Hello everyone!

I wanted to give you more information about your school closure pack. Children in Sea Lion class respond very well to structure and routine, so the idea is to give you a way of providing that for your children at home.

However, this is obviously a stressful time and the last thing I want to do is add to that. Therefore, please do not feel pressured to stick to the timetable if you are having a stressful day. On these days you and your children could try some mindfulness activities, do some drawing, painting or colouring, read stories together, cook something together, watch a film, do a puzzle, build a fort, get the Lego out or try some pen and paper games (may favourites are Battleships and Draw _____ with your eyes closed!)

For days when you are in the right head-space for learning, here is some advice for how best to use your pack.

Maths  Addition and Subtraction Activity Booklet

This has a great mix of activities. Some use skills we have already looked at in school, but there are also some new skills that children might like to try. My advice would be to revisit skills they already know first and save new material for occasions where you have more time to go through something together in more detail. 

Maths skills to revisit:

-Multiplication

-Addition and subtraction

-Writing numbers in both words and numerals

-Comparing and ordering numbers

-Measuring length, mass and volume.

-Counting in 2s, 5s ,10s, 3's, 4's and 8's

-Division and short multiplication.

New maths skills to try

-Money

--Time

-Picture graphs and bar graphs

-Fractions

-Angles

Writing Tasks Booklet

There are lots of picture prompts to choose from and these can be done in any order (pick something you like!). The idea is for children to get creative whilst also practising their sentence structure skills. More picture prompts can be found on: https://www.onceuponapicture.co.uk/

If you would like these tasks to have a clearer focus, here are some things you could challenge your child to include in their sentences:

Things everyone can include:

- Capital letters for the start of sentences, names of people, places, days of the week, months of the year and the word I

- Finger spaces

- Cursive handwriting 

- Read your work to check for mistakes and can you edit and improve your work?

Small challenges

- Adjectives

- Exclamation marks and question marks

- Coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or)

- Time conjunctions (First, second, next, then, after etc)

Big challenges

- Adverbs

-Adjectives

- Subordinating conjunctions (because, when, if, that)

- Similes and metaphors

- Use a thesaurus to find better vocabulary

Reading Tasks

These are not to support your child’s fluency (how well they read) but intended to support their understanding of a text.

In class we become ‘reading detectives’ to help us answer these kinds of questions. We highlight key words in the question and ‘scan’ the text to find them. Then we read around the word for clues to get the right answer.

If your child would like to challenge themselves further and practice their extended written responses, you could imitate our reading sessions by giving them a sentence to challenge or agree with.

Here is an example:

‘The farmer’s sons weren’t bothered about the treasure.’

I challenge because when they didn’t find any treasure they were upset. One of the son’s said that all the hard work was for nothing. He was annoyed he didn’t find anything.

Spelling and handwriting booklet

The purpose of the spelling booklet and handwriting booklet is to work on their handwriting and letter formation as well focusing on year 3/4 statutory spellings. 

Some helpful hints for supporting children with tricky words are:

- Make some flashcards for speed reading. These can be whipped out at any time during the day and only take a minute to go through. Make it fun!

- Draw a simple picture to go with the word. This will give your child’s memory something to hook onto

- Check out videos on Youtube! There are lots of videos for common exception words and tricky words. 

Topic activities

In each pack there is a home activity sheet for the topic 'Predator'.  Some of the activities include:

•  Learn how to spell the names of some of the weird and wonderful predators of the world – the weirder the better! 
• • Research and record a predator from each of the subgroups: mammals, birds, insects, arachnids, reptiles, fish and plants.

Hopefully this information will help you to get started. Don’t forget to access online games and resources too via DoodleMaths, Times Tables Rockstars, MyMaths and Reading Eggs (all logins are in the packs).

Sending you all lots of love and positivity! 😊

Please email your lovely home learning work because I'd love to see it and post it on our class blog at: contact@keyworth.notts.sch.uk

Take care and I miss you all!

Miss Fowell