Magical Maths
Do you wish you could wave a magic wand and make calculations easier? Y6 did today!
Well… not really. But they did use some pretty clever maths knowledge to manipulate the numbers in a calculation to be in their favour.
Take a look at this picture. Would you rather answer the ones on the left or right?
By doubling one factor and halving the other, you keep the product the same. And if it’s a choice between multiplying a decimal and a whole number, the integer will probably be easier.
Challenge your child to make a pattern with 248 x 1 = 248. I’ll do the first one for you: 124 x 2 = 248. Keep it going!
“We were compensating with our multiplication by dividing one factor by two and multiplying the other by two. It makes it so much easier. Saying 0.5 x 2 seems hard but that’s only 1 x 1!” explained Aayan.
“It was hard to start with but got easier as the lesson went on. It’s better than just doing a column method all the time and I was proud I got most of them right,” said Joude.
Cricket opportunities
Here’s some information about Dynamos cricket that has started at local cricket clubs.
Dynamos for KS2
What is it all about? Click the link for a short video: https://www.ecb.co.uk/video/1627073/introducing-dynamos-cricket-this-is-our-game-
Find your local centre and book here: https://ecb.clubspark.uk/Dynamos/SearchResults?&gclid=Cj0KCQjw38-DBhDpARIsADJ3kjm2dd01lHGEYp5ZR7QdfKTCG1qQiyMOUJOY6v8B1eK8tkaUi-hOMQgaArIKEALw_wcB
TTRS tournament winners (wb 19 April)
Hello again to all of the Times Tables Rock Stars out there,
It’s been great having you all back in class and seeing how much you are all improving with your times tables!
BREAKING NEWS:
The results are in. We have our ROCK STARS OF THE WEEK.
With 384 points, this week’s winners are Y3!
That’s now seven times in a row (yes, seven!) AMAZING!
Y4, 5 and 6 need to get their hands on the coveted guitar. Will next week be their week?
Remember to give your teacher a nudge as the week goes on if you’ve not yet had a chance to play on TTRS. If you’d like to play at home and would like a reminder of your login details, let your teacher know.
All the best TTRS!
Skip into summer
This term, all classes will be taking part in the West Yorkshire Skip into Summer project with Skipping School. We are excited to be part of the 136 schools and almost 33,000 children taking part!
As part of this project, we have skipping ropes available to buy at a subsidised price of £3.
If your child would like to buy a rope, to keep learning their new skills at home, they will be on sale, outside the Year 1 classroom in the middle playground, 3:10-3:30pm on Thursdays and Fridays. Exact change would be helpful.
Y6’s last term ever…
… will be an amazing one!
This half term, we’ve got some exciting learning planned.
PE
With the exciting arrival of our amazing new playground, PE has never looked so good!
This half term, we will be practising our football skills, alongside playing games to deploy them in, in our trusty old MUGA.
Science
We’ve kicked things off with learning about animals including humans. So far, we’ve self assessed our knowledge and learnt some new words!
Challenge your child to tell you some changes that a human experiences as they go from a baby, to a toddler, adolescent and adult.
Computing
This half term is all about Scratch! We will be honing our programming skills to complete a different activity each week.
Take a look at some of the digital art we’ve created so far:
This one is by Daisy and Jess.
Test your child to see if they know what these words mean already:
- repetition
- sequence
- selection
- variable
- logical reasoning
- simulation
- program
- search engine
Writing
This half term will be a mixture of recapping old skills and learning new ones like how to use a semi colon within a list.
We’re starting off with some robot descriptions. Take a look at these incredible ones from Jemima, Emily and Felix respectively.
Reading
To enhance our computing topic, we will be reading about significant individuals, such as Ada Lovelace, learning about digital literacy and how to stay safe online.
To help at home, make sure you’re reading every day (whether that’s your library book, subtitles on the TV or even the back of the cereal box).
Maths
We’re always making sure that everyone is confident with our maths learning, so this half term will be a mixture of recapping prior topics, such as the four operations, and learning new things like ratio and proportion.
As always, we will have a strong thread of arithmetic and reasoning throughout our lessons.
The Captain Tom 100 Challenge
Tennis opportunities
Living and Learning: rights and responsibilities
For our living and learning lesson, Y6 explored rights and responsibilities.
“A right is something you should have,” said Jess.
“A responsibility is something you should do morally,” said Priya.
We discussed our rights and responsibilities with respect to school, home, our communities and the world.
I particularly liked this one from Jasraj and Moh: “At home, we have the right to have fun on a console but the responsibility to manage our own screen time.”
Lots of our discussion about responsibilities involved the good choices we have the power to make: being kind, considering others and inspiring each other.
Week beginning 29 March 2021
Maths
Follow this sequence of maths learning which is linked to number and place value.
- Lesson 1: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 2: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 3: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 4: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 6: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 7: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 8: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 9: video, worksheet, answers
- Lesson 10: video, worksheet, answers
You don’t have to print the worksheet. Your child can write or draw their answers on paper. Your child’s learning will be most effective if you sit with them to pause the clip and check / praise / support your child as the clip moves on.
Practise times tables on Times Table Rockstars, too. If your child is in Y3, we’re concentrating on the 3 times table. If your child is in Y4, we’re concentrating on the 8 times table. Email the class teacher if you need your child’s login and password details.
(Suggested time: 30 minutes of Maths and 15 minutes of Rockstars daily)
Spelling
Look on the homework page to find this week’s spellings. They should choose some past spellings that they feel less confident with. Your child should complete one task each day.
- Day 1: Generate more words linked to the spelling pattern or ‘rule’. You could look out for the words in the book you’re reading at home, or any other text, like a website linked to our science topic of Living Things and their Habitat.
- Day 2: Practise the spellings using two of the ideas in our Super Spelling Strategies guide. (Set yourself and others at home a challenge of using some of the words when you’re speaking, too!)
- Day 3: Write separate sentences, each containing one of the spellings. (Don’t forget to show off really neat handwriting and make sure you sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, exclamation mark (!) or question mark (?).
- Day 4: Repeat Task 2 or 3.
- Day 5: Get an adult at home to test you on your spellings. Practise any you spell incorrectly – you could write them out carefully until you’re sure.
(Suggested time: 15-20 minutes daily)
Reading fluency
This is the text we’re using in class this week to build up fluency skills.
In school, we generally follow this sequence:
- Day 1: Read the text aloud with your child listening. Read it clearly and slowly, pointing to each word as you read. Have a chat about any unfamiliar words.
- Day 2: Read aloud each sentence (a full short sentence or part of a longer sentence), and have your child read it back to you. Do this ‘echo reading’ for the whole text.
- Day 3: Read the text and talk about the effect of the punctuation on how you read it – pauses for full stops and expression for exclamations (!) or questions (?). Your child reads the text aloud.
- Day 4: Read together with expression (just like you practised on Day 3).
- Day 5: Your child reads independently and fluently.
(Suggested time: 15 minutes daily)
Reading comprehension
We’ll be using this ‘RIC’ text in class to practise comprehension skills. RIC stands for:
- Retrieve: finding information in a text
- Interpret: using clues in the text to unlock information
- Choice: thinking about the author’s choice of words, techniques or organisation that make the text interesting and enjoyable to read
Follow these lessons on Blitz survivor stories and Goodnight Mr Tom. There’s a whole series of lessons, but start at Lesson 1 and work through, doing one (or maybe even two) each day. (If you’re self-isolating in your second week, stick with the series of lessons you’ve already started and aim to complete the full series.)
(Suggested time: 30 minutes daily)
Writing
Follow these lessons on diary writing from Oak National Academy. There’s a whole series of lessons, but start at Lesson 1 and work through, doing one (or maybe even two) each day. (If you’re self-isolating in your second week, stick with the series of lessons you’ve already started and aim to complete the full series.)
(Suggested time: 30-40 minutes for each)
Topic
Our topic this half-term is about history – all about World War II.
Follow these lessons on World War II from Oak National Academy. There are 9 lessons in total, but start at the first lesson and work through, doing two or three in the week.
(Suggested time: 30-40 minutes)
Science
Our focus this half-term is sound.
These six lessons from Oak National Academy link closely to what we’ve been doing in class. Start at Lesson 1 and work through, doing two or three in the week. If you’ve previously completed on of these lessons, have a go at the ones you haven’t completed yet.
If Science really motivates your child, you could also use look at these lessons all about practical Science.
(Suggested time: 30-45 minutes)
PE
Don’t forget to do some daily exercise!
Do two or three of these Five Minute Moves from Joe Wicks each day – spread them across the day as if they were playtimes, maybe!
Try working through this series of 25 lessons from the Association for Physical Education – do two or three in the week.
(Suggested time: 5 minutes daily, plus 30 minutes for the longer PE lessons)
Extra stuff…
As an extra (or as an alternative, if this helps to motivate your child)…
Geography isn’t a topic-driver this half-term, but you could brush up on your locational knowledge – something that was missed when schools closed earlier this year. You could explore some online maps and try to memorise some new countries, capitals, rivers and mountain ranges. These three lessons about Europe are worth checking out.
What about some Living and Learning? While you’re away from school, you could check out these lessons on money!
Yorkshire Dance virtual dance workshops
Yesterday, all classes took part in dance workshops, led by dance artist Ellen, as part of the Yorkshire Dance RE:FRESH dance festival.
From Reception to Year 6, all the children copied, explored and performed different dance moves in their workshops.
While we can’t have visitors in school at the moment, this was a great virtual project we could get involved with.
Here are some comments from the Year 1 children.
I loved it because of all the moves we did.
I loved it because I like all the animals.
I liked to see you smiling.
It was amazing and you were amazing, Ellen.
