Week Beginning 19th January 2009

Hi everyone.

First of all can I apologise for the blogspot not being updated at the weekend this week. I have been decorating and my internet connection was stood on by a workman!! I have been waiting for a new one to be delivered and have finally received it. It is really surprising how useless you feel without the internet.

Due to this happening to me I do realise how frustrating it is for the children to be given their brand new laptops and then not being able to connect to the internet at home.
From the sounds of things the majority or children are now up and running with their home connections, which it great, thank you for persevering with this and trying everything you can think of at home and also offering advise to each other.
For those of you who are still not managing to get on line, Mr Worrall has kindly offered to set up a technical support website to help with any problems that we cannot deal with. You will receive a letter with this web address on and will be able to look at the information that is already on and if you cannot find the answer to your query you can post a question to be answered.
Mr Worrall is doing this out of the goodness of his heart and we are very, very grateful for his time and efforts.


On Friday this week 6 of our Year 6 children will be taking part in an indoor athletics tournament at St Gregory's High School. If your child has been chosen you will have received a letter giving you information about this event. We will let you know how the children get on next week.

This week's curriculum......

Literacy

Year 5 will be continuing with their unit of work on Persuasive Writing. They really enjoyed beginning this topic last week.
This week they will be learning to identify the use of powerful verbs, identifying different
types of text, e.g. their content, structure, vocabulary, style, layout and purpose. Make short
notes, e.g. by abbreviating ideas, selecting key words, listing … .
Fill out brief notes into connected prose. From examples of persuasive writing, investigate how
style and vocabulary are used to convince the intended reader.

This week they will move to designing their own persuasive advert. We look forward to seeing some fantastic results. If you have magazines at home it would be helpful for the children to have a look at some adverts to see how they are presented.

Year 6 will be continuing with their revision. We have been very impressed with how hard the children are working at home as well as in school and we hope that they continue to keep up the good work throughout their revision programme.
This week we are looking at tackling longer questions in the reading test. These are 3 mark questions that children usually find difficult to answer. We will be starting off the week answering them in pairs and then go onto answering them ourselves. We will then look at the mark schemes for the tests to check what the expected answers are.
Have a look at last week's blogspots for websites to help with the reading test.

Numeracy

Miss Wright's and Mr Slavin's groups will be continuing their work on fractions but this week extending their work to include decimals and percentages.
There are loads of websites to help with this subject some our favourites are:-
http://www.mathszone.co.uk/
http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/maths/contents08fracdecperratprop.htm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/maths/activities/percentages.shtml

Mrs Morgan's and Mr Barker's groups will be continuing with their revision programme. We have noticed this week that the children are struggling with ordering fractions we have worked on this in class but it may form a good focus for your child's maths revision this week. The children have been on websites this week to help with this subject so they are aware of what can help, their revision books will also come in handy.

Science

We are continuing our dissolving topic and also continuing with revision for our Year 6's. This week the children will be focusing on living things.
Practical science this week will focus on the Earth, Sun and Moon.

Try these websites:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/living_things.shtml
http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/revision/Science/living.htm
http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/science/ks1-2/resources/index.shtml
http://www.crickweb.co.uk/ks2science.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks2bitesize/science/activities/earth_sun_moon.shtml
http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/science/ks1-2/resources/index.shtml
http://www.engineeringinteract.org/teachers5.htm

Topic

This week in our Environment Topic we will be looking at Pollution. We will first look at our local area and then focus on Pollution around the world.
This could be a good opportunity to talk to your child about the need to recycle.
We will also be taking part in this year's Yellow Woods Challenge. The challenge this year will be slightly different. In previous years the children have brought old Yellow Pages into school. This year as Warrington now have blue bins you can recycle the Yellow Pages in the blue bin and the children just need to bring the front page into school.

Have a look at these websites:-

http://www.recyclezone.org.uk/tz_curriculum.aspx
http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/Resources/Fact_Sheets/Key_Stage_3/Air_Pollution/pdf/glossary.pdf
http://www.thegrid.org.uk/learning/geography/ks1-2/resources/

Thanks for visiting the blogspot, see you next week.

Year 5/6 Team.