Classrooms

Class 4

Miss Griffin

Welcome to Class 4

1 year ago
Posted on 30th Mar 2024 by Rebecca Nash

Spelling Letter

Dear Parents and Carers,

Re: Changes to Spelling Practice at Home

I hope this letter finds you well. I am writing to inform you of a change in our approach to spelling practice in Upper Key Stage 2. As part of our continued efforts to enhance students’ spelling skills, we have made the decision to no longer send the ‘Look, Cover, Write, Check’ sheets home.

Our aim is to provide a more focused and systematic approach to spelling practice. Instead, your child will be given a weekly spelling list, along with the relevant spelling rule or pattern to learn and apply in different ways. This approach aligns with the requirements of the 2014 National Curriculum in England, ensuring that our students receive a robust and comprehensive education in spelling.

By providing a spelling list accompanied by a spelling rule, we believe that children will gain a deeper understanding of spelling patterns and develop broader strategies for learning new words. This approach encourages them to apply their knowledge in a broader context, strengthening their spelling proficiency and overall literacy skills.

To support your child’s spelling practice, we recommend the following approaches:

Regular Study: Encourage your child to devote regular time each day to practicing the week’s spelling list. Consistent practice will promote retention and help build a strong foundation in spelling.

Word Games: Engage your child in fun and interactive word games that incorporate the spelling rule. This could include creating wordsearches, playing Scrabble, or engaging in online spelling activities.

Contextual Use: Encourage your child to use the words from the spelling list in their written work. This will help reinforce their understanding of the spelling rule and develop their ability to apply it within a wider context.

Spelling Strategies: Teach your child various spelling strategies, such as encoding, mnemonics, or visual associations, to enhance their spelling skills. These techniques can be especially beneficial for children who may find spelling more challenging.

By adopting these strategies, we believe your child will not only improve their spelling but also develop valuable study skills and a love for language. As always, we encourage you to actively support your child’s spelling practice and provide opportunities for them to apply their learning in everyday situations.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this new approach to spelling practice, please do not hesitate to contact the school office. We are more than happy to provide additional guidance and support.

Thank you for your ongoing support and collaboration in your child’s education. Together, we can foster a strong foundation in spelling and empower our students in their linguistic journey.

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Welcome to Class 4!

Useful information.

Weekly spellings and homework.

Children will receive weekly spellings to learn on a Monday. Please practise these throughout the week, help your child to develop their own list of words based on the same spelling pattern or rule and choose some of their spelling list words to write in sentences.

In addition to their weekly home learning tasks, children are sometimes asked to complete homework tasks that will relate to their thematic work. The tasks set are sometimes to lead into a new area of study, to help reinforce objectives or sometimes to assess how well the child tackles the work independently and away from school. If your child is finding any of the tasks difficult and requires help, please assist them, and send a message via the Seesaw Parent App. Home learning tasks can be brought into school or submitted via your child’s Seesaw account. If home learning tasks are not completed, children will be asked to complete them in school during breaktimes. Further information around homework and expectations will be sent soon.

Reading.

Reading is very important, and children will have a reading book to share at home. We ask that children read their schoolbook at least three times a week. It is very important to hear your child read and to spend time discussing the text in greater detail as they become more proficient readers. This will secure their understanding of more complex texts and develop their ability to read between the lines. As your child moves onto the longer books, they will only need to read these once, but still need to be listened to and to have the opportunity to discuss what they have read in order to develop their full understanding of a text.

Children will also have the opportunity to bring home a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ book from the school library to share at home. Please record this reading and any additional reading completed at home in their journals.

P.E.

Our allocated PE slots are Wednesday and Thursday so please can your child come to school wearing their PE kit and trainers for PE on these days. As a reminder children will need to tie long hair up and remove any stud earrings or provide plasters or tape to cover them.

Our curriculum.

Below is the attached termly curriculum overview. Each term, as a school, we strive to ensure that the curriculum is exciting and engaging for all of our learners. This termly overview is a rigorous learning journey that covers all areas of the National Curriculum.

Newsletters:

Class 4 Newsletter Autumn 1

Class 4 Newsletter Autumn 2

Class 4 Newsletter Spring 1

Websites used in our classroom:

Hit the button- times tables.

Interactive Solar System

NASA- Solar system

Super movers- multiples

Times table games

Class Spellings Open this to see the latest spellings

1 year ago
Posted on 30th Mar 2024 by Rebecca Nash

Spelling Ideas

Ways to make learning spellings more fun.

Ordering letters

Giving children the letters from their chosen spelling words and challenging them to arrange them into the correct order is a great way to help familiarise them with the spellings. Depending on whether they are in lower KS2 or upper KS2, you may wish to only provide the letters contained in the word, or a range of letters the children must pick from. Here are a couple of fun ways to do this:

Provide children with letter tiles and challenge them to order the letters into the correct spelling. Scrabble tiles are great for this or you can use these free downloadable letter tiles.

Give each child a sheet of A4 paper displaying one letter from a particular word. Can the children arrange themselves so that the word is spelled correctly?

Make it memorable!

Many KS2 children find it very helpful to have visual guides or other devices to help them with tricky spellings and homophones, such as this visual guide to the ever-problematic ‘there, they’re, their’:

Another great spelling activity to help make tricky words memorable is to create mnemonics. Some mnemonics take each letter in a word and assign a new word to each letter to make the spelling more memorable. For example:

BECAUSE: Big Elephants Cause Accidents Under Smaller Elephants.

RHYTHM: Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving

Word games

Playing word games is a great KS2 spelling activity that will have them reinforcing words without them even realising they are working!

Boggle: create a 3×3 grid by muddling up the letters from any 9-letter word on a spelling list, such as ‘important’, ‘existence’, ‘guarantee’, ‘vegetable’ or ‘neighbour’. Challenge children to find as many words as they can from the nine letters (using each letter only once per word), with the added challenge of finding the nine-letter word.

https://www.education.com/worksheet-generator/reading/word-search/

Making word searches

Spelling Art