Health Week
This week is a themed week. We’ll be focussing on health, discussing ways in which we can keep ourselves healthy. That might include food and drink choices; ensuring that we’re being active enough each day; maintaining personal hygiene through hand-washing and brushing our teeth thoroughly; and being aware of our mental health.
There are lots of visitor sessions to look forward to: drug education, judo, pilates, basketball and ‘Learn by Heart’. Additionally, the children will work with other teachers each discussing a different aspect of health.
Help at home by discussing how you stay healthy and ask what special learning the children have been doing each day. Will what your child has learnt affect any of the choices (s)he makes from now on?
Phonics mornings
Thank you to everybody for attending the phonics sessions last week. The children really enjoyed having you there to share in their learning.
Although phonics is important in teaching the mechanics of reading, reading is about much more. We also want children to read for pleasure. Reading to your child regularly will help them to develop a lifelong love of books and reading.
At the moment the children are enjoying ‘Room on the broom‘ by Julia Donaldson and ‘In the witch’s kitchen‘ by Nick Sharratt.
20 November 2015
The homework this week is talk time homework / practice makes perfect and is due in on Wednesday 25 November.
How can you learn which way is left and which is right?
In maths this week, we’ve been learning about ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd…) and the left and right positions. Many children (and adults) struggle with remembering their left and right, but there are lots of ways to remember them if it doesn’t come naturally!
If your child cannot remember their left from right after doing the homework, it is not the end of the world! The homework acts as a chance for them to discuss their learning with you and for you to share any ways of remembering their left from right.
20 November 2015
The spellings for this week are:
Takeover day
The running of school today was taken over by… our very own children! Dinners were served by Year 4, Y5 children were in the school office and even assembly was taken over by Year 6 (what a good job they did!).
The class were successful in taking over registration, giving out book bags and homework, giving out ‘cool class tokens’ in assembly and dismissing the class for lunch. They did a great job and they showed how responsible and mature they were. Well done!
Taking the register 
Giving out ‘cool class tokens’
Taking the register
Phonics feedback
Mrs Burke and the other Reception staff were delighted to welcome nearly all parents / carers into the classroom this week to watch the Reception children learn phonics – so important in developing reading and writing skills.
Parents who visited either on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday gained an insight into the general teaching that goes on in Reception, but more specifically learnt about how we teach phonics and how they should support their child’s learning at home:
‘It was useful to see the step-by-step process in which the children are taught so that I can attempt to support in a similar fashion at home. It was helpful to hear the language used in context (grapheme, phoneme etc).’
‘Very informative and well-organised. Definitely helps with how to support at home.’
Lots of parents left impressed by the children’s learning behaviour:
‘I was happy to see how well the children are engaged.’
Finally, we asked how we can make these sessions even better. We had a couple of suggestions – a longer session was suggested, and the session a little bit earlier in the year. We’ll consider these, although in previous years we’ve tried different things and this seems about right for most people. One parent suggested that we should remind others ‘that phonics is not the be all and end all’ and that we should ’emphasise the importance of reading for fun’ – we agree. The purpose of the session was kept quite specific, but Mrs Burke will include some reminders about this in subsequent newsletters because we certainly want to promote a love of reading.
Thanks again to everyone who came along. The next sessions are on 20, 21 and 22 January.
Creative homeworks
This week’s favourite anti-bullying homeworks as chosen by the children:
20 November 2015
The homework this week is talk time and is due in on Wednesday 25 November.
What makes a healthy person?
It’s Health Week next week so the homework is a chance for children to talk about and show what they know about being healthy.
Keep checking the Class News page next week to see what the children have been learning.
20 November 2015
This week’s Practice Makes Perfect is due on Wednesday 25 November.
I can use homophones correctly in a sentence.
One of the things we’re finding tricky in Year 5 is to recognise which spelling we need when a word is a homophone.
Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently and have different meanings. Write 10 sentences using homophones. There are lots to practise from our spellings last week but everybody needs to practise ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ as we make mistakes with these a lot.
20 November 2015
This week’s homework is Talk Time and is due on Wednesday 25 November.
Should children play outside or play with technology?
Choose one side of the argument to debate.
Be prepared to have a class debate on this topic. Choose one side of the argument to debate but don’t forget to consider both sides so that you can counter the other team’s points.
Use the sentence openers to organise your ideas and create counter arguments for our debate.
