Happy and healthy learning at home

Tuesday 20 February 2018

Thank you to everyone who attended parent-teacher meetings recently. It’s great to see that almost all parents / carers took the time to hear how their child is progressing and to find out more about how to support their child at home.

Talking of support at home, the Learn More section of our website has lots of different top tips. Go to Help Your Child.

Of course, there are loads of games and activities online, too. Perhaps there’s too much – going on-line can be overwhelming. Here are two sites we suggest – useful for children of any age.

We really like IXL. Here, you’ll find pages for every year group, with activities to practise English and Maths skills. There are usually well over 100 pages for each subject. This could be overwhelming, but each subject is then broken down into helpful sub-categories. (For example, in Year 6 Maths, these are sections on Numbers and Comparing, Place Value, Addition, Understanding Fractions etc.)

This site is especially good to explain – and avoid – a common mistake in writing: ‘run-on’ sentences, which we call ’squashed’ sentences in school. These are two (or more) sentences that are squashed together. For example:

In half-term, I went to the cinema I saw Early Man it was great!

In this example, there are actually three ‘chunks’ (clauses) that all make sense and need to be split up (using a full stop or a dash or a semi-colon):

In half-term, I went to the cinema. I saw Early Man – it was great!

The sentences could also be joined with a conjunction:

In the half-term, I went to the cinema and I saw Early Man – it was great!

On IXL, there’s at least one activity to practise this in Y3-Y6 – start with the Year 3 one, even if your child is older.

The BBC Bitesize website has recently been updated – it’s probably best you avoid the old archived one, so use this link. The site contains pages on most National Curriculum subjects and it’s definitely worth checking it out.

Speak with us about other ways to support your child at home.