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School Days – VIP and fractions

Unbelievably soon it seems, but we’re counting down to half term.  This week’s been fairly quiet at school, probably helped by it being SATs week for the year 6s so the rest of the school has probably been shushed quite a lot.

Lack of imagination

I’ve always said I’m not a creative person. At primary school I remember we had to write our own books, and I basically plagiarised much of one of my own favourite stories at home then just added a variation. I really struggled to think up adventures or characters.  I was happy enough writing my own random dream sequences of a story (a pre-teen dreamworld of her friends and the boys they fancied playing starring roles) but creating poetry or stories for school was not my forte. It seems N has a mental block on this too.

Considering we read a lot of different things, and he watches tv shows that cover lots of different stories and adventures around the world, I’m surprised he struggles.  But I’m trying hard to motivate him and give him prompts.  For example, look at what is on the floor, choose one thing and tell me who owns it, what happens to it, where it goes etc.  But he won’t even try, even if I break it down into smaller pieces.  He just pours scorn, says that’s boring, and that he has no imagination.  I need to get him to realise he can do even if it’s just one step at a time.

Hopefully his teachers are giving prompts as well, and setting out ways for him to find his own ideas, rather than just saying ‘do it’.

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VIP

Being VIP again has been a long time coming (and his house team are severely behind compared with the other 3 houses. I can’t understand why they’re so far behind, unless like last year there are far fewer people in the team vs the others.

N’s VIP turned out to be for good writing, so I’m really pleased with that. And it seemed to have been for the writing he’d done on their space/rockets theme this seek. So I hope he’s as pleased as I am for it being for something he was worried about and thought he couldn’t do.

Music

N is always singing away at home. This week there’s been a lot of Lord of the Dance which I presume they were due to sing at the church service.

He’s also been playing on lots of the instruments around the house, the piano, the accordian and ukelele. I don’t think N’s school teacher old school recorder like we used to, so i he wants to do music he’ll have to specifically learn an instrument.  I suggested that come September he might want to learn an instrument and try one out.  So he seems to be debating the guitar. He was concerned that if he learnt an instrument he’d have to be in choir, but I’m not convinced of that link.

So we’ll see whether I’ll be booking him in for music lessons.  Although I’m sure he”ll change his mind  again soon.

Easy poetry

After his non-fiction reading books of last week, this week has been poetry. N flew through a random level 3-4 book sent home. He professed it way to easy, not surprising given he’s been on level 6 since January, then at the end of the week had a more suitable level 5-6 book.  Of course that one’s not been touched, with it being the weekend.  He did so well on the other one, I was hoping he was on a roll, but it looks like we’ll have it come back again because he’s not read it yet.  It’s nice that he was able to get some confidence and back to reading a whole book in a session.

Fractions

This week was all about fractions in maths. For the first time in a while he had homework t00 – but this was rushed through in less than 5 minutes.  I wasn’t sure at first whether N really grasped the written fraction and how it broke down, but a few days afterwards, he was talking about halves in play.  I asked him what the half would be if it was split in half again, and he knew that, as well as  answering correctly when I asked him how a quarter was written.  So his maths is still going pretty well.

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2 Comments

  1. We’ve been doing fractions this week too and we were doing them on the beach with him. He already talks about halves of things but getting him to put down on paper was the tricky bit. I think it’s clicked now!

    1. Yes, ours have talked about halves for most of the year, and N already knew that from us talking at home, but understanding how fractions are built up on paper is hard. N’s not really getting the how to draw lines to split up shapes equally. Semi circles and splitting it into quarters on angles is hard. I think I need to get some wax paper circles and fold them for him to understand!

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