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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

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

02 March 2015

Below (in orange) are some more sentences for your child to write at home.  It’s helpful to follow this process…

• Read the sentence to your child.
• Ask them to repeat the sentence several times. They could whisper it, shout it or say it in a silly voice.
• Count the words.
• Say the sentence word by word for your child to write.
• Remind them to use a capital letter, a full stop and finger spaces.
• Ask your child to read the sentence back to check they have written every word.
• Write the sentence together, modelling how to read back.

1. I can see a pair of boots on the mat.
2. The farmer gets up at six in the morning.
3. Jill has fair hair but Jack has dark hair.
4. Jim has seven silver coins.

Phonics

This week, we begin phase 4 of our phonics programme. 

During this phase, your child will continue to practise previously learned graphemes and phonemes and learn how to read and write words with four phonemes. These are called CVCC words (consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant) and include words such as, tent, damp, toast and chimp.  Although ‘toast’ has five letters, oa work together to make the long vowel sound o, pronounced ‘oh’; similarly, c and h in ‘chimp’ work together to make the phoneme ch. For example, in the word ‘toast’, t = consonant, oa = vowel, s = consonant, t = consonant.

Your child will also learn to read and write CCVC words such as swim, plum, sport, cream and spoon. For example, in the word ‘cream’, c = consonant, r = consonant, ea = vowel, m = consonant.

In addition, they will be learning more tricky words and continuing to read and write sentences. There are no new phonemes taught in this phase.

Tricky words in phase 4:

• said
• so
• do
• have
• like
• some
• come
• were
• there
• little
• one
• when
• out
• what

Ways you can support your child at home

Practise reading and spelling some CVCC and CCVC words but continue to play around with CVC words. Children like reading and spelling words that they have previously worked with as this makes them feel successful. Make up captions and phrases for your child to read and write, for example, a silver star, clear the pond, crunch crisps. Write some simple sentences and leave them around the house for your child to find and read.

Please look at the homework pages on our website for more sentences to read and write with your child.

Hockey

For PE this half-term, we’re focussing on hockey. Here are a few pictures of our first session this week. Keeping the ball at the end of our hockey stick proved tricky at times.

XXVII February MMXV

The homeworks this week are Creative and Practice Makes Perfect.

The Creative homework is to invent something which will make your life easier.

This could be something very simple or complex. Either way, you have to creatively show what your product is, how it is made and how it works. This could be done in a poster, a video presentation, an annotated diagram, a series of diagrams. It’s up to you!

The second homework is Practice Makes Perfect. This homework will be a Mathletics homework around our next unit of maths: multiplication and division.

XXVII February MMXV

This week, the words all end in cial. Usually cial is used when the letter before it is a vowel. However, there are a few exceptions: financial, commercial.

27.02.15

This week, the words are all words with double up for short vowel sounds. These words are taken from the National Curriculum list.

27 February 2015

This week’s homework is creative.  Please make sure it is handed in by Wednesday 04 March. 

What would be your perfect house?

What would it look like?  Where would it be?  What would be inside?

Don’t forget there is a drop in session on Wednesday 04 March at 2.45 pm.  This is an opportunity for you to see how we review homework and give feedback.

27 February 2015

Here are this week’s spellings.  There will be a spelling test on Friday 06 March.

Times Tables

From now on, Year 2 will be given a times table to focus on each week. By the end of the year, children are expected to know the 2, 5, and 10 times table with quick recall. This week we will be focussing on the 5 times table – here are the type of questions your child can expect.

• 1 x 5 is 5
• 2 lots of 5 are 10
• 3 groups of 5 are 15
• 4 times 5 is 20
• 5 multiplied by 5 is 25
• 6 groups of 5 are 30
• 7 lots of 5 are 35
• 8 x 5 is 40
• 9 multiplied by 5 is 45
• 10 times 5 is 50
• 11 lots of 5 are 55
• 12 groups of 5 are 60

They will also be expected to then know the related division facts. For example, if 6 times 5 is 30… 30 divided by 5 is 6. There will be a couple of questions relating to division facts each week.

Help at home by counting in fives as you go up the stairs or walk down the street. Ask quick fire questions while driving in the car and make it a competition to see who can write the whole table the fastest – you or your child?

27 February 2015

This week’s homework is Creative and is due on Wednesday 04 March.

I can present my favourite book.

Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, lots of us have a favourite book or at least a book we have enjoyed recently. Discuss what books your child has enjoyed recently and think about how they can present this to the rest of the class.

Here are a few suggestions…

• Prepare a speech.
• Write a book review.
• Create a poster.
• Interview the characters.
• Make a story board to retell from.
• Create a fact flap page.

Of course, this homework is creative so any of their own ideas would be great too!

Taken from our Homework Policy:

Creative homework

This involves a creative piece of open-ended work based around an ‘I can…’ statement eg ‘I can use research skills to find out about a country.’ ‘I know how instructions are used’ Only one rule: don’t use more than one page of A4 (unless your teacher says otherwise!). Content will be a balanced mix of subjects.

Top Tips: Be as creative as you like! Chat about ideas with your child: Could the homework be in the form of a poster, a letter, a comic strip, some writing, a PowerPoint…? Could it use photos, drawings, foldout ‘extras’ on the page…?