Dear 3EE parents,
Firstly apologies for any confusion over the cake sale, cakes can be brought in on Wednesday in advance of the sale which will be held on Thursday and Friday next week. Timestables practice is available on Timestables rockstars, https://play.ttrockstars.com/ your child’s username is the first letter of their first name followed by the first three letters of their surname and then the digits 30; everybody’s password is currently set as rockstar3. For example if Jo Smith was in 3EE her username would be jsmi30 and her password would be rockstar3. It is a great way to practise timestables facts either by themselves or against other children. At the moment I have set all children to have the tables 1-11. If you feel your child would benefit from practising fewer times tables and want them to just practice 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s and 10s please let me know and I will set them up in a group for this. If your child does not like the competitive element, even against themselves in garage mode, if you go into the account settings (3 lines in the top right corner) in the ‘my account’ settings you can select (amongst other things), the font size, turn sound effects on and off and more importantly turn the score and clock timer off. Turning off the clock and the total score should make it a more fun way of practising for children who do not enjoy that kind of pressure, equally if children do like competing they can join competitions with other children from round the world in stadium mode. The children’s names/ages/location are never shown even to other class members - that is why they pick a ‘rock name’ and avatar.
Lastly if you are looking for a way to make learning spellings easier and more enjoyable I would recommend looking at the website for 'sir linkalot' https://www.sirlinkalot.org/ and watching the video at the top of the webpage as it has good ideas for how to illustrate and memorise tricky words visually and aurally even if you just want to then take those ideas and apply them to your child’s spellings that week. It is a reasonably expensive app as it is subscription based, at £6.99 a month, although there is a free trial for a week. I think you could enjoy using the ideas for drawing pictures of words within words and singing/chanting spellings from the main video yourself at home for free https://www.sirlinkalot.org/ if you are feeling creative and want to find your own links to remember spellings. We are not buying into this as a school but I thought some of you might find it interesting for ideas on learning spellings.
Many thanks,
Ruthy Trevitt