Yr5 Weekly Update – 04/11/16
Central Idea: Media can influence an audience’s thinking and behaviour.
This week the children have been doing personal inquiries into the semiotic codes when viewing different media. So they chose one the codes: gestural, audio, linguistic, spatial, and visual to view. We also had a special visitor Greg Sutcliffe (Mrs Raymond’s brother), who is a Creative Director, in to share information about his job in advertising and some projects that he has worked on. The underlying message was how advertising is the use of creative ideas to change the way people think or feel about a brand.
Also on Friday we had students from KGV in to work with us on using media. All these skills are working towards the children designing their own advertisements to advertise a product of their choice.
Literacy
All classes are working towards developing their understanding of what they are reading. The children’s prior knowledge is being activated before reading a text with us. This is looking at what vocabulary and phrases may be in the text, writing down what they know about the topic they are going to read about, and what questions or wonderings they have around the topic. This gets the children ready and focused to read the book and activates the schemata that helps the children to build on their current understanding to further their learning.
We are still working with the children to add more detail into their writing. This means that they need to think about the audience they are writing for, and what they might need to know so the audience can picture it in their heads.
When reading to your children you could ask them to visualise or picture what has been read in their heads, then you could discuss what words or phrases helped them to make this picture in their head.
Or to talk about something they did over the weekend, but then add the details about this e.g. “I crashed my bike.” sentence turns into: “My front tyre clipped the edge of the stone wall and my wheel started to wobble. I thought to myself “I am going to fall”, it felt as though I was in slow motion. Slowly I was falling down to the ground. I thought to myself “Protect your head” so I put down my hands. Bang, then I hit the concrete.” Etc. This will not only improve your child’s writing but their oral language as well.
Maths
This is our final week on shape and space. Children have been using protractors to measure angles and more work consolidating perimeter and area. The children looked at the artist Piere Mondrian, who painted pictures made up of rectangles. They then recreated their own artworks based on this, using this to work the area and perimeter of the shapes within their work.
Keep delving into the My Maths website as the children also need to keep practicing their understanding about decimals, this is ordering them, writing in expanded forms, writing them as a fraction, and renaming them for maintenance.
Other news
Thank you for booking into the parent conferences. It was lovely to speak with parents on Tuesday at the first of our meetings.
The next parent conference is on Thursday 10th November. Please let us know if you can’t make it as we will be prepared and waiting for you.
Homework
- Twenty minutes daily reading;
- Try some of the online maths activities to reinforce learning in angles, perimeter and area – students have been given their login and passwords for MyMaths.
- To keep looking at the different forms of media and focus on what is the intended message, who is the targeted audience, and what semiotic codes have been used to influence your behaviour or thinking.
