Week 7!

What a busy term we've had so far! Just over the halfway mark and so far we have celebrated Education Week and Cross Country, finished half of our Science Platoons, re-established our Maths Assassins, had a robotics visit and been part of Photography Club. And that's only a sampler!

I'm really pleased to see how settled the class have been for the last few weeks, despite the special events going on around them, and I am looking forward to seeing them continue to work so peacefully for the next five weeks leading up to the end of our first semester as a class.

Just a couple of reminders for this week:
- Our Colonial Day has been shifted to Thursday, 6th June.
- School Photos are on this Thursday, 30th May.
- Winter Sport notes and bus fares are due from Year Six this week.

Spelling
We have started doing some work from 'Fry's First Thousand Words'. If you are interested in working on these at home with your child, I would recommend visiting this website. It provides the flash cards of the words, divides them into lists (we have used different lists in class, but many words from the first three hundred have been used already this year).

Activities you can do in the car with these words:
- Ask your child to spell the word out loud
- Spell it back and forth (you say a letter, your child says a letter, back to you, then them, etc.)
- Ask your child to use it in a sentence
- Ask your child to choose a word, explain the word, and you try to guess what it is (I call this 'I hear with my little ear, a word that means...')
- Ask your child to listen as you spell the word, and tell you what it is.

I will post a link to a document containing the activities students can choose to do in class for spelling so that they can practice at home as well if they like.

Times Tables Practice
Some parents have asked about the multiplication tables and what they can do to support their child learning them.

To start with, the order we recommend learning them in (orally) is 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s, 3s, 4s, 6s, 8s, 7s, 9s, 11s and 12s.

In the classroom this year, children have favoured the Skip Chains, Multiplication Board and Multiplication Slips to practice.

At home, you can:
- Give your child the question and have them answer it ("Five tens are...")
- Give your child the question in reverse and have them try to answer it ("Fifty divided by five is...")
- Give them concrete manipulatives (such as coins, beans, grains of rice, counters, etc.) and ask them to make groups ("Make five groups of ten... how many do you have altogether?")
- Count out a number of the material and ask them to make it into groups of a number ("We have fifty counters. How many groups of ten can you make?")

There are also some amazing number storybooks out there - one of my favourites is the Graeme Base book 'Uno's Garden', which has a lovely message about the fragility of ecosystems as well as some great multiplication practice within its pages!

Looking forward to seeing all your bright faces tomorrow!
- Ang =)