Variety is the spice of life!
If you ask your child what they’ve done today, you may be surprised! From learning Mandarin to finding out about geysers, it was all going on. All the children were mixed up for the morning and took part in four different lessons – there are eight different lessons altogether so there will be some more mixing up going on tomorrow. These lessons have been part of our Enrichment Week where children have thought about a variety of subjects in lots of different ways. Here are some photos to give you a taste of what has been happening: learning Urdu or Mandarin, art work, music, PE, geography, programming and DT.
CSI Fingerprinting
Today was science day and we’ve been learning all about fingerprinting. We’ve learned that all fingerprints are different and have arches, loops or whirls.
Even identical twins have different fingerprints! However, our twins’ were incredibly close!
Themed week
Today, we have been mathematicians which involved team-work, reasoning skills, adopting a systematic approach and lots of patience in order to solve some logic puzzles.
Creative homework
A few samples of this week’s homework which was to respond to a piece of art.
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
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.
End of half term
Well, it’s nearing the end of half-term already and what a busy one it has been!
Continuing our Time Travel theme, this week we’ve travelled back to the “Stone Age”. Check out our Stone Age artefacts below.
There will be no homework or spellings to learn over half-term, but extra practice of times tables and spellings would be a good idea. Please continue with lots of reading, Lexia and Mathletics at home, too!
Parents’ evening
Many thanks to all the parents who recently attended parents’ evening. It was a pleasure to meet so many of you. The children are all working hard at the moment and are demonstrating a positive learning attitude – as noticed by all the staff around school.
School council elections
Our current school councillors held their final meeting recently as we prepare to elect our new school council.
Children from every class, including Reception, are encouraged to prepare a speech to present to their class as part of the election process. Our whole school homework before the election date will give children the chance to plan their speech.
Thank you to our existing school council who have been involved with many decisions and discussions throughout the year. Most recently they have selected books for our library and pupil prizes as rewards in class.
Work on our plague masks begins.
Continuing on with our topic of Medicine Through The Ages, we have started making our very own plague masks. Plague doctors wore masks with a bird-like beak to protect them from being infected by the disease. We’ll be working on these over the next few weeks. Looking forward to the finished masks.
