Mathematics.
Another skill we touched on was number patterns and discerning if they are going up or down and by how much. We did a lot of skip counting off number on Friday (i.e. not starting from 0, starting from 7 by 2's or 3's) and I would recommend practicing this with your child as it really stretches their thinking as they have not learned it by rote or everyday occurrence. For example:
Counting in 2's (the most common way)
- 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 etc
Counting in 2's (off number)
- 7, 9 ,11, 13 ,15, 17, 19 etc.
Try it at home both counting up and down. It's quite hard! For an extra challenge, try counting in 3's.
Writing.
Common style (they use this in America.)
I went to Hungary, Greece, Egypt, and Spain.
Oxford style (used in the British Commonwealth)
I went to Hungary, Greece, Egypt and Spain.
This has been debated vigorously among the staff at UST and it is probably best to assume that both ways are correct. I have told the students that if they do either in their writing, I will not mark them wrong.
In the second half of writing we continued our work with acrostic poems and I am pleased to report that some of the poems produced have been of a very high quality. We also looked at some writing strategies when warming up for writing and have started the writing challenge: Being able to write non stop for 5 minutes about anything at all! This is a warm up activity for most writers to help the ideas start to form. I hope to utilise this as a test bed for poetry topics next week.