Week 16 (06.07.20)

Hello Chestnut and Maple!
 
Thank you once again for sending me your work for last week. If you sent your work on or after Friday I will send your feedback this Monday. An especially big well done though to both Lily and Felicity! Mr Johnson and Mrs Michelle Smith both made a point of telling me about how hard they have been working in their bubbles in school this week and both are this week's Star of the Week for their classes! Well done both!
 
This week is the last blog for the school year and goes through until Wednesday the 15th July. I have therefore added a couple of extra activities to take your child through to this date and changed the Schofield & Sims activity. Because this blog covers more than one week, please feel free, as always, to complete the activities in any order and at the best time which suits you and your child. This also means that the work does not have to be completed by next Monday!
 
The English and maths activities which your child would normally submit are both on Busy Things, so they don't actually have to email them as I will be able to see the work or their results online. 
 
English
Activity 1 (Spellings)
Please may your child practise their final sets of spellings, guided by their sheet in the work pack.
 
Activity 2 (Independent Reading)
Hopefully you have enjoyed the story, and if you haven't finished it, please continue to read the book. There is no time limit set this week, just enjoy the story for what it is and work towards the finish! 
 
Activity 3 (SPaG)
This weeks' blog focuses on humorous poems. For this reason, we are not going to use the SPaG booklet as the grammar rules it concentrates on are specific to this genre of writing. Poetry breaks a lot of the conventions of writing, you’re not writing in sentences for example and you start a new line with a capital letter whether or not it is a proper noun or if end-of-sentence punctuation has been used at the end of the preceding line. Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t use the SPaG booklet, just that I am not going to set work from it.
 
Instead, we are going to look at identifying rhyme schemes in poetry, as whilst children can often identify rhyming words and understand that words which rhyme must end in the same sound but start with a different one (i.e. high rhymes with pie because even though they are spelled differently, they both end in the long /i/ vowel sound and start with different sounds) they can struggle when it comes to rhyming structure. These two videos explain more, the first is about what rhyme is and the second about rhyming structure. There are accompanying games to each. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zjhhvcw/articles/zqjgrdm https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z4mmn39/articles/z83g2nb
 
Then, on the attached worksheet, try and think of two rhyming words for each of the words in the table. Remember, that the end of the word does not have to be spelled the same, as long as it ends in the same sound (e.g. bear and hair) but if the word sounds the same throughout then it doesn’t matter how it’s spelled, it will not rhyme (e.g. bear and bare).
Activity 4 (Reading Comprehension)
Please may your child read and answer the questions to the text about fossils. There is a final reading comprehension in the pack which your child can also complete if they wish. It is about drones and is the only one which is not differentiated.
 
Activity 5 (Independent Writing)
In this final blog, your child is going to write a humorous poem. Inspired by the poem ‘Not Done Your Homework?’ by Josie Whitehead can your child come up with a short three verse poem, each with of four lines, following a structure where the second line of each verse rhymes with the fourth line. The first and third lines do not rhyme. If they want to write more than three verses, this is of course up to them but please may the extra verses follow the same rhyming structure.
 
‘Not Done Your Homework?’ is a poem where the author lists various unbelievable excuses children have told their teacher why they didn’t do their homework.
 
NOT DONE YOUR HOMEWORK?
by Josie Whitehead
 
There are a million, billion reasons
Why their homework’s not been done,
But listed here are some of them
And I think you’ll find them fun:
 
“My baby brother tore it up
And ate it for his tea.”
“Our puppy came and sniffed at it,
Then used it for a wee.”
 
“I left it in the house somewhere,
But where, I had forgotten.
Dad, thinking it was toilet paper,
Used it on his bottom.”
 
“It got mixed with the washing,
Then went through the machine,
But look!  We saved the paper
And it came out really clean!”
 
“I prefer to do my homework
In the cemetery at night - b u t
A ghost came up and scared me
And I dropped it in my fright.”
 
“My psychiatrist told me yesterday
That it’s not good for the brain,
So I quickly tore my homework up
And chucked it down the drain.”
 
The reasons why it’s not been done
Can really be absurd.
Now teacher, where’s your thinking cap?
Get ready with your words!
 
What ludicrous excuses can your child think of for not doing their homework? The more outlandish the better! They only need to come up with three as they only need to write three verses.
 
I have created an assignment in the Busy Things app for you to write your poem. Type your poem in the left hand column and draw a picture to match it in the right hand column. Please note that whilst the second and fourth line of each verse should rhyme, that does not mean that they should rhyme with the second and fourth lines of the other verses. For example, in the poem above, done rhymes with fun in the first verse but does not rhyme with tea and wee in the second verse.
 
To find the assignment, click on ‘Resources’ on the School360 homepage, then ‘Busy Things’, ‘Key Stage 2’, ‘Maple and Chestnut’ and scroll down to the bottom and click on ‘My Assignments’ in the bottom right corner.
 
Maths
Activity 1 (Identify Angles)
By the end of LKS2 children need to be able to identify acute, right and obtuse angles. Acute angles are less than 90o, right angles are exactly 90o and obtuse angles are between 90o and 180o. This week, please may children first make an angle eater. This is done by drawing a circle on a piece of paper then cutting it out. Once the circle is cut out, fold it in half and then in half again, as in the picture below:
 
 
Then, unfold the paper and cut out one quarter of the circle. Because there are 360o in a circle and you have cut out a quarter, this means that you can measure right angles by putting them into the mouth of your angle eater. Your child can feel free to decorate the angle eater in any way they like! If you have any problems making their angle eater, then there is an attached sheet with some templates already drawn on.
 
When your child has finished their angle eater and is confident that acute angles are smaller than a right angle and obtuse angles are larger than a right angle, they can use it to identify the different angles on the below sheet. They should put the angle into the mouth of the angle eater and compare how much of the mouth the angle takes up, using this information they can order the angles from smallest to largest; identifying angles smaller than 90o as acute, exactly 90o as right angles (see if they identify anything different about how the angle of a right angle is marked, hopefully they should see that it is drawn with straight lines rather than being a curve), and greater than 90o as obtuse. The sheets are differentiated, so please just choose the one that your child is most confident with.
Then, using this information can your child identify the internal angles of the four shapes on the interactive worksheet in Busy Things? Finally, we can use our knowledge of angles to categorise the four types of triangle (later on your child will categorise triangles are right-angled isosceles or right-angled scalene, but at the moment we just call them equilateral, isosceles, scalene and right-angle). Whilst the BBC have a video and a quiz that explains it in child-friendly language https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zvmxsbk/articles/zggsfrd, it can be summarised below:
  • Equilateral triangles have three sides of the same length and three acute angles of the same size (they're all 60 degrees, but your child doesn't need to be able to measure them with a protractor until UKS2)
  • Isosceles triangles have two sides of the same length and two angles which are the same, and both of these angles are always acute. The other angle COULD be a right-angle, which is when it becomes a right-angled isosceles triangle, but for now we would just call that type of triangle a right-angle triangle.
  • A scalene triangle's sides are all different lengths and its angles are all different. Again, as with an isosceles triangle, one of these could be a right-angle but, if it is for now we would just call it a right-angle triangle rather than a right-angled scalene triangle.
  • A right-angle triangle is one with a right-angle in it. Its can have two sides of the same length or they could all be different lengths. Similarly, its other two angles could be the same or all three could be different. Please note that an equilateral triangle can NEVER have a right-angle as all three of its angles need to be the same and it's impossible to form a triangle with three sides and three angles of 90 degrees (the interior angles of a triangle must add up to 180).
Once your child has watched the video and had a go at the quiz, there is a final interactive worksheet in Busy Things where they need to sort triangles into their four groups. Any triangle that has a right-angle in it must go into the right-angle triangle box.
 
Activity 2 (Arithmetic)
Please may your child complete the adding and subtracting fractions with the same denominator worksheet in the arithmetic pack. The sheets are differentiated, so please choose the one which your child is confident with. As it’s been a while since we last looked at fractions, please remind your child that the denominator shows the number of parts in the whole and the numerator shows how many parts you actually have. If they think about pizzas, in the fraction 3/8 then a whole pizza would have 8 slices but because the numerator is 3, you only have 3 of the 8. This means that when you add 3/8 to 4/8, because a whole pizza still only has 8 slices the denominator remains the same. However, the number of slices you actually have has increased, the numerator increases so 3/8 + 4/8 = 7/8.
 
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 ‘fifth group’ of three sheets (Week 17, Week 18 and Week 19) which focus on the 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 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. Big Maths sheets for Stages 1 to 6 continue to be available from my Google Drive in the Big Maths folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SxMvlQZho_ZOpXhbzYKcXSmbTAlgDxsf?usp=sharing.
 
Activity 5 (Schofield & Sims)
Rather than work in their Schofield & Sims book, please may your child - as soon as is possible and before Friday - tell me or Miss Moffet which book they have been working in and how they have found it during home learning. Normally we would decide which book a child will have in their next school year based on how easily they could access it independently in class. However, because I haven't been able to do this since March, and we have covered a lot of the curriculum since then, I would rather have feedback directly from your child! I need to submit the order by Friday, so please may they let me know before then.
 
Science
Fossils
This week, children are learning about fossils and the fossilisation process. As usual, the BBC have some fantastic, fun videos to explain everything in child-friendly language: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z9bbkqt/articles/z2ym2p3. There is also a PowerPoint which goes into more detail, some fossilisation process cards which need to be sequenced that covers an animal dying to it becoming a fossil (these are differentiated. The easiest simply needs your child to put the pictures in order, the second needs the pictures to be put in order and the given sentences matched to them, and the hardest needs the pictures to be put in order and your child to come up with their own sentences to describe what is happening at each stage), and some matching cards where dinosaur fossils need to be matched with drawings of different species of dinosaur. There is also some guidance about different types of fossil and how they came to be formed (such as the famous mosquito in fossilised in amber in the original – and still the best – Jurassic Park!).
There is an OPTIONAL second activity which looks at comparing the permeability and durability of different rocks. Whilst this is a proper science investigation and the children will learn a lot about working scientifically, it is entirely optional because it is reliant on having a range of different types of rock at hand. Please do not feel that this needs to be completed, only do it if you or your child would like to and you have the resources available. A lesson plan and guidance is attached.
PSHE @EMAIL
Please may your child design a poster all about them. I would like them to draw themselves and tell me all the things they enjoy doing, all the things they feel they are good at or have become better at, and can they please tell me other information such as what clubs they go to such as gymnastics, choir, scouts, brownies... (these can be clubs in and out of school). Can they also tell me if they have been learning how to play an instrument during lock down or during the year. Again, this may be lessons you have in or out of school. It will be a good reminder for me and a good way for your child to focus on what makes them unique and special, and what makes them, them. They can do this in any way, shape or form they want!
 
Once again, thank you for all your help supporting your child and stay safe,
Mr W