This week in Ock Class - w/e 2nd October

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:

1. What's Mrs B's tip for reading large numbers?
2. What's the difference between orbit and rotate?
3. What did you use this week to practise your skimming and scanning techniques?