Week Beginning 2nd February 2009

Hi everyone and welcome to book week.

First of all we would like to thank the Year 6 children for their excellent behaviour while attending Young Citizen 2009 at the Peace Centre on Friday. The Year 5 children were also extremely well behaved while in school.
Thank you children we are really proud of you when we take you out of school.

On Wednesday evening there will be a meeting held in school for the parents of Year 5 children who will make their first Reconciliation this year. Please send the reply slip back so we know how many people will be attending this meeting.

We have the book fair in school this week and as usual on book week we base a lot of our curriculum work on books to tie in with this event.

Please do come in and have a look at the book fair this week after school. The children will have the opportunity to browse the book fair on Monday and choose a wish list of books for their class which parents can donate to school. These books will have a sticker inside telling everyone that your child has donated the book.
The friends of St. Vincent's are also holding a cake sale on Friday afternoon to tie in with the book fair.
Please remember that for each book you buy school will receive commission to buy resources. Thank you.

We have been monitoring the children's diaries and have noticed that the number of comments made about children's reading is dwindling. Please make sure that you hear your child read each week and make a comment in their reading diary.
We have asked the children to read for 15 minutes each night and then try to speed
up the next night to beat the amount of pages the read the night before. This is because 15 minutes is the amount of time they get to read the booklet in the reading SAT so they do need to fully concentrate for this amount of time on reading and be able to take all the information they have read in.
We will be monitoring the children's diaries again this week and will let you know the percentage of children who have been heard read that week.

Curriculum...

In literacy this week we will be concentrating on the theme of book week and basing our work on our favourite books and authors. Please take the time this week to let your children look through their book collection and decide which their favourite books and authors are.

We will be using the laptops to research our favourite author and then write a biographies of the author.
We will also be writing reviews of our favourite book, looking at illustrators and doing art work based on illustrators work and sharing our favourite books with each other.

On Friday the children will be allowed to come to school dressed as their favourite character from a book. Please ensure that if your child is taking part in this they do come dressed as a character from a book and not from a movie. There will be a prize for the best costume in each class.

Numeracy

Mrs Morgan's and Mr Barker's groups will be continuing with their revision this week. The children are working really hard on this and we can see the benefits in their class work from the revision they have been doing at home. We feel that having the mini laptops is making a big difference with this. We would love to hear how you feel about this , if you have any comments about how the mini laptops our helping your child at home please let us know through the diaries.
We think that we are raising a generation of computer technicians as the vastness of the children's knowledge in sorting them out never ceases to amaze us!!
Keep it up guys we are really pleased with you!!

Miss Wright's and Mr Slavin's groups will be looking at strategies for adding strings of 1, 2 and 3 digit numbers and multiples of 10.
The will be looking at all the possible strategies and then choosing the one they feel the most comfortable using.

Try these websites to help:-
http://www.ictgames.com/technowithflock.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/numbers/wholenumbers/addsubtract/mental/flash9.shtml
http://www.10ticks.co.uk/s_showGames.aspx?gameID=5#gamesContent

Topic

Our topic this week will involve us becoming authors and illustrators ourselves. We will spend the time designing and writing our own books aimed our foundation stage and Year 1 children. We will then make them into electronic books using software on our school computers and scanning in the illustrations that the children have prepared to go with their books.
After the books are completed we will invite the younger children to book readings from the authors.
We will then hope to put the finished books on our school website.

This promises to be a really interesting and exciting week!

Hope to see you at the book fair.

Year 5/6 Team.