Week Beginning 10th March 2008

Hi everyone and welcome to this week’s bog.

We really enjoyed the Year 3/4’s fundraising afternoon on Thursday and we now have lots of ideas for our own event which will take place this Tuesday afternoon. Get thinking children, you have already told us some of your excellent ideas and we can’t wait until the event takes place.

On Tuesday, after school we will be holding a parent’s meeting for the parent’s of our Year 6 children. The meeting’s aim is to give you ideas on how to help your child through their Sates. If you wish to attend the meeting please return your reply slip so we know how many parents to expect, thank you.

This week’s curriculum….
Literacy
The Year 6 children have now started a revision programme in Literacy as well as Numeric and Science. The children have been put into two groups and will spend this time working on reading and writing skills in order to prepare them for their forthcoming Sates.

Our Year 5 children will start a new unit working on Persuasion. We all know how persuasive children can be so we are just really polishing skills that they already have. We will be moving on from ‘Mum can I have a Nintendo Wii because my friend has one?’ and working on the art of persuasion using our writing skills.

The children will be planning, writing and designing their own persuasive advert.
By the end of this unit of work the children will….
Use note making as a way of collecting and organizing their ideas before they write.
Choose words carefully, adding adjectives, adverbs and powerful verbs to help get their
message across.
Compose sentences carefully, choosing whether to use long or short sentences to
make a particular point.
Use paragraphs to organize their ideas in a longer piece of writing.
Check and correct their own spellings.
Edit and re-draft their own writing.
Reflect on their own writing, using a checklist to help them decide whether they have got better.

Literacy homework will take on a different format this week. The children have completed a piece of writing in school. They will bring this writing home on Monday along with some level descriptor sheets. They will use the sheets (with the help of an adult) to determine which level they feel their writing deserves.
They will then use the sheets to give themselves targets i.e. things from the descriptors that they have not used in their writing will become their targets.
The Year 5 children will then re-write the piece of writing using their targets to improve it. We are not going to ask the Year 6 children to re-write their work as they have a lot of other homework, but if they do want to do this it is a very worthwhile exercise.

Numeracy
This week Miss Wright’s and Mrs Morgan’s groups will be looking at Probability and Line Graphs.
They will classify events based on the degrees of likelihood and recognize the distinction between ‘impossible’, ‘unlikely’, ‘likely’, and ‘certain’. They will also draw and interpret line graphs using probability investigations.
Try these websites for a head start…
http://www.e-gfl.org/e-gfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/teacher/other/spark/playcards/gamelaunch.html play your cards right.
http://www.mathsonline.co.uk/nonmembers/resource/prob/spinners.html a spinner exercise where the results are recorded on a graph.
http://teacher.scholastic.com/maven/loudlou/index.htm become the detective in this mystery but you must use probability to help solve it.

Mrs Millington’s and Mr Barker’s groups will continue with their revision programme.

Science
The Year 6 children will continue their revision programme in Science.

The Year 5 children will continue with their topic of gases around us. This week the children should learn that powders and sponges are solid materials with air in the ‘gaps’ in between particles and to make careful observations of materials and to explain these using scientific knowledge and understanding.

Here I Am
This week in Here I Am we will be discussing the Easter Story and performing our own dramas. A selection of the dramas will be performed in the Easter Service which will take place in the last week of term.

Topic
Topic this week will used to plan the charity fund raising afternoon which will take place next Tuesday. The children will have time to plan and design their stalls in order for the fundraising to run smoothly.

That’s all for this week, until the next time,

take care

Year 5/6 Team.