24 March 2016
This week’s Practice Makes Perfect homework is due on Wednesday 30 March.
To be able to solve maths problems.
The children have got a selection of Maths problems to read, understand and solve in a given context. They need to think about what question they are actually answering and, sometimes, interpret correctly what remainders mean when dividing. This is work that has recently been learnt in class so they should be able to work independently.
Any working out can be completed in homework books and, for each question, a full sentence should be written to communicate their answer.
If you’re wanting to support your child in their work, check out our calculations videos to see how we do our working out in class.
Football training
Thank you to all the children who attended football training tonight. Everyone was focused, positive and tried hard – well done!
Also, a big thank you to the parents who were able to help with walking and being an extra adult.
The children were glad to hear that we have some matches lined up too. Look out for a letter with more details.
Here are some action shots:
Yoga
We enjoyed a yoga session today. It linked well to the Life Big Topic as the children used different animals to inspire their movements and poses.
Science
Here are some pictures of what we investigated today. Can your child give these pictures a caption to describe what they learnt?
Mini-topic: ‘Loving Reading’
For the next two weeks, we will be completing a new mini-topic: Loving Reading.
The emphasis of the topic is all about enjoying reading. As you are aware, we already give reading a high profile within our class but this topic will put reading (and a love of reading) at the forefront of our learning.
Lots of research suggests that children who read for pleasure perform better at school and reading is certainly a life-skill!
As part of the mini-topic, children were given some reading challenges to complete over the next two weeks. It would be great if they could finish them all (some are easier to achieve than others).
You can help at home by:
- Encouraging your child to complete the challenges.
- Raising the profile of reading at home (Family reading time? A visit to a bookshop/library? Discussing reading over a meal?).
- Reading with your child regularly; whilst reading for pleasure is important, understanding what you read is even more so. The only way to be sure that children are practising their reading skills properly is to read with them and ask questions.
- Encouraging your child to read more than usual.
- Showing your child that reading can take many forms (fiction books, non-fiction books, e-books, audio books, magazines, newspapers, trusted websites, instructions, recipes, online news).
Again, we thank you for your continued support!
Holiday activity idea
Phonics
This week we will start Phase 4 of the ‘Letters and sounds’ phonics programme.
During this phase, children will continue to practise previously learned graphemes and phonemes and learn how to read and write words with four phonemes.
These are called CVCC words and include words such as, tent, damp, toast and chimp.
For example, in the word ‘toast’, t = consonant, oa = vowel, s = consonant, t = consonant.
They will also learn to read and write CCVC words such as, swim, plum, sport, cream and spoon.
For example, in the word ‘cream’, c = consonant, r = consonant, ea = vowel, m = consonant.
In addition, they will be learning more tricky words and continuing to read and write sentences. There are no new phonemes taught in this phase.
Tricky words in phase 4
said, so, do, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, when, out, what
Three or free?
Increasingly, we’re noticing children who are not speaking clearly enough – and this is having a negative effect on their spelling.
Listen to your child as the say words like ‘three’ and ‘the’. More and more children are saying these words in a way which sounds like ‘free’ and ‘vuh’ or ‘fuh’ – all words that use ‘th’, in fact.
We know this is simply because children are not learning to stick their tongue out to make the ‘th’ sound – maybe it’s a bit lazy, maybe it’s because they never learnt, maybe it’s because the London accent (where this is more historic) is heard so much these days. When we prompt children, the vast majority can do say ‘th’ perfectly.
Does this matter?
Well, yes. This week, a child told me in a Maths lesson that the cost of something was ‘free’ – he meant £3. In the same week, a good writer demonstrating his ability to use a wider bank of words begun a sentence with ‘Furfermore, …’
If the way children pronounce words means that someone can confuse what they say, or that they end up making mistakes in spelling a simple word like ‘further’, then yes, this does matter.
As Mrs Burke tells her class in phonics lessons, saying ‘th’ is the only time your child is allowed to stick their tongue out at someone – please help your child get out of this habit, whatever their age!
18 March 2016
The homework for this week is a moral talk time and is due in on Wednesday 23 March.
Should we keep animals in zoos? Should we even keep animals as pets?
18 March 2016
These are the spellings for next week:
