Literacy and Numeracy Focus - home learning opportunities

Hi everyone,

Take a look at the concepts, skills and strategies that we are exploring in Literacy and Numeracy below and links to home learning opportunities.

LITERACY

We have begun exploring Poetry as a creative way to express ideas and describe our observations of the world, starting with Diamante poems. Through diamante poems, we are able to focus on learning Nouns, Verbs and Descriptive words. Throughout the week, the children are going to be collecting words that fit into these three categories. We will then explore which descriptive words add more detail to nouns (adjectives) and which add more detail to verbs (adverbs).

By exploring grammar in this way, the children will develop a bank of new vocabulary and learn how to use it to enhance sentences. With practise, they will be able to transfer this skill to their own writing.

At home, you can explore how to enhance basic sentences to make them more interesting with this interactive resource:

http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/media/31977/wonderful-words-creative-stories-pets


NUMERACY

Inquiry Focus: 
Our Inquiry projects have involved designing rovers, nest box installation designs and making model of parts of the body. The children have needed to use a variety of shapes in their designs and we have assessed that they are not very familiar with the names and features of 2D and 3D shapes. We have begun an investigation into shape and the children are enjoying learning to name, describe, draw and design with shapes and find the total number of sides in their designs by using their multiplicative strategies.

Targets:
Throughout term 2 and 3 we have been developing our understanding of equal groups and arrays to represent multiplication problems. The children are being targeted in the strategies they require to solve these problems, ranging from additive strategies (skip counting), to multiplicative strategies (multiplication). We are now applying these understandings and strategies to solve AREA. We are using grid paper to draw pictures and designs and we are finding the area of ours and others' designs.

These ideas may be extended for some children to investigating surface area and volume of 3 dimensional shapes using multiplicative strategies.

Please visit the tab at the top of our blog called "mathematics: great digital links" and find a variety of interactive resources and games to further explore shape, area and perimeter.

Place Value:
Place value is a constant feature of our mathematics teaching as it underpins all conceptual understandings in number. Place value tells us that the 4 in 45 represents 4 tens. Knowing the strategy of adding in place value parts helps us add 2-digit numbers without counting by ones i.e. 32 +56 is  2ones+6 ones=8 ones and 5 tens+3 tens=8 tens, which is 86. When the ones add to more than 10, we must rename 10 ones for 1 ten.

WISHBALL is a fantastic game that allows children to practise their place value understanding at their stage of conceptual development.

Please visit this website to choose a level that suits your child (try wishball with TENS before moving on to hundreds or thousands or beyond).

http://splash.abc.net.au/home#!/resources/wishball