for this week is a moral talk time and is due in on Wednesday 23 March.
Should we keep animals in zoos? Should we even keep animals as pets?
18 March 2016
These are the spellings for next week:
18 March 2016
This week’s homework is practice makes perfect and is due on Wednesday 23 March.
I can tell the time.
Your child will have a series of time-based tasks to do that they need to finish in the booklet provided.
We’ve started telling time to the nearest minute in class and if your child needs some extra support to do this at home, I recommend the BBC Bitesize website. I’ve also set some time tasks on Mathletics.
18 March 2016
This week, your child has been given a copy of the Year 3/4 spelling list. They must pick 10 spellings that follow the rule double up for a short vowel sound. Words that follow this rule include comma (compare the sound of the ‘o’ with coma, where there is no double up), hopping (compared with hoping) and funny. Why not ask your child to identify the short vowel sound in each of these words. 
18 March 2016
Spellings this week are not one specific list. The children have gone through their English book and picked out words they have spelt incorrectly in the past in order to learn these and not make the same mistake again.
It’s best if ten minutes of each day is given to practising spellings and we’ve looked at lots of different ways in which we can practise in class.
- word shapes
- word pyramids
- missing vowels
- create a crossword
- make it into a wordsearch
- good old look, write, cover, check.
These spellings will be tested on Thursday 24 March.
18 March 2016
This week’s Talk Time homework will be discussed on Wednesday 23 March.
To be able to see things from other people’s point of view.
This links to our SEAL statement for the week and is an essential skill for life. Over dinner, discuss when we might have a different opinion to somebody else; why somebody else’s opinion might be different; whether it’s OK for our opinions to differ; and what we can do to get along with each other and accept/respect our differences.
Big Topic Review
A big thank you to those parents that were able to attend our open afternoon on Wednesday. We hope you enjoyed finding out about all the great learning that’s happened in Y6 during our ‘Life’ topic.
For those that didn’t attend, we reflected on each piece of learning we have done by writing down on big sheets something we remembered.
Then, we created a ‘diamond 9’ of the skills we have learnt/practised and some of the knowledge we have gained. It was interesting how everyone had different ideas of what they’d learnt most about.
Finally, we sat down to review our big topic book. It works as a diary of all the great topic-related learning we do!
If you’d like to find out more about our brilliant ‘Life’ topic, ask your child how they’ve found it.
18 March 2016
The homework this week is Practice Makes Perfect and is due in on Wednesday 23 March.
I can find real life arrays.
Arrays are pictorial representations to help children understand multiplication. They are an arrangement of items in rows and columns, for example:
We have a neat arrangement of 5 rows and 3 columns. We can see here that there are 3 groups of 5, which is 3×5. This is how arrays can help children with multiplication.
At this stage, we are just focusing on identifying arrays. We have been looking for arrays around our classroom and in the playground. Here are some examples of real life arrays to get you started! When you find some, you could draw them or take a photograph to stick in your book.
18 March 2016
This week’s creative homework is due on Wednesday 23 March.
To be able to use speech punctuation.
Using the tips provided, the children need to show that they are able to punctuate speech accurately or create an activity or example that would help others to punctuate speech accurately. There are lots of ways you could do this:
- Write a story (or section of) that includes dialogue
- Create a top tips sheet that would teach someone how to use them
- Make a game that would help us to practise.
- Write a section of text with punctuation missing to be corrected (but have an answer sheet ready).