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11 November 2016

This week’s homework is Practice Makes Perfect and is due on Thursday 17 November.

To be able to compare and contrast.

The children have brought home some poems we’ve looked at this week. One of the skills we’re working on is comparing and contrasting. Choose two poems. Compare and contrast them. (3 marks)

• 3 marks means mention 3 things
• Name the poem you are referring to
• If you mention a difference, discuss both poems (and make sure it’s a comparison and not just two random differences)
• Give some examples of what you mean eg. they’re both informal: ‘hiya’ is used in (a) and ‘wassup’ is use din (b)
• Don’t be too obvious (I know they’re both poems)

Then, choose any two texts (newspaper, story, magazine, comic, info book) and answer the same 3 marks question, comparing and contrasting them.

11 November 2016

This week, you have been assigned three Mathletics tasks.

Fractions

• Comparing fractions 2
• Ordering fractions 1
• Simplifying fractions

These are all skills we’ve learnt in class for the last two weeks so children should be able to complete them independently. Check, using the ?, what the activity is asking you to do. If you make any mistakes, always go back and look at that question again to see if you know where you went wrong or whether you need to check with an adult.

These tasks need to be completed by Thursday 17 November.

11 November 2016

This week’s spelling activity is all about homonyms.

Read the chapter from Ann M. Martin’s ‘How to look for a lost dog’ which is all about homonyms. Rose (the main character) loves homonyms which include homophones and homographs.

• Homophones are words which sound (hence, ‘phone’) the same but are spelt differently: their, there, they’re.
• Homographs are words that are spelt the same (hence, ‘graph’, as in autograph) but sound different: to bow, the bow and arrow.

Rose creates lists of homonyms because she really likes them. How many groups of homonyms can you (ewe) create and can you (yew) then use them correctly in (inn) sentences. I wonder whether you can write a sentence with the whole (hole) group of homonyms in it?

Challenge – Rose can only think of one group of four homonyms. Can you think what that is? (Check Rose’s rules for homonyms in the chapter.)

‘Power for good’

Next week is national Anti-Bullying Week.

The theme this year is ‘Power for Good‘ with the following key aims:

• To support children and young people to use their Power for Good – by understanding the ways in which they are powerful  and encouraging individual and collective action to stop bullying and create the best world possible.
• To help parents and carers to use their Power for Good – through supporting children with issues relating to bullying and working together with schools to stop bullying.
• To encourage all teachers, school support staff and youth workers to use their Power for Good– by valuing the difference they can make in a child’s life, and taking individual and collective action to prevent bullying and create safe environments where children can thrive.

Our school definition has recently been reviewed by the School Council and remains unchanged.

‘Bullying is when you hurt someone, physically or emotionally, several times on purpose.’

We also encourage children to use their ‘Power for Good’, if they were to experience or witness bullying, by using another STOP message, start telling other people.

In class, children will discuss these aspects of bullying:

• Our definition of bullying (above)
• Types of bullying – cyber-bullying and prejudice-based bullying related to gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and belief, special educational need and disability
• What to do if children experience bullying. The key message is to tell someone (start telling other people)

Recently the School Council responded to this question, ‘What would you do if you were bullied‘?

• ‘Start telling other people – tell someone who I trust and who I can talk to.’
• ‘I would tell someone I trust (family member, member of staff or friend).’
• ‘If I were bullied, I’d tell my parents, a friend, a teacher and if nothing changed I would phone ChildLine (08001111).’
• ‘I’d tell a teacher, maybe a friend and put in a worry in the ‘worry box’.  Also, I’d tell a parent.’
• ‘I would tell anyone I trust: my friends, my mum or dad or a member of staff.  They could sort it straight away.’
• ‘I’d tell my mummy and daddy.’

All classes have access to their class SEAL box or a whole school worry box where they can tell an adult any concerns about bullying or any other issues.

For further support, bullying resources can be found at…

• http://www.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/resources/disablist-bullying/resources-for-parents/
• http://www.childline.org.uk/explore/bullying/pages/bullying.aspx
• http://www.bullying.co.uk/advice-for-parents/
• http://www.youngminds.org.uk/for_parents/worried_about_your_child/bullying

Our noses are often in the paper

Year 6 enjoy a range of reading opportunities and one of our favourites is our weekly fix of First News.

We’re always keen to share interesting articles with each other and this brilliant paper never fails to disappoint. This week there was a man who’s best friend was a bear; a heart-warming story about a little girl who’s life had been improved by the efforts of WaterAid; and a funny little snippet on a ‘Petmiere’ – cinema for dogs!

We always read FirstNews on a Monday so ask your child at home what interesting articles (s)he’s read each week.

What are the 8Rs?

Year 6 have had a good start to this half term. We’re working on the 8Rs (resilience, safe risk-taking, responsibility, resourcefulness, responding, remembering, reflecting, readiness) to improve our learning behaviour, and therefore our learning, in class. These Rs are easy to apply at home, too:

• Resilience – try a new skill and keep at it if it’s hard
• safe Risk-taking – cook with an adult, using knives and other equipment
• Responsibility – be in charge of getting your own things ready for school or getting yourself up in the morning
• Responding – if an adult praises you for an action, make sure you do it again (or don’t do something again if you’ve been told about it before)
• Readiness – be ready to go if you’re heading out for the day with everything you might need

It’d be great to hear of any particularly good examples of children practising the 8Rs at home.

Moortown’s artists

We’d love to see you next Tuesday to share our learning from our Katie and…topic.  Art gallery open 2:45-3:30pm.

How much do parents really matter?

A new book, Do Parents Matter? by Robert LeVine and Sarah LeVine, will be published in the UK next year. It was previewed in The Times last week (29 October 2016, summarised below), and it sounds really interesting. After almost five decades of research, the authors, both acclaimed anthropologists, say parents have far less influence than we think, but they do stress two things parents can do to ensure their child is happy and healthy.

The book’s purpose, arguably, is to reassure. Parents these days are bombarded with advice on what they should and shouldn’t do to raise healthy and well-adjusted children. They are often made to feel they are falling short in some way – being a parent can be a role filled with anxiety.

So, Do Parents Matter? The authors conclude that yes, parents do matter, but not as much as we would think.

The couple have spent their working lives looking at parenting practices across the globe. Children can be happy in a variety of conditions, ‘not just the effort-intensive, cautious environments so many British and American parents drive themselves crazy trying to create’ they say in their book.

In other societies, parenting practices that we in the west would regard as neglectful or even cruel can still result in happy and healthy adults. For instance, many western working mums feel guilty about leaving their children in nurseries or with childminders. Yet communal childcare is the norm in other parts of the world; in some places, toddlers are routinely sent away by their mothers after weaning and taken care of by their grandmothers and other women.

In the UK and America, parents engage toddlers in discussions about what food they would like to eat or what clothes they would like to wear. Elsewhere in the world, parents teach their youngsters to follow commands without talking back, the first step in learning about obedience and respect.

Whilst western parents tend to cosset toddlers and try to shield them from the nasty parts of life, in other parts of the world parents believe children’s development can be helped by these things. The authors tell the story of a three-year-old Inuit girl living in the Canadian Arctic. Although the girl was loved and well taken care of by her parents, they constantly challenged the child with extreme, adult questions like ‘Why don’t you die so I can have your nice new shirt?’ This is seen as an Inuit strategy to get children to realise that life is uncertain and capricious, and that they will have to work through a lot of conundrums. The authors don’t suggest anyone does this, but include the example to show that there is a huge variety of ways to teach children about moral relationships.

Another contrast is around responsibility. Modern western parents don’t give children a lot of responsibility, believing that early childhood should be play-based. In Africa and Latin America, however, children aged five or six might be expected to care for a baby or herd animals; in the Pacific islands, three-year-olds are given scaled-down machetes and at five carry heavy loads of firewood.

The LeVines’ message is that children usually turn out fine, whatever the expectations placed on them and the contexts they grow up in. They do, nevertheless, identify two behaviours they see as essential for raising well-adjusted children:

• physical affection, whether from a parent or other responsible adult, and
• confidence to know that they are the grown-ups and whilst they may not always know best, they do know better than a child.

04 November 2016

The homework this week is practice makes perfect and is due in on Thursday 10 November.

I can show what I have learned about the 2 times table. 

In maths lessons this half-term, we’re learning about multiplication and division. We’ll be looking at the 2, 5 and 10 times table. This week, we’ve focussed on the two times table. Children should complete the worksheet in the book.

They could also do something creative to show their understanding of the two times table.

Finally, remember that Mathletics is a good way for children to practise their maths at home.

04 November 2016

Here are the spellings for this week. They will be tested on Friday 11 November.