Hello everyone,
I hope you had a great weekend! The weather was wonderful. The forecast suggests it will continue for the rest of this week so I have created a number of suggested activities for you to do that you could do outdoors. These, of course, are just suggestions. Please do not feel pressurised into completing these as we know lots of families have other struggles to deal with. Please remember to send pictures of you completing work or any other activity you are doing to me through Twitter or the school email address admin.bishopmillp@moray-edunet.gov.uk
Numeracy and Mathematics
For mental maths pupils can continue to do Sumdog. A new challenge is on Sumdog that pupils can dip in and out of.
Fractions, Percentage and Decimals
We have previously covered fractions, percentages and decimals in class so you can set them a challenge this week. Set your child an imaginary budget. For example £200. Ask your child to look online for clothes for the summer holidays for mum, dad, a friend, etc. You can set a number of rules to make it more of a challenge. For example, three pairs of shorts, two t-shirts, etc. Then tell the pupil that, their soon to arrive, Young Scot card gives them 50%, 20%, 7%, etc (you choose the challenge) discount. This could also be done with fractions if the pupils find this easier and then relate them to the corresponding percentage. There are lots of Youtube videos pupils/parents/carers could use to work our percentages of numbers if you are unsure. Although we have practiced these it doesn’t necessarily mean they are embedded for pupils. Part of the challenge can be finding out how to do it and being independent with their learning. I am of course available to support any issues. The challenge does not have to be related to clothes it could be sports equipment, art supplies, etc. Hopefully something that your child is interested in.
Literacy
Reading
Pupils could continue to read their home novel. Questions that could be asked include;
• How do you think the story will end and why?
• What do you think will happen next and why?
• Describe the book in no more than eight words and later justify why?
• If you had to rename the book, what would you call it and why?
• Favourite character and why?
If you child prefers non-fiction there are child friendly autobiographies available to buy, First News newspaper (available in Tesco) or Newsround available online. Pupils can read these small articles and relay back to you what they are about.
Writing
An interesting writing activity this week. I am trying to use video to improve pupil’s motivation as I can imagine writing can be a challenging activity for some pupils. Good advice is to not get to involved with the first draft of the pupils writing. Let them do it. Once they have completed their writing sit down with them and in fifteen minute chunks to go over the writing and see how you could improve it together.
The activity involves watching the following video on YouTube.
Duke Dumont Feat. A.M.E – Need You (100%)
I love the idea of this video, how he makes everyone else happy apart from himself due to the music.
Ideas to promote writing. Pupils could choose one of the following.
• Children can write in role as the character and write about his day. They can empathise with the character and look at how he feels.
• They could imagine that this happened to them and write a day in their shoes.
• This could be linked to the story of the pied piper and look at using music as a way to hypnotise others.
• They could write a newspaper article about this strange occurrence and interview some of the other people seen in the video.
I would really like to see how we would dance to some of this music if we met somebody with this song coming out of them. Any spelling mistakes can be practiced using the Active Spelling Activities on the Second Level pack that is hyperlinked on our classes page.
Health and Wellbeing
Usually we look at substance misuse this term. A good starting point would be to look at the types of substances that come under the following three criteria’s
Legal substances (some answers – paracetamol, caffeine, etc)
Age dependent substances (alcohol, nicotine, etc)
Illegal substances (cannabis, cocaine, etc)
This can be done as a discussion rather than writing anything. Usually we ask the pupils to initially focus on smoking. We ask them to list the positives and negatives of smoking. Obviously they struggle to find any positives and even contrived positives are grossly outweighed by the negatives. Negatives they could focus on include.
Cost (weekly, yearly and what this could be spent on instead)
Health problems for different parts of your body
Going outside away from people
Health problems for your family
Ingredients in cigarettes
There are good videos on YouTube to support this but I will let you choose the ones you think are suitable for your child.
Can I please take this final opportunity to thank you for any work you are doing with your child or not. Regardless you’re doing a great job. I am not finding it easy with my toddler whilst working. Its normal. Please look after yourselves and remember I am here to help. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any support.
Take care,
Mr O’Neill
