St. Margaret’s C of E Primary School

The Mardens, Ifield, Crawley, West Sussex RH11 0AQ

Telephone 01293 521077 Fax 01293 538326

Headteacher: Mrs Jill Hine B.Ed (Hons), NPQH

Business Manager and PA To Headteacher: Mrs Lynn Laverty

Independent Learners for Life

Wednesday 10th February

Dear parents/carers,

As a school (and particularly in Year 5) we are continuing our drive to improve standards of the children’s work, including their presentation and spellings, to help them to meet the expectations for the end of Year 6. With this in mind, please can you support your child to answer their reading homework question to the best of their ability and learn their spellings each week.

Reading diaries; please support your child to:

  • Write with their neatest, joined handwriting.
  • Write in full sentences with correct grammar, spellings and punctuation, including capital letters. (If you can correct their spellings and practice words they cannot spell, and discuss grammar and punctuation errors with them, that will help immensely.)
  • Include the reading question within their answer.
  • Answer using PEE – make their point, explain their point and use evidence from the text to support their point.

A high-quality answer is far more important than the length of the answer!

Example:

Q9: A character in the Iron Man book that I can describe in detail is Hogarth’s father; he is very trusting, caring and protective of Hogarth and his family. I think this because of his actions in the book - he believed Hogarth immediately when he was told about the Iron Man, he rushed to neighbouring farms to get their help to defend against the Iron Man, and he tried to trap the Iron Man so that he could not hurt his family in the future.

For your information: Q9 = Can you describe a character from the book in detail and show an example of this from the text? Iron Man by Ted Hughes. The question does not need to be written as it is included in the answer.

Spellings: we have covered basic spelling support and rules over the first half of this year within lessons – including sounding out the phonemes (letter sounds), clapping the syllables, revising the long vowel sounds, looking for words within words, root words, prefixes and suffixes. We will now be providing spelling words each week for the children to learn, but more importantly the spelling rules are also listed to support all spelling! Please help your child to learn these words and rules – they will be expected to try to spell these words correctly within their work, rather than take a test each week. Please see the spellings for the next half term on the attached sheet, you only need to learn the spellings for each school week.

As a school we are now including 15-20 minutes of spelling practice every day. The Year 5 classes have been divided into 4 groups and will be taught in these groups at their spelling level. Please feel free to ask your child which group they are in or pop in to ask us after school.

We hope you will enjoy learning with your children, thank you for your continued support.

Yours sincerely,

Mr Yelling & Mrs Turner