Moderate and Hard
Day One
Before we begin our writing challenges this week, we will practice the letter family that children often find the most difficult. Click HERE for a lesson on how to form the one-armed robots!
Day Two
Today's English is linked to the Science home learning for this week. Below you will find a copy of the first science activity in the science section of the Year One home learning for Week 13. Challenge one (Observe) will be our English lesson for today. Once you have done the activity, choose the mini-beast which most fascinates you ready for tomorrow's lesson. If you are unsure of what your bug is called, HERE is a great website for identifying them. Make sure you wash your hands after looking for bugs and remember not to touch them directly. There are poisonous caterpillars about at this time of year.
Day Three
Today, find out more about your chosen mini-beast. HERE is a fantastic website to read about them or you could watch videos on YouTube. Remember that you can use the online library at https://balksburyjun-hantssls.wheelers.co/
Username: firstname.lastname (E.g. john.smith)
Password: ebooks
You can browse the collection or search for a specific book title, author or publisher and then borrow the book; it will be assigned to your child for 2 weeks.
Day Four
Most non-fiction texts have pictures to help show the information which is written. In today and tomorrow's lessons, we will use the writing frame below. Today, write the title of your non-fiction text on the top line. This could simply be the type of mini-beast you are writing about or you could think of something catchy. Alliteration works well for this. Once you have written your title, take time to draw your mini-beast in the circle in the centre of the page. HERE is a lovely guide for drawing lots of different kinds of mini-beast. In this lesson, it would be helpful to give your child an audience for their writing. This could be a relative or friend who might have a particular interest in their mini-beast! If they do not want to part with their writing, you could tell them you will send a photo of it to this person.
Day Five
You could spend some time practising writing one-armed robot letters before starting to write today. You will need the writing frame from yesterday. Ask your child to write one sentence in the space underneath each line. They may find it easier if you draw lines for them to write on in pencil or they may be happier writing in the blank space. Remind them that it is important to use a capital letter to begin and a full stop at the end. You could challenge them to add a extra part to their sentence by using 'and' or 'but'.
You may think the order of this is this is odd, but when they have finished writing their sentences under the blue lines, they can then write a subtitle on the blue line. It is often better to do it in this order as very young children are still getting to grips with the purpose of titles and subtitles and when the information is already written down they can see why they need to give it a 'name'. Here is where it is particularly helpful if you are making your non-fiction text for a particular person. Ask your child how that person will know where to find out what the mini-beast eats (for example). Will they need to read all the sentences in order to find that information? Which sentence has that information? Can they give it a 'name' so we can find it easily? They might simply name it 'Diet' or 'Food'. They should be encouraged to use a capital letter for the key words in their titles. You could challenge them further by asking them to write their subtitle as a question, for example: What do earwigs eat?