|
Dear parents and carers,
We made it to half term- yay! It has been a very long and tiring half term, and your children have worked exceptionally hard. They have coped so well returning to school and with the changes that making us more covid-secure have brought. I was lovely to talk to most of you over the past couple of weeks about your wonderful children and how much progress they are making. If you didn't make an appointment to talk to me, please contact the office and I'll do my best to squeeze you in next half term :) In English this week we have continued with our independent writing, this time learning how to edit and revise the first draft. We'll continue with this for the first week back after half term, as it's not quite finished yet. We'll do our final redraft and share our finished stories then. In maths this week we have mainly focused on subtraction, including looking at the column method for subtraction when you need to exchange (or as we called it when I was at school- "borrowing"). Some children were shaky at first but have really been Steadfast Squirrels and Must Do Moles, and I am really pleased to see how much improvement they've made in it over the week. After half term we'll be finishing off our work on addition and subtraction, including looking at estimating answers and using the inverse relationship. We really enjoyed our interhouse football skills competition this week. Watch this space for the results early next half term! When we return to school we will be creating some artwork for our Remembrance Day installation, and also carrying out some work based around Children in Need. I hope that you and your children all get some time to rest and recuperate over this half term break, and I'm looking forward to seeing your children when we return to school for the autumn 2 term. Mrs B Three things to ask your child this week:
0 Comments
Dear parents and carers,
This week in our English lessons we have finished planning our stories and have now started to write them! This is very exciting :) I'm really looking forward to reading the completed pieces. We're taking it very slowly and gently as it's been a whole since the children have done a long piece of writing, but they've made a really good start. Next week we'll be continuing with this, and will hopefully have finished our first drafts, and maybe started to edit and revise them. On Wednesday we did some work on inference, by being a detective and using clues in a picture to figure things out. Next week we'll be trying this with text, rather than pictures. In maths this week we have been recapping addition and subtraction involving exchanging. We've used drawn place value counters and also the column method. Next week we'll be continuing with this. In science we really enjoyed learning about the Moon today. The children have made little models that show how the Earth and Moon rotate, and how the Moon orbits the Earth. After half term we'll be rounding off this unit of work with a recap and some assessment, before moving on to our next topic. In our PE this week we've been practising our football skills, ready for our interhouse PE football skills competition next Monday afternoon. The competition should be fierce! Please note that the spelling test will be on THURSDAY next week, as it's an INSET day on Friday :) Mrs B Three things to ask your child this week:
Dear parents and carers, It has been lovely to welcome some new children into our class this week, and I'm looking forward to welcoming a familiar face back next week, too. It's also been lovely to have our parent/teacher meetings, as I always have lots of lovely things to say about your children. I'm looking forward to catching up with the rest of you for parent/teacher meetings next week. In English this week we've finished our sentence stacking based on Float, and are now moving on to planning our version of this story. We're flipping it on its head and calling it "Glide", and this time, a child will be making a paper plane instead. Next week will involve planning this version of the story, and also hopefully writing the first few paragraphs. We'll also be looking at inference in our whole class reading session. In maths we've rounded off our work on place value, and next week we'll be moving on to look at addition and subtraction. We'll be recapping some work from previous years to make sure that these areas are secure before covering the year 5 curriculum in this area. I've really been enjoying our PE lessons this half term. We've learned about different types of exercise, and tried out lots of different body-weight and cardio exercises in the form of circuits. The children have also come up with their own circuits and taught them to the class. There are some photos of their great work below: The spellings for this week are:
financial commercial provincial initial spatial palatial controversial initially controversially financially Mrs B Three things to ask your child this week:
Dear parents and carers, This week in our English lessons we have continued to work on our sentence stacking based on Float, and we have also been practising retrieving information from texts in our reading session. Next week we'll be finishing off the sentence stacking and looking at how to plan our own writing based on it. We'll be identifying the "story steps" and looking at the emotional intent of each of those steps, in order to prepare us for writing our own stories. In maths we have continued with our work on place value, working with even larger numbers! The children have been developing their understanding of value in place value and also ordering and comparing numbers. Next week we'll be hopefully finishing off this unit with a bit more rounding, as well as some work on negative numbers and Roman numerals. We enjoyed our music lessons this week looking at dynamics and volume. Inspired by our work on Float, we created a storm soundscape, and added in some onomatopoeic poetry alongside it. The piece worked really well and I'm proud of how the class worked together. On another musical note, we loved this brilliant Horrible Histories song about Copernicus, Newton and Galileo, which helped us to learn about the movement of the planets in our solar system in our science lesson this week. You can watch it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/watch/horrible-histories-songs-copernicus-newton--galileo-the-earth-goes-round Support from you at home can be incredibly important to your child's progress in class. Please make sure that they are doing their Spelling Shed and TTRS homework, as well as reading regularly. For year 5, I am happy if the reading record is updated whenever they finish a book, rather than every time they read. However, so far the numbers of children who are completing the set homework are very small. Please help me to help your children to achieve their potential. Finally, I thought that you might like to see some of my *ahem* amazing artwork. A child had told me a story about one of his pet fish eating another fish and then exploding, so I had to immortalise it in whiteboard marker immediately. Full marks to the child who recognised my inspiration for this sketch- it's very much like a Gary Northfield! I tweeted him the picture and he said it was (and I quote) "brilliant" so obviously a career in comics awaits.  Mrs B
Three things to ask your child this week:
Dear parents and carers, In our English lessons this week we've continued working on Float, writing our modelled sentences but also exploring the storm through poetry. We created a class poem about the storm, including some wonderful descriptive language. We'll be continuing with this next week. In maths we've continued our work on place value and rounding. We're working towards larger numbers and next week we'll hit the millions! We've been making sure that we really understand place value and can use our knowledge in a variety of different ways. The children have found the rounding a little trickier, but it's definitely getting there. Our PE lessons so far this half term have been based around cardio and bodyweight strength exercises in circuits. The children have been working on improving their form in exercises such as planks, squats and lunges, and also improving their overall fitness. However, on Thursday our lesson was interrupted by this little fellow, who looked like he'd had a little bump on the head. Luckily we managed to scoop him up in a paper hat (not a typo) and I carefully deposited him under the hedge.  In our science lessons we have been learning about space, and this week we learned the order of the planets from the sun, and also about the features of some of the planets. The children were fascinated that Mars had rovers on t that were exploring, taking photos and sampling the rocks, so we watched a few videos about these brilliant feats of engineering too. Next week we'll be looking at how the helio-centric theory of our solar system developed.
Please remember that water bottles should have a sports lid- we've had a few accidents this week and some soggy work for me to mark! Mrs B Three things to ask your child this week:
Dear parents and carers,
We enjoyed finishing off our work on "Here We Are" this week, and sharing the work with the rest of the school in a special assembly. It was great to see what everyone else had done across the year groups. What a special book this was to start the year with! In our English lessons this week we have started looking at a lovely book called "Float", by Daniel Miyares. This is a wordless picture book, and tells the story of a young boy who makes a paper boat and takes it out into a rainstorm. The children have learned to make their own paper boats, and also practised their inference and deduction skills when looking at the beautiful illustrations. We've started writing our own sentences about the story, using skills such as repetition and onomatopoeia. We'll be continuing with this work next week. In maths we started with a bit of time spent having a go at some place value work independently, so that I can start to really suss out where the class are and what they need to work on. For the rest of the week we have started with some recapping of basic place value work and rounding. This covers some year 4 work, but is really vital to make sure that I am not building on shakey foundations! We'll be continuing with our work on place value next week. Please remember that details of the homework can be found on Google Classroom. It's pretty simple though:
Doing these activities at home will really help me to teach your children in school, and will help them make the best of their year 5 with me. Mrs B Three things to ask your child this week:
Dear parents and carers, How lovely to have your children in for their first full week in year 5! It has been a week full of fun and the children have worked hard and produced some fantastic art and writing. We have continued to work on Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers, and during the week we have explored social contracts, written notes of advice to people who are feeling worried, scared or anxious, written song lyrics, created health advice posters and written poetry about our school field! We've also been using the zentangle technique in our space themes artwork. This is where you split an area up into shapes (either randomly, with straight or curly lines) and then fill each space with a different doodle. It has been really interesting to see children really engrossed in it, and the mindfulness aspect of this type of activity is really important. We then added bright rockets, inspired by artist Peter Thorpe. I've been really impressed with this lovely work, and I'm really looking forward to sharing it with the rest of the school on Wednesday morning, in a special sharing assembly. We have had lots of children with the sniffles this week- the shock to the system of being back in school has played a part, I think! Although the children are doing a good job of their regular handwashing, I think that the spread of this around the class (I had 6 children poorly on Friday afternoon) means that we need to do more on this next week! Here are some photos of some of our fantastic work this week: Hopefully e'll have everyone back in class, all healthy and happy, on Monday! Have a great weekend :)
Mrs B Three things to ask your child this week: 1: What advice would you give to someone who was feeling worried about corona virus? 2: How did you feel when you were doing your zentangle? 3: What do you know about the size of the solar system? Year 5 have been working on rewriting the lyrics to "Wonderful World", as part of our work on Here We Are by Oliver Jeffers. I thought that they did a really fantastic job! Here's what we came up with:
I see octopus swim Under the sea Tentacles waving At you and me And I think to myself What a wonderful world I hear birds that chirp Eagles too Flying around Me and you And I think to myself What a wonderful world I hear ribbiting frogs Swimming through murk Down to where The animals lurk And I think to myself What a wonderful world I can see green grass Bumblebees Bluebells blooming The leaves on the trees And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see komodo dragons Roaming around Scaly feet On rocky ground And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see leaves of green Brown monkeys too Stripey yellow giraffes With shiny black hooves And I think to myself What a wonderful world I hear badgers of night Hidden from sight Owls above In the silver moonlight And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see delicate clouds Skies of blue The bright burning sun Birds chirp and coo And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see apples of red Grass green too LIttle fox Hunting for food And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see pandas roll In the bamboo Looking at the sky The deepest blue And I think to myself What a wonderful world I see octopus colours Shining in the deep Water rolling Mountains steep And I think to myself What a wonderful world Dear parents and carers,
It has been really wonderful to finally get back into school, and be a classroom teacher again! I am really enjoying seeing all of your children again, and having taught the majority of them in year 2 has given us a nice smooth transition. Your children are settling in really well and are already feeling like my class again! They are dealing very well with our extra safety measures, and are doing a particularly sterling job with the frequent handwashing. This week we have been working on our "Here We Are" project, alongside the rest of the school. The children have written list poems about a special place, written to a special person and also created posters to encourage people to keep the positive environmental aspects of lockdown going. Next week we'll be continuing with this work, and it will make up the bulk of our morning activities. We're looking forward to sharing this work with the school and our wider community shortly. I will be starting maths and spelling homework in the coming weeks, but I thought that this weekend the children (and I!) would be especially tired, so I haven't set anything yet. Once we do get it up and running, tasks will be set on Google Classroom, so please let me know if you've forgotten their log in details :) Best wishes, Mrs B As we were unable to take part in our annual Sports Evening this year due to Lockdown, we continued with our physical activity at home. We took part in National School Sports Week where there were lots of different challenges to try which were organised by the Youth Sport Trust and Sky Sports. Children and families across the country took part and it was great to see so many of our school community getting involved. Well done to each and every one of you for showing excellent commitment to being physically active and supporting our work as an Active School. Take a look at some of the photos from the challenges:
|
Contact Us01865 862794 - Phone
Appleton C of E Primary School
Church Road Appleton Abingdon Oxfordshire OX13 5JL Queries
Please contact us on: office.3850@appleton.oxon.sch.uk 01865 862794 © Appleton Primary School
|
|
