Hello! I hope everyone has had a fine weekend and are ready for this four-day working week. The May Day holiday has changed this year and is this Friday instead of Monday. This coincides with VE Day which is also this Friday and is celebrating 75 years to the day.

One special request this week is can you please try and get yourself onto Glow this week and our Teams page. Videos on how to do this are available on the Bishopmill Primary School YouTube channel. On Wednesday at 10am I will be on our Teams page to catch up with pupils. This will not be a lesson but an opportunity to speak to the pupils about how they are doing. Please join us as I would like to hear from as many as pupils as possible. Pupils will not be able to see each other but will be able to see me.

This week I have sent you (the child) an email on Glow Mail with your UN and PW for Active Heinemann. This is a maths programme that the school subscribes to and can be beneficial to help improve numeracy. It is similar in some ways to Sumdog. To access your emails the child needs to log into glow and search for the ‘mail’ tile. Once you have done this, click on the tile and you will get access to the email(s). Email is also another good way to contact me in future if you would like to.

Numeracy

This week we are suggesting a focus upon creating and reading graphs. There are a variety of graphs that your child could create although tables, bar and line graphs are the ones that we focus upon. Ideally we would have used Enterprise as a meaningful event to create graphs around. Usually pupils wanted to create bar charts to find out information (favourite cake, etc) and graphs to display their weekly profit/loss. This allowed the pupil to see the relevance of the graph and motivate them to create one that was personal to them. It involved the full cycle of creating a survey, gathering the information and then displaying it.

At home you could do graphs on a number of different areas. Some examples are listed below but you/they can suggest other ideas.

• Daily temperature
• The month of family birthdays (3 in Jan, 4 in Feb, etc)
• Height of family/pupil on a monthly basis
• Minutes exercised each day
• Daily money spent on shopping

You could also ask another household what their information is to compare. Can you place all the information on the same graph? Usually with graph work, pupils make mistakes that they notice whilst creating the graph. This is good learning. Making mistakes and realizing what needs to change and why is an excellent learning tool. Please send me any pictures of any graphs.

Literacy

Listening and Talking/Writing

This week our listening and talking and writing activity are related. With it being VE Day this Friday we are suggesting that pupils watch this video below from the BBC education website. As your child watches the small video, they should take notes on information that they find interesting. They could then relay this information to you verbally or they could write a paragraph, summarizing the main points of the video. Note taking is a good life skill and one we recently practiced at the Careers Fayre.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/history-ks2-ve-day/z7xtmfr

Reading

Please continue to read the novel that you had chosen or other outlets to read. Examples of this could be Newsround, magazines, FirstNews (a childs newspaper available in Tesco and other outlets as well as digitally). I have posted some questions/activities below that you could consider doing depending on where you are at with your reading. You are not expected to do them all.

• Write a small review of the book.
• Re-title the book.
• Draw a picture of your favourite scene/character
• Write down the traits of your favourite character
• Explain how you would end the book if you had the choice
• Who was your favourite character and why

Health and Wellbeing

The weather is looking promising this week. Make sure you spend as much time, safely, outside as possible.

With potentially increasing frustrations due to the lockdown your child may become increasingly emotional. Sadness and frustration can become increasingly prominent. Speak to your child about what they can do to return to a happier/calmer feeling when another emotion takes over. Some suggestions could be deep breathing, mindfulness activities, a quiet area, talking, etc but it is best that the child suggests reasonable ideas. We would encourage you to speak to your child about this when they are calm and happy to help support them when other emotions take over.

Miss McNab also has a page on the school website and a Twitter page offering physical activities and challenges if you want to have a go at these. I completed the Ladyhill challenge that is already on.

Topic

Before the lockdown there was consideration on how to celebrate VE days. Much of Great Britain was going to have a celebration picnic. We are suggesting that this could still happen but in the safety of your garden or house. The weather is looking pretty good for those lucky enough to have a garden. Can the pupil help create the picnic? Lots of other classes are suggesting downloading bunting and decorating a space. Whilst you can search for bunting to colour, children could also create their own out of regular paper. They may want to look at others for inspiration. Other ideas include poetry, relevant songs, dances, traditional games.

Mrs Taylor, our music teacher, also has a page on the school website if you want to see some of the activities she is suggesting.

As always, I am here to help in anyway I can. Please do not hesitate to contact me in whatever suits you best. Enjoy the long weekend!

Kind regards,

Mr K. Stuart