Spelling
SPELLING FOCUS APRIL 2025:
Know your stem words and how adding a prefix or a suffix can change the spelling. Remember family → familiar and comany → accompaniment. The y in both examples changes to an i. Can you think of other examples?
We are 90% successful as a class spelling words from the statutory spelling list for year five and six! Well done year fives at Purleigh 2024-2025! Can we go higher next term??
Increasingly, class five are going to be given an option of an easier or harder word to spell. Excellent is the expected spelling. Excellency is a variation which requires knowledge of the spelling rules for word endings. This will help prepare eventually for the end of year six test which is on unseen rules. Children can anticipate which words are going to come up by naming other words in a word family.
About half the class are segmenting words in class. One of the most useful things which would aid memory is if your child could recall any of the words they are learning and split the spelling into the same three or four letter segments. If your child is not following this approach, it is because they are in the 70%+ pass bracket for spelling all the year five / six words. That is a BIG well done!
Maths homework APRIL 2025
What real-life examples of data can you think of which could be turned into a line graph? Hours of sunshine in a day? Temperature? Try recording the data which changes over time, then turn it into a line graph like the ones we are doing at school.
The website here uses cogs, levers and pulleys to make things work. Have a go. There's maths connected with all that engineering!
Look for symmetry in real life. Could it be a door, window, part of a building? Is the symmetry vertical or horizontal? Record some examples of what you see.
We have started looking at percentages, and making connections to fractions and decimals. See if you can find examples of percentages in every day life - at the supermarket, offers online, labelling on kitchen products. Make a list of a few of them. Can you sort them into two different kinds of groups?
Could you practise looking for and working with decimals up to three decimal places? They are in metres, grams, millilitres. Record where you found them in your homework books. Perhaps you could write some conversions too!
The class are becoming experts at fractions! We can say for example what thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths and elevenths are of a whole. However, recently we were caught out by questions which need to name the whole. For example, three quarters are fifteen. What's the whole? Can you think of other examples and write ten of them in your homework books?
How are the factor trees going? Can you practise the prime number factors? E.g., what is 2x2x11? What is 2x2x2x2x3?
Can you construct a factor tree from the bottom up? Think of the prime factors, put them on a branching tree and see what number you can make at the top. (You may need to explain this to an adult!) What patterns do you notice?
This week, think of a number between 2 and 100. What fractions can you make from that number? For example, the number 35 can be divided into fifths and sevenths; 20 can be divided into halves, quarters, fifths and tenths. What ones can you think of? Can you turn them into number sentences? (Remember what we did in class.)
Try thinking of real-life fractions of amounts. Time is an obvious one to start with. But instead of half or quarter of an hour, how about, 'What's 2 twelfths of an hour, or 6/10ths, or 3/30ths of sixty minutes?' It that's too much of a challenge, start with unit fractions (your child has been taught these!).
Measure the perimeter of something indoors and something outdoors. It is acceptable to estimate. Record your answers and think of a real-life reason why you might need to have done the task.