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Literacy

We’ve been focusing our learning on using capital letters and full stops properly.  To help your child at home, please make sure your child can write their full name with capital letters. Perhaps you could look for words that use capitals in reading books – look for words such as names of places and days of the week.

Recently, we’ve used describing words to make our sentences more interesting and we’ll soon be learning about the features of stories and writing our own, too!

Spellings will go home on Fridays and be tested the following week – your help with learning the words – a little time each night – is needed here, please.

Topic

We’ve started the year with a mini-topic associated with sound.  We’ve been identifying sounds, thinking about how sounds are made and how we can change the volume and pitch of sounds.

Next week, we have a themed week: ‘Staying Safe’.

Our big topic this term is ‘Doctor! Doctor!’  We’ll discuss how people in the emergency services help us, how our bodies work and how to stay healthy. Your child will also learn about historical figures such as Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale.  There’ll be a variety of art and DT activities, too.  This topic provides us with the opportunity to invite lots of people in for talks and we’re also planning a trip.  Our class novel is George’s Marvellous Medicine – you might like to read this along at home as well as in school.

23 September 2011

This week’s spellings are high frequency words. The children will be tested on Friday 30 September 2011.

Cyber-bullying

Cyber-bullying

Next week is our Staying Safe themed week.  Children will learn about safety in a variety of contexts: in the kitchen, in the playground, during sports, during travel – your child might even use a police speed camera to catch out those speeding drivers on Shadwell Lane!

Over the past few years, there have been growing concerns about cyber-bullying – the use of technology, particularly mobile phones and the internet, to deliberately upset someone.

We regularly teach our children about e-safety, but here’s some good advice for parents / carers:

• Be alert to your child being upset after using the internet / phones – they may be secretive or change relationships with friends.
• Your child is just as likely to be a bully as to be a target.
• Talk to your child and understand how they are using the internet and their phone.
• Use safety tools and parental controls – if you’re not sure how, contact your service provider.  Please note tools are not always 100% effective.
• Remind your child not to retaliate.
• Keep any evidence of cyberbullying – emails, online conversations, texts etc.
• Report the cyberbullying.
• Contact us at school so we can take action if it involves other pupils.
• Contact the service provider eg website, phone company etc.
• If the cyberbullying is serious and a potential criminal offence has been committed then consider contacting the police.

The Directgov website has some useful information and support.

Connectivia!

How many connectives do you know? Do you know what type of connectives they are? Have a look at these pictures below of a competition we had today to see which group could answer these questions. Well done, Green Group!

23 September 2011

This week’s homework is Practice Makes Perfect and is due in on Wednesday 28 September.

See if your child can give you an example of the following connectives:

• time connectives (Later on,…)
• adding connectives (Also,…)
• reason and result connectives (As a result,…)
• problem connectives (However,…).

We’ve been looking at these different connectives all week and now I want to see if the children can spot them. Their aim is to search through all magazines, newspapers etc. and find as many different connectives they can and then paste them into their homework book.

Feel free to be as imaginative as you can with your sources of connectives; the above examples are only suggestions. Happy snipping!

23 September 2011

This week’s list is high frequency words.  They will be tested on Friday 30 September.

23 September 2011

This week’s homework is talk time and linked to our mini-topic – Sound.

I can talk about sounds I hear at home.

We want to know how many different sounds you can hear at home and what they are and how they sound (soft, sudden, irritating…). We will discuss your findings on Wednesday 28 September.

23 September 2011

Spelling rule:

This week’s spellings are all time connectives.

These will be used in next week’s lessons because the text type we’ll learn about is Instructions, where you often see time connectives to help you work out the sequence of what to do.

Time connectives are very often at the start of the sentence (as an ‘opener’).  Because of this, commas and capital letters have to be remembered to be awarded the mark.

Can you come up with any more time connectives?

Cycling and Buddies

Year Six have had a great week.

Monday saw many of the children continuing the cycle training that they started in Year Five. The instructors told me how impressed they were with the attitude and enthusiasm exhibited by the group. This made me very pleased. It’s always great to have such positive feedback! (Mr Roundtree was pleased to hear that Angel didn’t fall off this time!)

Many of your children have been buddies to the new reception children and have given up their lunchtimes to show their new friends the routines and expectations in the canteen and dinner hall. Again, it’s really pleasing to see how the class has volunteered to help out the new children and make their first day at Moortown a success.

Well done Year Six. You’ve made a fabulous start to being in the oldest age group in school.