Week Beginning 6th October 2008

Hello and welcome to this week's blogspot.



We have been hearing all week about the fantastic time the Year 6's had a Conway and we are glad that they were not too tired to work hard last week!



Homework

Just to clear up a few issues with homework. At the Year 5 induction meeting some parents thought that the children writing sentences to go with their spellings was too much to do as well as their literacy homework. It was decided that if parents felt their children learned their spellings easier by putting them in context then to do the sentences if they didn't feel the need to do that then to leave the sentences and learn the spellings.

We do feel that it helps the children understand the words they are learning better by putting them in a sentence but realise that the children have lots of homework throughout the week.



Curriculum.



Literacy

We have now finished our unit on poetry and the children ended the unit by writing some fantastic poems of their own, we were amazed at the quality of some of their writing.



This week we will be starting a unit of work on journalist writing. If you have any suitable newspapers at home from the weekend then please do send them into school.

We will start the week by looking at fact and faction, the children will be recognising techniques used to argue, persuade, mislead and sway the reader. Use techniques of dialogue to explore issues. Explore fact and fiction and the fact that things written in some newspapers are not always face.



Try these websites:-

http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/english/englishD9.htm have a look at the features of newspapers.

http://www.headliners.org/?gclid=CNums_C0jZYCFRg1Zwodqw68Fg children's news site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/english/revision_bites/non_fiction1.shtml





Numeracy



This week Mrs Morgan's and Mr Barker's group will be looking at 2-shapes. We will be using the terms 'parallelogram', 'rhombus' and 'trapezium' and begin to know their properties. We will be classifying quadrilaterals, using criteria such as parallel sides, equal sides and equal angles.
By the end of the week the children:-
MUST be able to recognise parallelograms, rhombus and trapeziums.
SHOULD be able to discuss the properties of these shapes.
COULD be able to draw these shapes by listen to their descriptions.

Miss Wright's and Mr Slavin's groups will be using fraction notation, including mixed numbers, and the vocabulary 'numerator' and 'denominator', changing improper fractions to mixed numbers and vice versa, recognising when two simple fractions are equivalent.

Science

This week we come to the end of our topic on reversible and irreversible changes. We will be completing an end of unit assessment and review all the work we have done in this topic.

Here I Am

We are also coming to the end of the topic Myself. We will be completing assessments on what we have learned during this topic and linking all our learning together.

PE

The children did PE outside this Thursday even though the weather was so bad. It would be a good idea if the children could bring outdoor PE kits into school in case we have to do PE outside in future. Thank you.

Topic

This week we will be looking at Spartans. We will be looking at the life of a young Spartan solider and how that compares to our life today. See previous blogspots for Greek websites.

On Wednesday Mrs Morgan will be taking 11 of our year 6 children to Evelyn Street Primary School to work with some of their children. Evelyn Street have had the mini laptops in their school for a while now so they are going to train our children to use them and then the children will pass that knowledge on to the rest of year 6.

We also have someone coming in from MGL this week to work with some of the children making podcasts and radio shows.

We would also like to say congratulations to Mrs Millington and her husband Mark on the birth of their new baby boy Oliver. We send them all our love and best wishes.

Thanks for visiting the blogspot.

Year 5/6 Team.