Monday 1st February

Daily News

Pinch! Punch! First of the month.

Phew! Having ticked off January (which always seems like a long month) I am sure that the weeks of home learning will now start to fly by as we head towards half term.

It was really nice to see you on Friday morning. I am looking forward to our next meeting at the end of this week. Remember, if there is something particular you would like to do in the meeting, leave me a suggestion in the blog comments below. [As a reminder, when you post a comment it will not appear until I receive and email and have moderated it.]

Mr Simmons’ Joke of the Day

Maths

After working on the understanding of percentages last week, it is now time to develop your skills in calculating percentages of amounts.

Have a go at these questions:

And submit your answers to your Class Dojo portfolio.

English

This is our final week working with The Highwayman. In fact, we will be doing an extended writing task which will take you the next 5 days. I explain the task in this video:

Sorry – that was quite a long video today. You will probably need to keep coming back to specific parts of the video for the rest of the week so you know what specifically you will be working on each day.

Please submit your writing plan on your ClassDojo portfolio – I will be able to have a quick check and make sure you are on the right track for the work for the rest of the week.

Reading

I would like you to read for at least 30 minutes each day. You can get more ideas and suggestions of reading material from the Reading@Home section above.

Science

We will return to our classification work soon, but I thought we would have more of an investigation based session this week. Have a look at the information on these pages:

Choose one of the activities above to attempt.

Then, inspired by this I would like you to set up your own ice-based scientific investigation. I will give you time later in the week to carry this out, but you may like to start coming up with ideas now.

As an example, it could be to answer the question, “How does changing the amount of salt in a solution affect the time it takes the solution to freeze?” (You could set up different ice cubes with a different amount of salt in each one and measure how long each one takes to freeze – and then melt) or “How does adding fruit to an ice cube affect the time it takes the ice cube to freeze?” or “How does stirring a glass with ice cubes in it affect the speed the ice cubes melt?” or “How does the number of ice cubes in a glass affect the speed that the ice cubes melt?” or any scientific research idea you/your family can come up with – try to word your question in a “How does …….. affect ……?” format.

[Just don’t leave the salted ice cubes in the freezer – they won’t be very nice with your next ice cold Coke!]

The sorts of things to think about will be:

• Come up with a question you would like to investigate
• What is the independent variable (the one thing you are going to change)
• What is the dependent variable (the thing you are going to measure)
• What is the investigation question (e.g. how does changing the independent variable affect the dependent variable?)
• Make a hypothesis – what do you think will happen?
• What are the other fixed variables?
• Run the experiment
• Collect your results
• Present your results
• Was your hypothesis correct?

Family Challenge

Have a go at this challenge. Read the instructions carefully and then see if you can work out where one hole definitely needs to go. As you are doing this challenge, pretend you are Stanley Yelnats!

Stay in Touch

Please stay in touch, letting us know how you are getting on with your learning.