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Amazing inventions!

There were some fantastic creative homeworks this week. Children were asked to invent something which would make our lives easier. Below are five of the homeworks the children particularly liked this week. A special mention should also go to Ahmed, Jennifer and Ravinder, who produce some amazingly creative digital homeworks.

Brandon’s invention to solve the problem of annoying siblings:

Linda’s brain bending invention:

Sam’s genius spaghetti fork:

Jaskirat’s very useful ipad case and stationery box:

Molly’s maid:

Creative homework

A few samples of this week’s homework which was to respond to a piece of art.

06 March 2015

This week, the words all end in tial. Usually tial is used after a consonant letter but there are some exceptions like initial.

The spellings this week all have the suffix ful.

06 March 2015

I can respond to a book

As it’s recently been World Book Day, please  read and talk with your child about their favourite book.

Perhaps they could draw a picture and write about why they like it.

Building the dream

Iggy Peck, Architect inspired Year 1 to become architects themselves today.  World Book Day was celebrated with drawings, thoughts, painting and actual building.  Iggy Peck built towers out of nappies (dirty ones!) – you will be glad to hear we didn’t do that but we did construct our own structures:

We did some sketches and line drawings:

…and we did some printing:

What a creative day!

06 March 2015

Here are this week’s spellings.  There will be a spelling test on Friday 13 March 2015.

Class assembly

Thank you to those of you who could make it to class assembly today. We really enjoyed preparing for it and, from my point of view, it was made an easy task because of the children’s concentration and naturally clear voices.

• ‘Lovely assembly – liked the communal story at the end.’
• ‘Great story, loved the fire props and well remembered lines.’
• ‘Really enjoyable as always. The audience participation was a nice touch and the humour that was included.’
• ‘First time at school assembly. Could see the kids enjoy it by the number of children joining in. Well done.’

…and a well done from me too!

06 March 2015

This week’s homework is Talk Time and is due on Wednesday 11 March.

Everybody has the right to have a house. Discuss.

Talk about your and other people’s opinions and write a couple of sentences to help you join in the discussion in class.

From our Homework Policy:

Talk Time homework

This involves a discussion topic eg ‘Should animals be kept in zoos?’ Children should make notes (even pictures, diagrams etc) ready to participate in a class / group discussion on the topic. Please make sure you write a comment about the Talk Time discussions in the homework books.

Top Tips: Turn the telly off! Sit around the dining table! Have a chat and share opinions and ideas! Children should talk with family, friends and each other. (Your child should write some notes in their Homework Books.)

Lotherton Hall detectives

With a visitor from Lotherton Hall, we became history detectives again today. We started the lesson by looking at the building and thinking about what it is and when it might have been built.

Then, we each had a box of clues. We began by looking, feeling, touching and talking about what we had. Everyone really enjoyed thinking about what the artefacts were and how they were used.

Gradually we started getting more information by matching uses to the objects helping us to understand what sort of person might have used them.

Finally, the people of the house were revealed and we had to use all of the information have learnt to decide who each set of objects belonged to. There were some great discussions while we tried to explain our reasons and opinions to each other.

We had objects belonging to the Lord and Lady of the house and their maid and cook. There was a real difference between the rich and poor people of the house and (not surprisingly) most of  us decided we’d want to be one of the rich people of the house if we’d been alive then.

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