Year 1 & 2 - Tuesday 12th May

Good morning everybody and a warm welcome to Tuesday's blog! Please don't forget that you can get in touch with us at the email below. We encourage you to reach out if you have any questions, big or small, or if you just want to share what you have been doing at home.

ks1@downhallprimary.com

Remember - all the resources below are also on our classes webpage.

English - Seaside Animal Report

Earlier in our project "At The Seaside," we wrote a report that was about aspects of the seaside by making notes from our "Seashore" text. Look at our class page near the bottom for a slideshow of this text if you missed it. One of the key skills in Primary Education is practising the same skill in different ways. Over the next 2 days, we will be using these information tables to create simple reports about animals that live on the coast.

Year 1












Year 2

This contains the same living things but some extended information:












So the first thing is to look and talk about these, thinking about the information that they show. Looking at the relationship between what an animal eats (Food) and what tries to eat them (Predators) is important as is an understanding of the fact that size and lifespans are averages.

From here you can begin writing sentences, putting these facts into a full sentence. Writing "Starfish 20cm 5 years" does not make sense as a full sentence. Use these sentence scaffolds as support:



So I would get:

A starfish can grow to 20cm wide and can live for 5 years. It lives on the seashore and eats sea lettuce, limpets and mussels. Its predators are lobsters and it is a type of echinoderm.

We'll look at ways to add jingles and bells to our sentences tomorrow!

Maths - Creating Graphs

Last week, we asked you to start collecting data for the temperature in Rayleigh. I did this a couple of weeks ago, so you can always use my data if you missed a couple of days. We are going to turn this into a block graph today:

Monday - 16°C Tuesday - 8°C Wednesday - 13°C Thursday - 12°C Friday - 10°C Saturday - 16°C Sunday - 15°C
We need a blank graph shell to help us, although you could make one yourself if you draw carefully: First, I need the numbers up the side. Now our range is from 8-16 and we only have 10 spaces! So we can do 2 things:

1. (Easier) we use a zigzag line (called a break) to jump from 0 to 8 and then number as normal.
2. (Trickier) we go up in 2's.

(It'll be clearer on my examples further down).

Also note that the numbers get "skewered" by the lines. This is particularly important if you are choosing option 2 above.

Secondly, we need the days of the week along the bottom. These live in the boxes. If you can't fit them in, just use initials - M, T, W, etc.

Now we can start adding the data in. Here's my 2 versions to match the above options. It is important to note that we always, always, always "model" everything that the children do in class. I use the caveat that it is only fair and I never ask the children to do anything that I wouldn't do myself. 





Of course, I haven't finished mine. I always tell the children that they haven't come to school to watch me do their work! Notice on the 2's labelled graph, Wednesday's 13 sits in between 12 and 14. This is why "skewering" the numbers is important.

A final point to notice is the labelling of the axis (temperature and day) and a title. I used London as my data point, yours will be Rayleigh. Of course, if you have been tracking weather in more exotic locales, you could make your graph for there.

We will talk reading and interpreting graphs tomorrow.

Happy data crunching!
Key Stage 1 Team