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Homework review

Our reponses to the recent creative homework relating to Money Week were amazing!

It was clear that many of us had spent lots of time responding to the task and the results were impressive.

In class, we looked at other people’s before giving each other some verbal ‘stars and steps’. We then voted on our favourites:

17 June 2016

This week’s Practice Makes Perfect homework is due on Wednesday 23 June.

To experiment with vocabulary for effect.

We’ve been practising using a thesaurus in order to expand our vocabulary this week, making sure that we check the meaning of words and that we know how to use them in a sentence.

I’m asking the children to find ten new words that they wouldn’t normally use in their writing but are more ambitious choices for them to remember in the future. For each word, they need to be able to explain what it means (this could be verbal rather than written down) and they need to have written it into a sentence.

As an extra challenge, see if you can find all ten words and their meanings without using the internet. It is an undeniably useful resource, but how else can we learn new things?

17 June 2016

This week’s creative homework is due on Wednesday 23 June.

I can show what I know about the EU referendum.

We’ve learnt lots about the EU referendum this week resulting in some fabulous debates. There were convincing arguments for both the vote remain and the vote leave campaigns. In any way they wish, children should show what they know about the EU and the upcoming referendum. They may choose to express an opinion on which way they feel people should vote, or they may wish to remain neutral and offer both sides of the argument.

Here are some ideas to get you going but, as usual, I’m sure the children will have much better ideas of their own:

• Create a campaign leaflet to go through people’s letter boxes informing them of the debate.
• Write a speech convincing the class to vote one way or another.
• Create a voting booth that the class can cast their votes to.
• Generate a quiz which tests our knowledge on the EU referendum.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

17 June 2016

What other words can children find that have ei in? Lots come after a c, but some don’t. Homophones should always be practised in sentences.

Creative Money Homeworks

There were some brilliant Money Week homeworks on show today. Well done on your hard work. Here are some of our favourites:

We’ve bin archaeologists!

Today in class, we time travelled to the future and discovered some strange black objects full of unusual artefacts. We had to decide what these strange things were and what they showed us about the past.

This was a chance for us to practise our interpreting evidence skills and will come in handy when we start investigating Ancient Egypt.

What is peer pressure?

As part of our RSE learning, we talked about peer pressure and used our ever-improving dramatic skills. We discussed what peer pressure is, when it might happen, different ways it can happen and how we might deal with it.

In groups, we then acted out scenarios in which somebody is being put under pressure by their peers but in all sorts of different ways.

EU. Are you in or are you out?

We’ve had a heated couple of lessons over the last two days exploring the key issues that are central to the most topical question in Britain right now:

Should Britain remain in the European Union?

We started off by making sure we all knew what the EU was and what the referendum was all about before discussing five key issues: immigration, terrorism and security, jobs and employment, economy and the cost of being in the EU. In groups, we found out more about the remain and leave opinions on these matters and started developing our own opinions.

The following day, we decided which side we’d like to debate on (and interestingly had a 50:50 split) and prepared our group for a debate.

We’re all seasoned debaters now so we took to the stage like naturals to argue it out with our opposition and convince the audience to vote like us.

Then, having learnt about both sides ourselves and debated our hearts out, we gave our final vote.

History – toys

We are continuing to learn about the history of toys and how toys have changed over time. Today, we looked at how some toys have survived the test of time but that have still evolved in some way. Examples are dolls, teddy bears and toy cars.  The children looked at pictures of these toys from the early 1900s – present day and ordered them using their historical knowledge.

Then, we looked at a painting  entitled ‘Children’s Games’ which was painted by Pieter Bruegel in 1560. It shows over 80 games being played in a town square, some of which children still play today. The class really enjoyed searching for all the games being played using  magnifying glasses.

Perhaps you could create the opportunity for your child to ask grandparents or older relatives about toys which they played with when they were young.

English – instructions

We are learning all about instructions. We have already learnt about the importance of instructions being in the correct order and being clear (just ask your child about what happened when we tried to make a jam sandwich with unclear instructions)!
Now we are beginning to think about writing our own instructions. Today, we looked at imperative verbs, or ‘bossy’ verbs. These are verbs which create an imperative sentence, i.e. a sentence that gives an order. We played a game which we called ‘bossy boots’ to help us to identify and use imperative verbs.

I gave the ‘boss’ a verb and they had to say it in a sentence to be bossy. We had some very bossy characters!