School Days linky – Robinson Crusoe and spellings
Wow, we’re into half term already. I know many of you aren’t yet, so the #SchoolDays linky will be open for a couple of weeks to capture everyone’s ends of term. Hopefully those who’re off this week have some nice things planned.
This last week of term whizzed by and I think N was surprised by it as well.
VIP again
Yes, N was VIP again. I think it might have been due to good focused work, but N wasn’t sure.
Crocodiles and man
I love that N’s class are doing dinosaurs and crocodiles. N’s been talking about evolution and how there were crocodiles who walked on 2 legs in the time of the dinosaurs. He’s obsessed with fossils (looks like we’ll have to find a fossil beach on our half term break to visit), and also talked about man in the old days.
It’s great that he’s still enthralled by it, and is remembering what they’ve learnt. When I mentioned how good it was to have school to learn all these new things, he nodded yes and carried on talking. So far, school is a good thing in his eyes. Long may hat continue.
Spellings
N was sick the previous week when the spellings were handed out. Every day I would then forget to ask the teacher to let him have them. It got to the Friday and I was panicking because he’d only have the weekend to learn them before their test on Monday. So I texted round other mums – it turned out his best friend who’s in the higher year 1 class has harder/more spellings, so then found one of the year 1s in N’s class and got the spellings of them. N was very blase about learning them. The whole of last term he was obsessive about doing his spellings daily, but now he’s less bothered. This set he only copied and covered twice so I wasn’t hopeful about him doing as well as usual.
When it came to Monday, he told the teachers he’d not had the words until the weekend so he was allowed to do their practice of look, over and write. Hopefully the next set he’ll do better on – although his current application to learning them is somewhat distracted.
Reading books
I’ve mentioned before about some of the really dull books N gets for reading books. This week hasn’t been a great set of books coming home. He gets books 3 times a week. Monday’s book was one he’d read before, as was the one on Wednesday. And then the books for the holidays, 2 out of 3 he’d had before. It’s annoying given that they get written in his reading journal. N had been going up to the other classroom to get his books, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. But when he goes and chooses his own from his level at least we get books that he hasn’t read before.
So there have been several days where he’s refused to read. Thankfully the one book that’s new to him this holiday, is fairly long and has a few stories and poetry in it. I’m hoping he’ll be happier reading that one.
Open morning
Each end of term, parents can go in to look at the children’s books. N was very excited that I was going in.
‘Mummy, I’m now on book 3 for maths’. I joked that maybe it was because he has big writing, but looking at his books, it turned out that he’s missed out a few pages instead. Oops.
It’s so nice to be able to see his work. His writing has really come on – I can now pretty much read what he’s writing. And with the extra writing he’s been doing this week out of school (dinosaurs and crocodiles), he’s obviously getting a lot more confident with what he can do.
Robinson Crusoe
I’m not sure how it came about but N started telling me about a film they’d been watching about a man on a desert island who lived there for a year. There weren’t any animals for him to eat, so he ate coconuts and berries. And he had a long beard.
I gathered it must have been Robinson Crusoe, but I couldn’t work out which subject they were watching it in. It seems it was maths and I presume counting tallies (and maybe pictograms). When I was at school we had the occasion tv learning episodes, but otherwise it was all learning from books and not much else. Education is so different nowadays.