PE days
Just a quick reminder: if the day starts with a T then Year Three have PE.
Tuesday is swimming and Thursday is dance this half term.
Circle time
This afternoon, Year 1 have been discussing our SEAL statement: I can make a fresh start.
Cracking comprehension
It’s Monday afternoon which means we have cracking comprehension with Mrs Bald!
First News
We all enjoyed reading the First News newspapers this afternoon. We read them before having a discussion as a class. You could do this at home, too! 
Our first week!
What’s going on in class
Having thoroughly enjoyed our mini-topic ‘The Lost Thing’, we’ve now started a Big Topic called ‘Holidays’. The topic began by exploring two suitcases and predicting where we could be visiting (real and imaginary) in the next 8 weeks. We then look at the top ten holiday destinations from the UK in Summer 2015 and researched one of these countries in greater detail.
Topic – In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be planning a holiday abroad, looking at temperature, rainfall and all sorts of other important deciding factors. We’ll delve into the world of physics to understand how planes stay in they sky and boats don’t sink as well as starting to compare the UK to a (currently mystery) destination in the Americas.
Help at home by searching flights online, looking at how long it takes and discussing the children’s idea for how the plane works.
Maths – Alongside this, we’ll learn lots about other countries by understanding graphs, tables and charts in our maths lessons. We’ll need to answer basic retrieval questions as well as compare data and use graphs that might be less familiar to us (pie charts).
Help at home by exploring different ways of presenting data and see which you think are the clearest and what makes them easy to understand (labelled axes, titles etc).
English – We’ll look at different types of sentences (simple, compound and complex) and practise writing these accurately before moving on to writing discussions to put forward different sides of an argument.
Help at home by discussing guided reading books and how sentences vary their openers, some are very short and some very descriptive and there are different joining words (but, because, although) used to link ideas together.
Times Tables
Next Friday will be our first times tables test of the year. The focus is the 10 times table. We will be practising in class next week but children should spend time practising at home as well. We’ll be counting in tens with lots of objects to get them used to what the numbers actually mean. It would be great if you could do this as well. As well as this, the look, cover, write, check strategy is also a tried and tested way to learn the facts.
One thing to be aware of when you’re practising with your children is that the test won’t list the times tables in order. For example, 1×10, 2×10, 3×10, 4×10, etc. Instead, the facts will be read in any order: 3×10, 7×10, 9×10, 3×10, etc. Please bear this in mind when you’re practising at home.
A couple of other points to bear in mind:
- Don’t neglect 0x10 and 1×10
- The National Curriculum sets out the expectation that children should learn up to x12, so include 11×10 and 12×10
Please ask if you have any questions.
Cracking creative homeworks
Each time we do a creative homework, the class pick five of their favourites. Here are this week’s top five:
25 September 2015
The homework this week is talk time and is due in on Wednesday 30 September.
I can talk to my family (especially older family members) about what holidays were like when they were my age.
Here are some questions you could ask:
- What holidays did you go on when you were my age?
- How did you get to your holiday destination?
- What did you do when you were on holiday?
- What did you pack?
- Was the food that you ate different on holidays?
- What things are different and what things are the same?
- Do you have any evidence of the holidays that you went on when you were my age? This could be photographs, postcards, letters.
25 September 2015
