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It’s the half-term break…

…so there’s no homework this week.

Please make sure your child continues to read lots and be read to – this is always the most valuable activity you can do at home to help learning.

Why not put some Maths into practice too: play a board game, bake something, create some mathematical art…

Bringing the past into the present

Our class novel “Street Child” is continuing to provide many opportunities for us to learn in different ways.  A lot of the drama recently done in Y5 has looked at mood and feelings which will enable the children to include these aspects in their writing.  Here is some of the drama being photographed by the children on our iPads.  They then uploaded the photo into an app and annotated it with how they felt the characters felt.

   

Pieces of Art

Year 3 and Year 4 have been piecing together different sections of art. There are five paintings of art to put together and each child gets one piece of one painting.

They now have to find someone else who has a piece of their painting. However, they are not allowed to show it to anyone else. They must use their knowledge of colour, shape and other art techniques to describe what they see. After that, they have to assemble the pieces into the correct place.

Finally, we discuss the paintings and say how artists create subtle effects.

• “You can tell the motorbike is moving because of the blurry lines and the scarf is in the air.” (Sam, Year 3)
• “This painting has lots of action in. You can tell because the black lines show movement.” (Isra, Year 4)

Foooooooore!

Year 4 have a visitor today from Cookridge Hall Golf Club. We’re trying some golf swings. Thankfully, all the balls are made out of sponge so we won’t be smashing any windows!

“It’s great fun and it also helps our coordination.” (Harris, Year 4)

“It’s harder than it looks!” (Abigail, Year 4)

Paul, who led the session, commented: “Out of the hundred schools I’ve been to, this one is the most well-behaved.”

Well done, Year 4!

Phase 2 Phonics

This week, we’ll begin Phase 2 of Letters and Sounds. In this phase, children will continue practising what they have learned from phase 1, including ‘sound-talk’. They will also be taught:

• the phonemes (sounds) for a number of letters (graphemes),
• which phoneme is represented by which grapheme, and
• that a single phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, /ll/ as in b-e-ll.

They will be using pictures and hand movements to help them remember these.

VC and CVC words

C and V are abbreviations for ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’. VC words are words consisting of a vowel then a consonant (e.g. am, at, it) and CVC words are words consisting of a consonant then a vowel then a consonant (e.g. cat, rug, sun). Words such as tick and bell also count as CVC words – although they have four letters, they have only three sounds. For example, in the word bell, b = consonant, e = vowel, ll = consonant.

Now the children will be seeing letters and words, as well as hearing them. They will be shown how to make words using magnetic letters, how to read (blend) little words and how to segment words into individual sounds.

These will be simple words made up of two phonemes, for example, am, at, it, or three phonemes, for example, cat, run.

Tricky words

They will also learn several tricky words: the, to, I, go, no.  Children will still be practising oral blending and segmenting skills daily. They need plenty of practice at doing this.

Saying the sounds

Your child will be taught how to pronounce the sounds (phonemes) correctly to make blending easier.  Sounds should be sustained where possible (e.g. sss, fff, mmm) and, where this is not possible, ‘uh’ sounds after consonants should be reduced as far as possible. Try to avoid saying ‘buh’, ‘cuh’ etc.

Ways you can support your children at home

• Magnetic letters  Buy magnetic letters for your fridge. Find out which letters have been taught – have fun finding these with your child and place them on the magnetic surface.
• Making little words together  Make little words together, for example, it, up, am, and, top, dig, run, met, pick. As you select the letters, say them aloud: ‘a-m – am’, ‘m-e-t – met’.
• Make or buy an alphabet poster
• Buy whiteboards and pen  These are a good way for children to try out spellings and practise their handwriting.
• Remember to have fun!

Let’s play dress up

Having found a few outfits, some of the children decided to dress up as Victorian servants. They really look the part.

19 October 2012

The spellings for this week are ‘high-frequency’ words, many of which are ‘tricky words’ – words that don’t follow an obvious phonics pattern.

These words will be tested on Friday 26 October.

19 October 2012

This week’s homework is talk time. It’s due in on Wednesday 24 October 2012.

Should animals perform in the circus?

Remember that talk time homework is marked through a class discussion/debate once the homework has been handed in.

19 October 2012

The homework this week is Talk Time and is due in on 24 October.

Should households have more than one car? Discuss.

We want you to discuss with your child the different factors involved with having more than one car. In addition, we’d also like you to discuss the differences between need and want as well as looking at the effect cars have on the evironment. Encourage your child to use words and phrases such as:

• However,  
• On the other hand,
• Nevertheless,
• Furthermore,

19 October 2012

We are breaking from the norm this week by only having six spellings. This is because the spellings are a bit trickier than usual.

The spellings are all ‘adding connectives’ which we’ll be using in our writing next week. Most of the spellings have a capital letter and a comma because we will be using them as sentence openers.

(‘Another point is…’ flows better without a comma.)