To parents of Room 8,

Just to let you know that over the next couple of weeks Room 8 are going to be looking at telling the time. As this is an important life skill which the children will need, any help that you can give the children would be gratefully received. If they have a watch (preferably analogue but it doesn’t matter), please encourage them to wear it and ask them regularly at home what the time is etc.

Below are some areas that we will look in regards to telling the time. Next to each area are typical questions the children would be expected to know of or work out. If possible, please discuss or ask similar questions to help them.

• Time duration’s and calculating them – How many minutes in an hour, days in the year, weeks in the year, which months have 30 or 31 days? How many minutes in 3 hours? etc
• Reading analogue clocks– We read the minute hand first and the hour hand second, splitting the clock into past and to, talking about the key quarters- o’clock, half past, quarter past and quarter to.
• We will look at reading clocks to the nearest 5 minutes and hopefully to the nearest minute.
• Converting analogue time to digital time – Quarter past 4 = 04:15
• Changing 12 hours to 24 hours in digital – 04:15 = 16:15
• Calculating how long something lasts for– e.g. I sat down to do my homework at 20 minutes past 3, it took me 40 minutes.At what time did I finish my homework? etc
• Applying these skills of time to read and understand timetables.

On behalf of myself and the school, I would just like to say, thank you so much for any help you can offer in this area.

Regards,

Mrs Davies.

We have been very lucky in Room 8 today as we have had some special visitors come into school to help explain the meaning behind Chinese New Year.

We have learnt all about the story of Chinese New Year and which animals are involved in this special occasion. This year, it’s the year of the Pig.

We made paper lanterns which are used in China to scare off the terrible beast which roams around the country on New Year’s Eve. Some of us even dressed as a dragon!

As part of our new topic, which is geography based, we have spent the last two weeks looking at maps of the world and the United Kingdom. Today, we have tried to locate key cities and towns of the U.K. Afterwards, some of us went that little step further and correctly identified the grid references for where each city was located.

It’s so important that children spend time looking at maps whether they are of the world or of the U.K to help them understand basic locations. These can be done through looking globes, an atlas, car maps even jigsaws!

Due to a photocopier malfunction, I haven’t been able to print off the homework or spellings for next week.

I promised the children that I wouldn’t set homework this week as it wouldn’t be fair, however, I will set spellings. Please find below next week’s spellings and as soon as the photocopier is up and running I will print out a hard copy.

Regards,

Mrs Davies

Rule: soft g, ge or dge and 3/4 common exception words

Group 1

• edge
• misjudge
• villagers
• dislodged
• manager
• voyage
• dodge
• acknowledge
• advantage
• imagine
• important
• island

Group 2

• edge
• ledge
• bridge
• fridge
• dodge
• lodge
• lodger
• huge
• badge
• imagine
• important
• island

Group 3

‘ow’ words

• window
• borrow
• tomorrow
• row
• know
• known
• bow
• were
• where
• with

Over the last week, Room 8 have been introduced to some new strategies in maths to help them with their developing addition and subtraction skills.  I thought I would write a quick post explaining them through some examples, not only to help with your child’s learning at home but to keep you informed of how we do calculations in Year 3.

Addition

This is the expanded method where we introduce the children to adding in columns. At the moment, the children still need to keep learning the value of each digit therefore we are practising adding our ‘ones’ first, followed by our ‘tens’.

Subtraction

Below is the expanded method for subtraction. The first example is a very basic, easy example whereby the children simply separate out their number into its value and subtract. We emphasis the importance of subtracting from the ones column first.

Below is the slightly more challenging subtraction example because we need to ‘steal’ from its neighbour if the top digit can’t be subtracted.

I hope everyone from Room 8 has had a relaxing half term and a not so stressful first week back, ready for the Christmas push! Just a quick message asking for help from any parents. As part of our ‘healthy me’ topic in PSHE, I would love the children to investigate what the food labels actually mean on daily household foods.

In order to do this investigation, I would really appreciate it if you could have a rummage in your recycling boxes  for…

• 500g cereal boxes (Rice Krispies, Coco Pops, Cheerios etc)
• Any 2l fizzy drinks bottles
• Any 500ml fizzy drinks bottles
• Snack wrappers
• Chocolate bar wrappers (family size or those big bags of M&M’s, malteasers etc)

All food needs a bar code on so I can scan it. Thank you for your co-operation.

Regards,

Mrs Davies (aka Miss Evans!)

Some eagle eyed children in Room 8 might have spotted a small mistake on the math’s homework this week. This will not be for all of the children but if your homework involved using digit cards to make as many numbers as possible, this could be you!

The question was asking you to make a 3 digit number less than 100. My apologies, can you make the small adjustment to 200. Hopefully, that should work.

I look forward to seeing your answers by Thursday.

Regards,

Miss Evans

I just wanted to show all the parents of Room 8 the fabulous art work the children have produced with Mr Farlow. The children have been looking into all things Viking’s, and using both their new found knowledge of this era and their skills of oil pastels to blend,  have created these fabulous pieces.

Here are just some of them: