Spellings

Here are your spellings to practise for next week. How did you get on in your test?

If you would like an extra challenge, see if you can think of any other words with the same spelling pattern as these common words - write them down and then check your spellings with an adult - did you follow the pattern correctly? Be sure to spell these words correctly when you write your story.

English

Today's challenge is more of a 'project' for the next few days or weeks really. You have a long Easter break coming up when we will not be setting daily work and so we'd like to give you something that you can work on for a little while in order to make something really special at the end. 

You are going to be authors! Yesterday you should have planned out your 'Big Adventure' for the snail the whale in a new setting. You've thought about the characters and what might happen to them while they are on their adventure and now you can start to write your very own adventure story.

Look again at your story plan from yesterday. Did you remember to include all of the important points? Have you thought about what will happen at the beginning, middle and end of your story? Have you thought of some describing words for your characters and the setting that you have chosen? Did you consider how they might be feeling? 

Think about what would make your story great...

• Capital letters and full stops.
• Clear finger spaces.
• Time connectives like first, then, next or finally to link your ideas.
• Interesting adjectives to describe the new characters, the snail or the whale.
• Could you include a question in your story?
• Think of some WOW words for verbs, for example, choose something more powerful than 'went'.

We've attached a fun 'whale border' page for you to write on if you like, or you could simply write your story in your book. 

Once you've finished writing your story, we'd like you to edit your work...

• Check your spellings in a dictionary, or with a grown up.
• Did you remember full stops and capital letters?
• Is there anywhere else that you could have finished a sentence and started the next one with a time word? Remember, try not to use 'and' more than once in a sentence.
• Could you squeeze in any more adjectives? 
• If you read each sentence back to yourself, does it make sense? (Ask an adult to help you with this one if you are having trouble checking for sense.)
• Have you used the correct verb tense? Does your verb end correctly? Is it -ed or -ing?

Then we'd like you to 'publish' your final piece of work. This might be an opportunity to improve your typing skills, or to re-write the story by hand with all of the corrections and your neatest handwriting. We'd like to see these in a story book format with beautiful illustrations, just like the ones that are in Julia Donaldson's book. You could use SumoPaint or Kleki to create your illustrations if you are working on a PC or just draw them yourself on paper. Hopefully we will end up with 30 wonderful stories for each class, and these will go in the book corner for everyone to share. Take your time and make this your absolute best work little authors, make it a project that you are super proud of. We can't wait to see the finished books!

Maths

Today we will introduce a litre as a standard unit of capacity and volume.

You will need:

• A litre measuring jug OR a container that holds 1 litre (water bottle, bottle of squash etc)

Explain that the standard unit of measure for capacity is called a litre. Show a container measuring a litre, and fill it full to the litre mark. Pour the litre of water between different sizes and shapes of container (taller and narrow as well as shallower and wider) and each time ask children how much water is in the container. If children have an understanding of conservation of measure, they will recognise the volume of a litre remains the same regardless of the container.

*Some children may think that when pouring a litre into a narrower, taller container, the volume of water has increased as it reaches higher in the container. Discuss this with your children.*

Pour the water back into the marked litre container to show children the volume is still a litre. Show children a range of containers, with both greater and smaller capacities than a litre, preferably in a range of shapes and dimensions.

Ask: Which of these containers do you think have a capacity greater than 1 litre?

Children predict whether a range of containers will have capacities greater or less than a litre, justifying their reasoning. E.g:

‘I predict this bowl has a capacity of about two litres because it’s really wide and deep’.

They then measure out a litre using a measuring jug or your chosen 1 litre container and check whether they were correct. E.g:

‘The bowl’s capacity is about three litres. It’s capacity is even greater than I thought!’

Now, sort your containers into three separate groups:

• Less than one litre
• About the same as 1 litre
• More than 1 litre

Take a photo of your learning today!

Children could watch this video to help understand some of the language used over this week. It also helps to recap comparing capacity.