This week's newsletter

UKS2 Newsletter

News Roundup
•This week’s Achiever of the Week goes to.... everyone in 5/6D for their fabulous sign language skills to our Celebration Assembly song ‘Proud’... you should all be very PROUD!
•The children should have brought home details of a planned trip to the theatre during the first week back after Christmas. We will be spending the whole day at the West Yorkshire Playhouse taking part in drama based activities in the morning and then watching a performance of Annie in the afternoon. Payment for the trip must be returned to school by Friday December 16th.

Numeracy: This week the children have been investigating the area of compound shapes as well as circles. We have applied our knowledge of the Grid Method to multiply numbers, including decimals. Next week we will be consolidating our knowledge around this and other calculation methods and then applying all of the skills we have learnt so far this year.
Home learning: Times Table Challenge will be taking place in a few weeks’ time so please continue to practise ALL of your times tables as well as other number facts (e.g. number bonds to 100, 1000, etc). These facts are fundamental to all areas of numeracy. Any additional resources related to specific strategies will be provided for those who wish to practise at home. These resources are NOT compulsory; however we hope that children will choose to use these to help them with their understanding of the units of work.
Try the following website to get you up to speed with your times tables... for a real challenge, why not try this at zero seconds!!!!:
http://www.teachingtables.co.uk/bingo/caller/caller.html

Literacy
This week we have been applying a personal touch to our persuasive writing by planning and drafting a letter to ask a celebrity to come and perform at our Christmas Party. We have also looked at using superlatives within our sentences to really make the celebrity feel like they are ‘the best!’
Home Learning: This week’s spellings are linked to our DT unit starting next week: construction, modification, improvement, prototype, structure, technicalities, dowelling, flexibility, life-sized, variety.

Other areas of the curriculum:
In Topic we have been preparing a speech in order to pitch our invention idea to the Dragons from Dragon’s Den. We have also created a persuasive poster to advertise the same products. They looked A-MA-ZING!!!!
In Music Mrs Brook’s class have been perfecting their performance of Silent Night on the recorders. Miss Gascoigne’s class have been continuing to create mash-ups of popular Christmas songs using Garageband. Miss Darroch’s class have been learning sign language to a popular Christmas carol. Look out for these performances in assembly over the next few weeks.