In Primary 6 this week Monday started with Media Monday, followed by a Number Talk using doubles and near doubles (250 + 250 followed by 248 + 249) . We saw how much quicker is was to add up to a near double first, then remove the extra RATHER than spending time on a chimney-style sum. Next, we started a new topic in maths – rounding to the nearest 10, 100 and 1,000 and applying this knowledge to word-problems that required several steps of calculation; although the task required concentration we all felt pretty confident that we could move on to the next stage which was to round bigger numbers and decimals.

We continued with our Literacy work, mostly looking at how more complex paragraphs are made by creating COHESION in our writing. We discussed the meaning of cohesion and looked at the cohesive devices used by authors to make a paragraph work well (namely, pronouns, conjunctions and determiners). Synonyms are also used to assist with cohesion in writing and therefore we subsequently completed an exercise to replace common words with interesting synonyms in a passage.

We found out some things about the Victorian Artist and designer William Morris in our topic work.

This week Primary 6 have also started their Primary 2 reading project; we met our Primary 2 buddies and found out about some of the books they like to read.  Next week we’ll create some activities designed to challenge and interest our junior readers!  We strengthened the connection we have with our Primary 2 friends today with our joint language learning when Primary 2 sang us a song in many languages and in return, we taught them the names for the colours in Spanish by playing games we had created with them…a great collaboration!

In 6B our Number Talk today was about how to simplify division.  We found a range of strategies to answer the question 56 divided by 4.  The most efficient was to split the 56 into 40 and 16 and divide each of the parts by 4 separately.  Hard at work P6!