Uncategorised

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.

Curriculum enrichment themed week

Themed weeks are always popular. Next week, we try something new – five consecutive themed days, each centred around a particular subject of the curriculum. A variety of events and visitors are planned.

On Monday, we’ll focus on Maths. We welcome the Happy Puzzle Company to school for a Puzzle Challenge Day. Using large 3D puzzles and challenges, pupils will improve their personal learning skills, thinking skills and team-working skills, whilst boosting their confidence in the processes used.

After school on Monday, there will be an opportunity for you to come and buy a puzzle or two. Happy Puzzle Company will be in The Space and will have a large range of puzzles available for you to buy. You should have received details and a voucher about this – ask at the office if you haven’t.

All lessons on Tuesday will have a Science theme. Children from Year 1 to Year 6 will be joined by Hands on Science, and will take part in their CSI Fingerprints workshop. Children will take their own fingerprints and be shown how to identify and find the characteristics that make them unique.

We’ll be enjoying a play by the Quantum Theatre on Wednesday: ‘The Writing on the Wall’. This will help us focus on composition, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation in our English.

Thursday and Friday mornings will see the return of the ever-popular learning carousel! Groups containing children from each class, Reception to Year 6, will focus on different areas of the curriculum: Art, Music, Computing, Geography, PE and DT. There will also be taster sessions in Urdu (led by our own Mrs Maqbool) and Mandarin (led by Master Mandarin). Children will rotate through the groups and will take part in all of these activities.

In addition, we’re hoping to welcome a local newsreader to an assembly – Harry Gration. He will speak to the children about the importance of Maths and English in his job at Look North.

Sharing homework.

This will be the first of many homework sharing posts that gives the children chance to share their good work beyond the classroom and will (hopefully) become a useful source of ideas if you’re stuck with a creative homework.

Last week’s homework was to show what you have learnt about a period in history. I had information from Celts, Vikings, Romans, Victorians and even the Industrial Revolution. Lots of interesting stuff and here’s but a few…

 Ben’s model of a Celt house. which came with some information too.

 

What’s going on this week?

Some parents have mentioned that it would be helpful to know what we’re learning each week to allow you to know how to help at home. In response to this, there’ll be a short post each Sunday/Monday about the main areas for learning in the following week.

Maths

This week, we’ve returned to division in Maths and have started by sharing objects into groups and recognising this as a division calculation. This then leads to understanding how we can use our tables to solve division (eg 15 divided by 3 can be solved by counting in 3s until you reach 15). Once we’re confident using this skill, we can start thinking about division in real life particularly when things don’t share equally.

How many egg boxes do I need to hold my 23 eggs? Each box holds 6 eggs.

English

We’re entering the weird and wonderful world of poetry in English. Lots of reading of poetry helps us to hear the patterns, rhythm and understand the poets choice for how to structure it. Through poems by Tony Mitton (Old Noah’s Dance Hall Ship, Elegant Elephant Delicatessen, Instructions for Growing Poetry and My Hat) we will also explore techniques like rhyming and alliteration before attempting to write a poem of our own about our favourite piece of clothing.

Topic

It’s the final week of Time Travel which means we’ll be reflecting on what we’ve learnt over the last eight weeks. Here are some things you could ask at home…

• What have you learnt?
• What did you enjoy most?
• What would you still like to find out?
• What did you fin the most challenging?

13 March 2015

There are just three spellings this week:

In class, lots of children are getting these words mixed up.

There

There represents a place.

eg The boy is over there.

It also can show that something exists.

eg There are two apples.

Their  

There is used to show possession.

eg Their house is close to ours.

They’re

They’re is a shortened version of ‘they are’.

eg They’re coming all the way from London.

When practising these words, you should read a sentence with either of the words in and your child should tell you which word is correct. 

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.

13 March 2015

Here are this week’s spellings.  There will be a spelling test on Friday 20 March.

A note for Green group – This week, we’ve been learning about using apostrophes for possession and not for plurals.  These spellings will be given as part of a sentence and children will have to identify whether they need to use the apostrophe or whether it is plural.

For example:  There are lots of dogs.  It is the dog’s bone.

13 March 2015

This week’s homework is talk time.  Please make sure your child is ready to talk about this on Wednesday 18 March.

• Is it right that some people are homeless? 
• Why might they be homeless? 
• How would it feel to be homeless?

Sorting 3D shapes

We explored all things 3D this week and a great way of showing whether you are confident with you edges, faces and vertices is to try sorting shapes.

…or a Carroll diagram. It’s interesting to see how the shapes move around when you change the criteria you’re sorting with.

Can you spot any mistakes we made?

It was quite tricky sometimes, especially when you’re trying to think about four things at once!

Artists once more

After our Katie and… Big Topic, we had a bit of a break from art… but it’s back!

We started off using different types of pencils to sketch Tudor houses. We really tried to capture the dark strips of the buildings and their often wonky shapes.

Then we went very abstract! We looked at Jackson Pollock’s Number 8 which was a great contrast to the real-life sketches we’d created. Using all things bubbly, we created our own bubbly backgrounds for our serious Tudor houses. It was great fun and our finished pieces, when we combined the two, will follow.