Thursday, 19 February 2009

Fun with plurals

Here's a great site with some games and more information about
plurals. CHECK IT OUT!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/spelling/plurals/pluralrules/index.shtml

Mr Ashcroft

Monday, 16 February 2009

Why the 'easy' multiplication focus?

Soon we'll being coming to the end of our specific focus on statistics and focussing on our 'number knowledge'. When we talk about knowledge we mean things that you just 'know' and don't need to work out. The more we just 'know' the less numbers we need to keep in our head when working out bigger number problems. Our times tables are one of those things we should just know without needing to spend a long time working out.

Sometimes we're so keen to get to the 'big' multiplication facts like the 9x, we leave a few gaps behind us. This showed up when we did some tests in week one. We want to remove these gaps, and in some cases, this means starting at the easy ones and moving on from there.

The order of learning times tables from easy to hard is this:
1, 2, 5, 10, 3, 4, 6, 8, 7, 9

So you can see, if you're focussing on the 3s, you're more than half-way there! In fact, the photo shows that for each times table you learn, the next one has one less to learn.

Mr Ashcroft