Written method for multiplication

Judit and Sara had spent some time putting together the ideas that they had learned from previous weeks, to help them with their writing this week. We looked at the theme of powerful settings in stories. The main task was that Judit and Sara could build their description up and create a picture of a place for the reader, using their choice of vocabulary and effectiveness of sentences.

The girls began with reading a modelled idea of a setting and recognising that the writer leaves clues for the reader to help the them figure out the mood and behaviour of the characters in the setting The girls progressed to looking at further examples of settings. They compared stronger and weaker examples of descriptions and then they extracted good sensory vocabulary from a short excerpt of writing, with this technique the girls spotted how the writer builds their writing up using sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste words and phrases. The reader gains a greater feeling of being inside the story with the character(s) with the use of this vocabulary.

In the last part of the week Judit and Sara planned the key sentences that their paragraphs needed and the catchy vocabulary as well as the sensory words that they wanted to incorporate into their own setting descriptions. Sara focused on writing about a dark house which was lit by a grand fire place and Judit took her inspiration from the story ‘Charlie and the Chocolate factory’, she created a fantastical world with many sweets and chocolates. We looked closely at some of our weaker paragraphs to check if we could add strength to the writing and give the reader more useful imagery.

In their maths this week, Judit and Sara had looked at a written method for multiplication which bears a link to the grid method which they practiced with last week and this method feeds into the more traditional written multiplication method. With this style of multiplying, the girls could recognise the properties and values of the number digits (like with the grid method) but the system is set out in the traditional multiplication column style. Sara grew in confidence in recognising multiplying of amounts in tens and hundreds. Judit would like to stick to the more traditional method of multiplying but she appreciated that this system helps people know that they are multiplying by 100s, 10s or ones. I got to work with Jordi and Sergi in matching numbers to their amounts, we are constantly practicing to count forwards to ten. Sergi is now managing to know the number order for his numbers up to eight. He impresses us with his clever counting.

In their English work Jordi practiced the sounds that he had learned from last week when he read the book ‘Nat’s cat’ he is beginning to register the words that contain ‘at’. We started to read the story ‘Tin man Tim.’ Jordi had a go at segmenting the sounds in the words and blending them to read.