This week in Ock Class w/e 20th September

Dear parents and carers,

This week in English we have continued the sentence stacking part of our work on Float. We have spent time analysing the illustrations in order to make predictions about the character and what might happen next, as well as making inferences about how the character feels. We've also looked at how the layout of the page affects the meaning, as well as other clues, like the colour of the boy's coat. Next week we'll be finishing the sentence stacking, before moving on to planning our own writing based on this wonderful book. I was pleased with how confidently the children shared some of their writing so far in our sharing assembly this morning, too.

Please remember to keep encouraging your child to keep reading regularly at home, either out loud or independently - this also includes being read to, as well! 

The children did very well in their first spelling check of the year, with lots of children getting all five correct, and lots of children very close to that. Well done everyone! This week's spellings all have -cious endings:
delicious
atrocious
conscious
ferocious
gracious
luscious
malicious
precious
spacious
suspicious

In maths this week we have continued our work on place value. We've stretched our skills by working with bigger numbers, consolidating our knowledge of place value and the number system. We've worked hard on rounding and also on solving problems based on place value. We've also started looking at common mistakes, such as only answering one part of a two part question, and how to check our work for errors. Next week we'll be continuing to compare and order numbers up to one million, as well as recapping using negative numbers. Please remember to keep working with your child on mental maths fluency, particularly times tables. I have put some of times table, rounding and counting work on My Maths for your child to access at a convenient time. I also really like the Times Table Rockstars app, which is fantastic for building fluency and can be tailored to the particular tables that they are finding hard. Little and often is the key to this sort of consolidation work. Please do give me a shout if you need support with this.

In science this week we learnt about the planets in our solar system, including the order of the planets from the sun and some key facts about each one. We also watched this fantastic video about a group of friends who built a scale model of the solar system in the Black Rock desert. In their model the Earth is the size of a marble, and the sun is about 1.5m in diameter. It shows the huge distances between the planets in a much better way than conventional diagrams. The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

Mrs B

Three things to ask your child this week:

• Which is your favourite planet in the solar system, and why?
• If you count on in 10,000s from 34,237, what will be the 5th number you say?
• How does the boy feel when he finds his ruined boat?