Den building
Our mini topic over the last three weeks has been The Village that Vanished by Anne Grifalconi. In this African folk tale, a village escapes from a group of slavers by dismantling their village and hiding deep in a forest. Today, we had a go at creating our own village with “Chris the Den Man” and made it vanish. Here are the finished results (before the village vanished!).
Bedtime reading
We like these top tips to promote bedtime reading from Book Trust.
Although these are specifically for children who are starting to read by themselves, there are plenty of tips to support children of all ages.
(The Book Trust’s advent calendar is brilliant, too!)
8Rs for learning
Resilience, resourcefulness, readiness, responsibility, risk-taking, responsiveness, remembering and …reflection.
This week we complete our 8Rs SEAL theme. Children will have the opportunity to not only reflect on their learning in general but also reflect on how the 8Rs supports their learning.
Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…
Can your child remember the 8Rs and the associated animal?
Maths and English
Maths
This week in maths, we’ve been looking at mental methods of subtraction. We started the week by looking at a method called “forcing bonds”. Let’s have a look at this in practice…
To make this calculation easier, we can start by subtracting down to the previous ten. This would mean we would subtract four to get to thirty.
Having subtracted four, how much more would we need to subtract the full eight?
We would then subtract the remaining four which gives us an answer of twenty six.
We’ve also looked at the “add and adjust” method of subtraction which we usually use when subtracting nine.
To start, we add one to our nine which gives us ten. As a class we agreed that finding ten less is much easier than subtracting nine.
We would then use a blank number line to clearly record our methodology.
We then have to “adjust” our answer because we want to subtract nine not ten. To do this we add one back on.
English
In English, we’ve been looking at how to punctuate direct speech. Here is an example of correctly punctuated direct speech.
We use inverted commas (speech marks) before and after speech in a sentence. Ask your child how their “speech hands” can help them punctuate speech.
Direct speech is always finished with punctuation – usually a comma. Can your child think of any other punctuation that could be used at the end of direct speech? Since this punctuation is part of the speech it must come before the closing inverted commas.
After speech we often see the word said or a synonym of said. We’ve been exploring said synonyms in class.
To make our speech sentences more interesting, we’ve also looked at adding in adverbs. Adverbs describe a verb and in this sentence the verb is said.
Library
I hope your child has enjoyed having a book from our library. Please could you make sure they bring their library books back to school next week as we are having a rotation of stock.
One of your 5 a day for free
Our weekly fruit tuck shop runs on a Tuesday playtime. It’s for Key Stage 2 children, with a charge of 20p per portion and a pre-payment option available.
Today, as part of health week, all children, including Reception and Key Stage 1, were invited to an extra tuck shop free of charge. This gave children who might not normally come to the tuck shop the chance to try it out.
It was great to see everyone enjoying a fruit-filled playtime.
Polished performance
This week is the final week of our Autumn term after-school clubs.
It was great to see so many parents come to watch the routine learnt by children attending the popular dance club led by Edward Lynch.
Edward has worked with class teachers in curriculum PE to develop their teaching of dance and his enthusiasm for this subject has certainly rubbed off on the children who attended this club.
- ‘It was an amazing club.”
- ‘I like dance even more now.’
Healthy packed lunches
As it is health week, copies of our Guide to Healthy Packed Lunches have been given out at lunchtime today as a reminder for children who choose to bring a packed lunch to school.
We encourage at least one piece of fruit or vegetable in packed lunches and snack items occasionally, as a treat, but aim for healthy options. Lots of learning has taken place in health week looking at quantities of sugar in drinks and the importance of drinking water to keep hydrated. We therefore encourage water which is freely available for packed lunch children.
There were also some prizes for healthy packed lunches.
It’s all about health
This week is the first themed week of the year and it’s all about health.
Over the week classes will work with different visitors to school including:
- d:side (drug education)
- Catering Leeds (food nutritionists)
- Leeds Force basketball
- Leeds City Council road safety team
- Tsukuru Judo Academy
- Leeds University dental students
- Rachel Frazer – Yoga teacher
- Heart Research UK
- Dr Natwar – Corner House dental surgery
- Claire Sparrow – pilates teacher
There will be lots of learning in class too – hand washing, body image, emotional health, 5 a day and much more. Keep an eye on our class news pages to find out more.
On Monday 23 November, 3:00-3:30pm, there will be an information session for parents, led by d:side, where you can find out more about the drug education sessions delivered to each class this week. No need to book – just come along.
Column addition with regrouping
Earlier in the week, we were looking at column addition without regrouping (you may recognise this as “carrying the ten”). Since then, we have moved onto column addition with regrouping.
Let’s have a look at this calculation. To solve it using column addition, we would have to line up our columns first. 
In class we’ve been using hundreds, tens and ones counters to help us solve column addition questions. We’ve been drawing hundreds, tens and ones grids (HTO grids) to arrange these counters. 
We’d start by representing the top number on our HTO grid. We have one hundred, two tens (twenty) and nine ones.
Next, we’d add the ones column together by adding three more ones counters in our ones column.
After that, we’d “regroup the ones” by replacing ten ones counters with one tens counter.
We can’t have a tens counter in the ones column so we move it to the tens column.
We’d represent this regrouping in our written calculation like this. We have two ones left (two) in the ones column and an extra ten added to the tens column. 
Following that, we’d add up the tens column. We need to add three extra tens to do this.
We have five tens in the tens column and one extra ten from our regrouping totalling six tens (sixty).
Finally, we’d turn our attention to the hundreds column. In this instance, we don’t need to add anything up in the hundreds column.
For more information or if you need any advice talking about this at home, check out our calculation videos or catch me after school.
Column addition
This week in Maths, we’ll be looking at column addition. Today, we’ve been looking at how to layout column addition correctly. We’ve also been discussing the language associated with column addition.
We’d describe the three digit number here as having digits in the ‘hundreds’, ‘tens’ and ‘ones’ columns. We would use this knowledge to help us line up the second number underneath (lining up columns correctly).
The ‘tens’ column and the ‘ones’ column are lined up correctly here.
We’d start by adding up the digits in the ‘ones’ column.
Then, we’d add up the digits in the ‘tens’ column. Ask your child what they’d do to add the digits in the ‘hundreds’ column together.
Below is a common mistake. Can your child explain what has gone wrong with this?
Our videos present various mental and written methods used to teach calculations.
