WEEKLY ENGLISH HOME LEARNING 08/05/2020 Every week we will send out this sheet for your child’s reading and writing home learning. There are daily

activities to keep you practising your secretarial skills and longer writing tasks that you can complete at any

point during the week. Remember the best writers are readers, so make sure you are keeping up your

reading too. Continued practise of secretarial skills is key and don’t forget that talking is also a great way to

practise your ideas for writing.

From now on, home learning will be slightly simplified and include Basic Learning and Extension Activities.

We will also include success criteria, which we often use in class to illustrate to the children the basic

elements of that particular genre of writing. If you are able to give feedback to your child, this will be a very

useful starting point.

Basic Learning in Reading means:

spending at least half an hour a day on quality, concentrated reading time

discuss any reading your child has completed Extension Activities in Reading mean: Completing a reading comprehension activity set by the teacher where the key skills of:

understanding the characters and why they do or say something

retrieving key information

predicting what might happen next

summarising what has happened already

inferring Written answers are not necessary, they could be discussed with a parent, sibling or friend. Basic Learning in Writing means: Do some writing every day, whether it’s a shopping list, a book review, a get well card to grandparent, a letter to Auntie Jean, a diary entry or an adventure story… Make sure you include:

correct use of full stops and capital letters

correct spelling – your teacher gives you your weekly spellings for your year group

neat and legible handwriting

Extension Activities in Writing mean all of the above plus, making sure you include (where appropriate):

correct use of apostrophes for possession and contraction

correct sentence structure for simple, compound and complex sentences

properly demarcated paragraphs

an introduction and a conclusion

neat and legible handwriting

READING

This is the image I showed you last week, but this time it includes the text as

well. You had to think about the man’s character based on the clues in the

image. Below is a copy of the next page of the book. Look closely at the

images of the man and have a chat with someone at home or write

down what further clues there are in the image about his character. What

do his facial expressions in this image suggest about how he is feeling? How

do you think he feels about the work he is doing?

Where is the alliteration in the text?

How would you describe the type of work he does and how he lives?

In the resources for this week there is a body template, use this (or just draw one yourself in your book) to capture

words or phrases to describe the old man. On the inside you can describe his feelings and personality and on the

outside describe his appearance. You can add to this as we read more of the story so don’t worry about adding too

much now. If you have access to a thesaurus, use it to look up synonyms (a word that means the same) for words

such as ‘sad’. If you want you could also add thought or speech bubbles and have a go at writing what he might be

thinking or saying.

SPELLING PRACTISE Spelling lists can be found in each year group’s additional resources section. Keep going back to these, once you know all your own, look at the year above and challenge yourself to learn those too. This week we are going to focus on words with the suffix ‘ous’. A suffix is a letter or group of letters that can be added to a word to change its meaning. Adding the suffix –ous turns a noun into an adjective. It means ‘full of’. Try to include some words with the ‘ous’ suffix in your writing this week. Remember these rules:

SPELLINGS

adventurous furious dangerous humorous mysterious curious anxious courageous tremendous glorious Try the activities below to help you remember your spellings:

GRAMMAR PRACTISE Someone asked me this week what the difference between a metaphor and a simile is. It is a bit confusing so I thought it would be worth going over this again because using similes and metaphors in our writing helps make it more descriptive and interesting. It is a creative way of comparing things. Try using some similes or metaphors in your reading activity above or your writing activity below.

Practise Activity 1 - check your understanding. Take the following five overused similes and on some paper, rewrite them finding more original objects and ideas for comparison. For example, as strong as the worldwide sun.

Activity 2 - write about your home using similes and metaphors. Compare it to objects and ask yourself what your home would be if it were an animal, a plant, a vehicle, a time of year or a type of food. The more original your metaphor or simile, the better. For example, my house squats in the street like a predator waiting to ambush its prey. The walls are November, grey and desolate. Activity 3 – sort the similes and metaphors

WRITING IDEAS SUCCESS CRITERIA

This week our focus is advert writing. Given that you will already have done some research on Sweden and we have

already created adverts in class for our ‘Elixir of Life’ drinks at the beginning of the year and more recently for

Iceland, it is a good opportunity to go over this again. Remember when you were writing your Iceland advert script

you had to persuade people to visit Iceland? This time you have to create an advert on paper to persuade people to

visit Sweden.

To write a successful advert you need to include most of the following:

a catchy slogan or catch phrase, using alliteration, similes, metaphors or rhyming

a hook or a promise, e.g. it will be the experience of a lifetime

superlatives/exaggeration, e.g. good = best

rhetorical questions, e.g. Wouldn’t you love to ……

bossy/imperative verbs and strong adverbs

positive adjectives and feelings

important information about the place and words that stand out

eye-catching, memorable pictures

BASIC

Take a look at this example advert trying to persuade people to visit an Alien Park!

Now structure and imitate the language used in this to write your own advert to persuade people to visit Sweden.

You could try to include the important message about how sustainable Sweden is, that is an important selling point.

What do you want to say about Sweden? Use the planner below to plan your ideas. You can use some of the ideas

above but try to come up with sentences and ideas of your own as well, think back to the persuasive language we

used for our Iceland scripts. The word mat we used to help us for that is in the resources for this week. There is also

an example of a leaflet for Budapest in the resources and an advert for Italy below – we can only dream about that

right now!

Underlying structure Jot down your ideas in not form

Ask about 3 questions to the reader to draw them in. e.g. Do you ……..

Tell the reader what there is to do in Sweden using bossy verbs. Name 3 things. e.g. Don’t miss the ….

Add on more detail with about 3 more sentences.

Tell them where it is.

End with a catchy slogan, using alliteration, a simile or metaphor e.g. See you there!

EXTENSION

Let’s publish!

How about turning your advert into a leaflet that you can distribute to people? You can make one using the

instructions below. You can add pictures, maps of where things are, quotes from visitors and whatever else you’d

like to make your leaflet colourful and exciting.