Week 13 (15.06.20)

Hello Chestnut and Maple!
 
Thank you all for your messages last week, it is an exciting time although we’re being kept waiting longer than expected! The baby is being served his eviction notice this Monday the 15th as he seems to be in no hurry to get out into the world on his own!  I was really impressed with the dialogue you sent through, and I am pleased to see that so many of you are confident using the rules for direct speech to write a conversation between two people. Some of you went even further and included split speech and narrative description, they were a joy to read. So many of you did really well converting between analogue and 12 and 24-hour digital time; Busy Things seems to be much more user friendly than Frog Play! I have also liked seeing your model Earths, some of you made them out of plasticine, others cross-sections or even a papier mache model! In other news, Jack has just been awarded a Blue Peter badge for his painting of Queen Victoria in honour of her birthday on the 24th May, and Imogen holds a world record for being part of the largest live drawing lesson ever!
 
This week’s stars of the week for Chestnut and Maple are Ellie S and Hector. Ellie has been working incredibly hard in class and I have heard many great things about her Ellie’s Marvellous Medicine book! Hector meanwhile not only produced a very good piece of dialogue but has also made some Miro inspired ceramics!
 
This Friday the 19th June we have the opportunity to take part in the Northumberland Tyne and Wear Virtual School Games between 10:00am and 3:00pm. The event will be on Active Northumberland’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnP_2E9H6RmYXHEYVh4rrFQ as well as their social media channels, such as Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ActiveNland/. Every hour there will be different events, competitions and activities which will require minimal equipment. It will no doubt be great fun!
 
English
Activity 1 (Spellings)
Please may your child practise their week 2 set of spellings, guided by their sheet in the work pack.
 
Activity 2 (Independent Reading)
Please read The Abominables for half an hour.
 
Activity 3 (SPaG)
Please may your child complete page 16 (as shown by the shield in the bottom left) of the SPaG booklet which is about identifying and using alternative verbs. Some of you have already started doing this, which you showed in your dialogue work last week changing the verb for ‘said’ every time someone spoke.
 
As a second part of the SPaG activity, and linked to Activity 5, please may your child look at pages 18 and 19 of the SPaG booklet. These pages ask your child to draw a mythical monster and then describe it using pairs of adjectives with some examples given on page 18. Rather than draw a monster, please may your child instead take the time to think of who their wanderer in their story plan for Activity 5 will be, then draw and describe them. Otherwise the rules for how to describe someone or something using a pair of adjectives remains the same (we describe things in the following order: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, material; so my favourite, big, old, square, brown, wooden box rather than a wooden, brown, square, old, big, my favourite box. Obviously we don’t often use all of these adjectives in one go! Your child will only need to use two, but please may the follow the rule for how to order them).
 
Activity 4 (Reading Comprehension)
This week, please may your child read and answer the questions to the text about David Walliams.
 
Activity 5 (Independent Writing) @EMAIL
Please may your child listen from where they got up to last week (end of part 7) to the end of chapter 22, which is just less than 23 minutes. The end of chapter 22 is part way through the 9th video on the YouTube playlist, so it doesn’t matter if your child wants to listen all the way to the end, but for the purposes of this week they don’t need to get past 06:43 when Chloe says “… I want to go wandering with you.” Now that we’re getting to the end of the book Mr Stink, we have finally discovered how Mr Stink became a wanderer and his story is very sad.
 
Your child will need to plan a story based on this book which they will write the final version for next week. This story will need to be in four parts (it does not have to be about Mr Stink, instead they can come up with a character of their own: see the second part of Activity 3):
 
The start is about someone who becomes a wanderer and we need to know how or why this happened (like with Mr Stink’s backstory two weeks ago);
They then meet a child (if they want, this can be the person writing the story);
Then a crisis of some sort occurs; and
Finally, things get sorted out. The wanderer may go on their way or may choose to stick around, but your narrative will need to explain their decision.
 
Please note that your child doesn’t need to write the final version of the story (that will be next week’s task). This week they only need to plan the story and think about how they are going to structure the events so that it fits the four parts above. How they choose to do that is up to them. They can write notes on a piece of paper or in Google Docs, they could draw it as a comic strip, make a mind map, draw a story mountain… anything goes as long as they record their ideas somehow so that they don’t forget them and it is in four parts.
 
Mr Stink Audible audiobook:
 
YouTube playlist:
 
TV film adaptation:
 
Maths
Activity 1 (Coordinates)
Generally, children have a pretty good idea of what coordinates on a grid are and can describe position (next to, to the left of, underneath…) but they often get confused when they have to write coordinates down or use them to mark a position. This is because they forget the most important rule of “along the corridor and up the stairs”. The first number or figure (sometimes it might be a letter) is ALWAYS on the horizontal x-axis and the second is ALWAYS on the vertical y-axis. In later years, children will come across grids in more than one quadrant:
 
But the same rule will still apply. Even if the first figure is negative, it will be somewhere on the horizontal x-axis and the next figure will be somewhere on the vertical y-axis. If either of them is 0 then it sits on the axis, if both are 0 it will sit in the middle of both axes. Fortunately, for now children only need to read and plot coordinates in the first quadrant using positive numbers. Their grids, therefore, look like this:
Whenever they read a pair of coordinates, the first figure will always be on the bottom axis (“along the corridor”) and then the second will be on the vertical (“up the stairs”). It is crucial that children understand this as otherwise they will consistently read coordinates incorrectly and make later tasks more complicated. This reasoning problem might help your child understand why we need to have one way of reading coordinates and can’t just read or write them however we fancy (Dora is correct because she travelled 0 along the x-axis before going up vertically 8: along the corridor 0 and up the stairs 8. Tommy has gone up the stairs 8 and along the corridor 0. If you plotted Tommy’s coordinates correctly, it would be underneath the yellow circle)!
This week I would like you to play Battleships with your child. You may notice that there is a slight variation with the version of the game I have provided as both axes are numbered, rather than the traditional way of one being numbers and the other letters. This is so that your child gets used to dealing with coordinates where both figures are numbers and to know that the first number tells them how far along the horizontal x-axis they need to go, and the second number tells them how far up the vertical y-axis. You may find that you need to reinforce this a few times as if they start swapping them around, they will be plotting incorrect coordinates. If you find that your child struggles with this concept I have attached an editable Word version of the file so that the you can swap the labels on one of the axes for letters and then use letters and numbers for your coordinates so your child knows that letters belong on one and numbers on another (alternatively you could just cross out and write over the one provided). Whatever you do, though, your child must ALWAYS plot the first figure using the horizontal x-axis and the second using the vertical y-axis: “along the corridor and up the stairs”.
 
The rules for this game of Battleships is as follows in purple:
 
How to play:
 
Give each player a pencil and a print-out of the Battleships game. The top grid is for your own fleet ("My Fleet") and the bottom grid is where you try to locate the other player's fleet ("Enemy Fleet").
 
First you decide where to place your own fleet within your grid. A fleet is made up of one aircraft carrier, one battleship, one cruiser, two destroyers and two submarines. Each type of ship covers a different number of boxes in the grid, as shown on the print-out, and is drawn vertically or horizontally (not diagonally). Ships cannot occupy the same square.
 
To place a ship, check how many boxes are covered by the ship (shown to the right of your grid) and then write the first letter of the name of the ship in the boxes it covers. For example, a cruiser covers three boxes so you would pick any three adjacent boxes and put the letter C in each box. Keep your fleet location secret from your opponent! When each player has marked their fleet on their grid, begin play. Here's an example:
 
Take turns to ‘shoot’ at your opponents’ fleet by calling out the number of a certain box by its grid location. For example, you could call out "1,4" or "5,3". Your opponent must say whether the shot is a "miss" or a "hit", and, if it is a "hit", what type of ship it is. You can keep track of what and where you have shot on your lower grid, and the ships you have sunk by crossing off the ships at the bottom right of your print-out.
 
If you set your grid as in the above example and your opponent called out “1,4” they would have missed (shown with a blue explosion) as it would have been 1 along the bottom and 4 up vertically. However, if they had called out “5,3” they would have hit the left-most square of your battleship (shown with a red explosion).
 
Play continues until one player wins by successfully sinking the whole of the other player's fleet.
 
You don’t have to email me photos of you playing the game, but you could let me know how you got on or if you are having any difficulties, or simply if you enjoyed it. There are interactive alternatives online but I would strongly caution against using them as they often use letters and numbers, with letters up the vertical axis, and they read the letters first, which is not how coordinates work. Sometimes the letters are along the top of the horizontal axis, which is fine, but it can confuse the children as the axis now seems to be in a different place (it isn’t really, but it looks to be).
 
Activity 2 (Arithmetic)
Please may your child complete the short multiplication worksheet from their work pack. There are two sheets to this and your child only needs to do one of them. The Year 3 Curriculum only requires children to be able to multiply 2-digit numbers by 1-digit (e.g. 23 x 2) whereas by the end of year 4 they should be able to do so with 3-digit numbers (234 x 2). If your child is in year 3, then they can work on the 2-digit by 1-digit sheet if they wish to do so. Obviously, if they are confident there is no reason why they can’t go onto the more difficult sheet. Similarly, if your child is struggling with 3-digit by 1-digit, then go onto the less complex sheet. If your child is not confident with their times tables, there is also a times table mat in the home learning work pack which they can refer to. This will allow them to focus on the method rather than needing to also worry about remembering number facts. There is also a worked example of the method in the pack to go along with the worksheets. It doesn’t really matter if you put the carried digit underneath the calculation or on the top, but for multiplication I personally prefer to put it underneath. This is because (if you have a look at the worked example when they have just multiplied 7 and 9 to give 63, 3 is kept in the ones column and the 6 is carried across into the tens underneath) when the tens digit is carried, it still looks like the whole number. Putting the carried digit underneath also helps remind me that I need to do the multiplication first before I add on the carried digit (so in the same example, after I have carried the 6, I would then multiply the 8 in the tens column of the 3-digit number by the 9 to give 72 THEN add on the 6, giving 78. The 8 is put into the ‘answer’ and the 7 carried into the hundreds). These are both common areas for confusion with the children. Please encourage them to take their time and to not rush.
 
Activity 3 (Times Tables)
Whether your child wants to complete their times tables online at https://ttrockstars.com/ or on the sheets provided in the work pack is up to them. If they choose to complete them on paper, then please may they complete the ‘second group’ of three sheets (Week 7, Week 8 and Week 9) which focus on the 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 times tables. If they choose to complete this activity online, then there will be 10 sessions for them to complete. Online games will test all the times tables, however. If, on the other hand, your child wants to complete the games online, there is nothing stopping you giving them some of the sheets to do too!
 
Activity 4 (Big Maths)
Please may your child complete their next Big Maths sheet. As I may not be able to respond straight away this week (particularly on Monday and probably Tuesday), I have uploaded all of the Big Maths files to my School360 Google Drive for you to download at your convenience. This link will take you to the folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SxMvlQZho_ZOpXhbzYKcXSmbTAlgDxsf?usp=sharing which anyone with the link has access to view and download only, not to add, edit or delete.
 
Activity 5 (Schofield & Sims)
Please may your child complete the next two pages in their Schofield & Sims arithmetic book.
 
Geography
How are Volcanoes Formed?
This week children are beginning to look at volcanoes and how they are formed. Should they get very enthusiastic about the subject, I have also attached a second PowerPoint which is just for information and is all about the world’s most-deadly volcanoes as well as a version of volcano Top Trumps. The BBC has some excellent videos of real volcanoes erupting too https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z849q6f/articles/zd9cxyc.
 
As always, to match this lesson I have attached a lesson plan, PowerPoint presentation and some worksheets. The second worksheet is a series of instructions to make your own volcanic eruption at home but it calls for things you may not have at hand. It is entirely up to you whether you want to do the second sheet or not as it’s more of a visual spectacle than a lesson, although if you find that you do want to make an eruption but don’t have food colouring, vinegar or plastic cups etc. to hand, a similar demonstration can be done with some fizzy pop (actual branded Diet Coke seems to work best) and a packet of Mentos mints https://www.thoughtco.com/make-mentos-and-soda-volcano-eruption-605994#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%8BMentos%20and%20diet,kids%20can%20do%20this%20project. I would suggest you watch some videos first before you decide whether you want to do it or not, and if you do definitely do it outside (unless you really want to have to clean your carpets).
 
This is the link to the video of the volcano in the PowerPoint https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/mar/25/iceland-volcano-eruption. If you want to know how to pronounce the name of the volcano (it has defeated me so far), this Icelander will show you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSo_ND41-6g&feature=youtu.be. As usual with videos on YouTube, please watch them before your child does and then watch it together with them in case - after having been uploaded by the creator, and after my sharing of the link - they have been edited in some way, it contains inappropriate adverts or if it goes onto play or recommend inappropriate videos afterwards.
 
 
There was a bit of a false alarm last week with the due date coming on the 8th and then subsequently passing by with no new arrival. As a result, Mrs W is still awaiting the arrival of Mini-W, but we are booked into Cramlington on Monday the 15th. Please forgive me if any email responses don’t come until after Tuesday or Wednesday, or generally aren’t as swift as usual. Rest assured I will still be working to continue to provide remote learning materials for your child and provide feedback, with more work posted in next week’s blog.
 
Once again, thank you for all your help supporting your child and stay safe,
 
Mr W