Smileystar

I have year 4 (31 children - 11 girls and 20 boys), the levels for my class from their Year 3 SATs: 4 3As (3 girls 1 boy) 5 3Bs (1 girl 4 boys) 13 3Cs (5 girls 8 boys) 3 2As (1 girl 2 boys) 4 2Bs (1 girl 3 boys) 2 2Cs (2 boys)

In the first week back we only have 4 days and I know from experiece that at the beginning of term, everything takes a whole lot longer than it should, so I've planned some basic skills activities for across the week. Hopefully, it will help me to assess what they can do and what I need to focus on in more detail. They have a bad reputation as a class with several behavioural issues and for being very immature. I have one boy with a speech and language statement who has a full time SSA and another who has just received 5 hours ESAP (sp?) funded support for Literacy. These are the activities that I am planning on doing: 1. Talk about their holidays trying out Big it Up - then a written version used for initial assessment and target setting (I'm thinking about putting it in an envelope for them to open later in the year from an idea from TES) 2. Medium and High Frequency Word spelling tests 3. Looking at parts of sentences and idenitfying parts of speech - play consequences game from Jumpstart. 4. Look at examples of a variet of different types of writing and idenitfying what makes it 'good writing'. 5. Introducing VCOP and play adjective and adverb games 6. Kung Fu Punctuation 7. Connectives games.

My first topic will be Creating Images (Poetry 1) not sure exactly what I'm doing yet but a lot will depend on how the first week goes.

So the first week is over and the week hasn't gone too badly. I need to do a lot of speaking and listening work and even more basic skills. They had no idea about parts of speech, they're ok on adjectives now but need a lot more work on adverbs and powerful verbs etc. Their writing was not too bad but very basic, not detail or expansion anywhere in their writing, despite managing to include this in discussions. So I'm off to find some speaing and listening stuff on amazon - am thinking Pie Corbet.