This week in Ock class- w/e 8th November

Dear parents and carers,

I hope that you all had a wonderful half term. Although we've only been back a week, it does feel like longer because we've already been very busy!

In our English lessons we have started a new project based around Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. We have been thinking carefully about what we're learning about Liam, the main character, from the choices that he makes. We read the first few chapters and then wrote lots of questions that we have, which we're hoping will be answered as we continue to read the book. We're also started some sentence stacking based around Liam's experience in the Porsche showroom, which we'll be continuing with next week. In our sentence stacking this week we have been looking at the effect that different sentence length can have on the tension of the writing.

In maths we have been working on multiplication and division skills, concentrating on multiples and factors. This has pulled up a few children who are still not secure in their times table knowledge. I really like the Times Table Rockstars app  which costs £6 for a family membership for a year, but is a really good way of encouraging children to learn their times tables. Alternatively, you can use other methods which don't involve an app- there are some really good ideas on this website.

I was really impressed with the children's work on their Remembrance Day poppies, which Miss Sutton has used in the Remembrance Garden. They thought carefully about what Remembrance means, using the loving book Memorial, by Gary Crew and Shaun Tan, and then put that thoughtfulness into their artwork. 

The engineering project was also really good fun and you can see the results of that on this page.

Here are the spellings for next week (test on Friday as usual):
abundance
brilliance
elegance
extravagance
tolerance
hesitancy
relevancy
vacancy
dominancy
abundancy

Mrs B
Three things to ask your child this week:

1. What are multiples and factors?
2. How do you know that Liam is a thrill-seeker?
3. Why is Remembrance Day important?