Study Plan C

Three numbers is not harder than two, as long as you choose a friendly pair to add first. You are allowed to add them in any order.

Worked example. 7 + 8 + 3.

Hunt for a pair that makes ten: 7 and 3 make 10. So do those first: 7 + 3 = 10, then 10 + 8 = 18. Much easier than 7 + 8 = 15 and then 15 + 3.

Worked example. 6 + 9 + 4 → 6 + 4 = 10, then 10 + 9 = 19.

Worked example with no ten pair. 5 + 6 + 2. No pair makes ten, so use a double you already know: 5 + 6 is one more than 5 + 5, so 11, then 11 + 2 = 13.

Oops! Changing the order is fine for adding. It is not fine for subtracting — 9 − 4 is not the same as 4 − 9.

Monday does dimes and nickels with $10 and $5 bills. Wednesday adds pennies and $1 bills. The method is the same both days: start with the largest and count on.

• Dimes go 10, 20, 30, 40… (count by tens)
• Nickels go 5, 10, 15, 20… (count by fives)
• Pennies go up by one

Worked example. 3 dimes and 2 nickels. Dimes first: 10, 20, 30. Then keep going by fives: 35, 40. That is 40¢.

Worked example (Wednesday). 2 dimes, 1 nickel, 3 pennies. 10, 20 … 25 … 26, 27, 28. That is 28¢.

Worked example with bills. Two $10 bills and one $5 bill. 10, 20 … 25. That is $25.

Oops! A nickel is bigger than a dime but worth less. Size does not tell you value — you have to know the coin.

A dozen is 12. A half-dozen is 6.

Half of twelve is six — so half a dozen is half of a dozen. The words do exactly what they say.

Worked example. Two dozen eggs = 12 + 12 = 24.

Worked example. A dozen and a half = 12 + 6 = 18.

Story problem practice. “Mum bought a half-dozen rolls and then 4 more. How many rolls?” Half-dozen is 6, so 6 + 4 = 10 rolls.

A fact family is a set of numbers that make each other. The 9 family is every pair that adds to 9, read forwards and backwards:

9 − 0 = 9 · 9 − 1 = 8 · 9 − 2 = 7 · 9 − 3 = 6 · 9 − 4 = 5 · 9 − 5 = 4 · 9 − 6 = 3 · 9 − 7 = 2 · 9 − 8 = 1 · 9 − 9 = 0

Notice the answers count down as the number you take away counts up. If you know 4 + 5 = 9, you already know 9 − 5 = 4 and 9 − 4 = 5. Every addition fact hands you two subtraction facts for free.

Three stories, one after another, all about the same question: will the people trust God?

1. Amalek (Monday). The Amalekites attack. While Joshua fights, Moses holds his hands up on the hill — and when his arms get tired, Aaron and Hur hold them up for him. The picture to remember: help is part of the story.
2. Sinai (Tuesday). God speaks to all the people from the mountain and gives the Ten Commandments — the ones being memorised this week. This is where Exodus 20 comes from.
3. The Golden Calf (Wednesday). Moses is up the mountain a long time. The people get tired of waiting and make a calf of gold to worship instead. It happens right after they promised to obey — which is exactly why the story is remembered.

The link to Friday: the DVD is about Commandments 1 and 2 — no other gods, and no idols. The Golden Calf is the story of breaking both of them, so Friday ties Wednesday back to the memory verse.

Ten is a lot at once, so split them the way they split themselves. The first four are about God:

1. No other gods
2. No idols
3. Do not misuse God’s name
4. Keep the Sabbath holy

The last six are about other people:

5. Honour your father and mother
6. Do not murder
7. Do not commit adultery
8. Do not steal
9. Do not lie about your neighbour
10. Do not covet

Learn four, then six. Two small jobs beat one big one.

This week’s letters come in pairs on purpose, because each pair shares a starting move.

The portal lists these as capitals — M, N, S, G, J, P, R.

• M and N — same start, same shape, different count. Capital M has three points coming down; N has two. Say the number to yourself as you write it.
• S and G — both begin with the same big curve up and over. S comes back down and finishes on the line; G carries on round and finishes with a little tail to the right.
• J — a tall loop coming down, crossing below the line and swinging left. Capital J has no dot — only the small letter j does.
• P and R — both start with a tall stroke down and back up into a loop at the top. P stops once the loop closes; R keeps going with a leg out to the right.

Before the test on Thursday: write each letter five times slowly rather than twenty times fast. Neatness is the thing being marked, and speed is what breaks it.

Look at the order the teacher set up. It is a proper revision ladder, and it works best if you do not skip a rung:

1. Monday — copy the list. Copying is for noticing. Say each word out loud as you write it.
2. Tuesday — make the bingo card. Writing each word again, in a different order, breaks the habit of only knowing them in list order.
3. Wednesday — practice test. This is the important one. The words you get wrong here are your real homework; the ones you get right need almost no more work.
4. Thursday — book pages and bingo. Play with the hard ones.
5. Friday — the test.

The best five minutes of the week: after Wednesday’s practice test, write out only the words you missed, three times each. That is far more useful than writing the whole list again.

Oops! Reading a spelling list is not studying it. You have to write it with the list covered — otherwise you are only checking that you can recognise the word, not spell it.

Some words start with two letters where you only hear the second one.

• kn — you hear only the n: knot, knee, knife, knock, know.
• gn — you hear only the n: gnat, gnaw, sign, gnome.

The silent letter is there because people used to say it, hundreds of years ago. The spelling stayed after the sound went away.

Oops! This is a spelling trap, not a reading trap. You will read “knot” correctly — the mistake is writing “not” when you mean the knot in a rope.

Two days, two families, and they rhyme with each other:

Wednesday, the ng family: bang · king · long · strung

Thursday, the nk family: bank · wink · honk · trunk

Same four vowels (a, i, o, u), same order, just ng one day and nk the next. Careful: they line up by vowel, not by word. Only bang/bank is the same word with the ending swapped. The posted Thursday words are bank, wink, honk and trunk — so king does not become kink, long does not become lonk, and strung does not become strunk. Learn each family by its own four.

Say them out loud and feel the difference — ng hums and stops; nk has a little click at the end.

Every sentence has two halves:

• the subject — who or what the sentence is about
• the predicate — everything else, which tells what the subject does or is

Worked example. The brown dog barked at the postman.
Ask “who is this about?” → The brown dog is the subject. Everything left over — barked at the postman — is the predicate.

Worked example. My little sister is six years old.
Subject: My little sister. Predicate: is six years old.

The quick test: find the verb. The verb is always inside the predicate, and the predicate starts at the verb and runs to the end.

Oops! The predicate is not just the verb — it is the verb and everything after it. In “The brown dog barked at the postman”, the predicate is “barked at the postman”, not only “barked”.

A root word is the word you start with. A suffix is the ending you add on.

point + ing = pointing · help + ing = helping · kind + ness = kindness

The syllable rule Tuesday names: when you add a suffix, it usually makes its own syllable. Point-ing is two beats. Clap them.

“Sequence” just means the order things happened. The test is almost always: what came first, next, and last?

Signal words to hunt for while you read: first · then · next · after that · later · meanwhile · finally · last · in the end. Also times of day — in the morning, that night — and any dates.

The retell test. Cover the page and tell the story back in four sentences, starting each one with first, next, then, finally. If you get stuck in the middle, that is the bit to re-read.

Oops! A story does not always tell events in the order they happened. If a character remembers something, that memory happened earlier even though you read it later. Ask what order things happened, not what order you read them in.

This is the old tale about a king who puts a large stone in the road and hides to watch. One after another, people come along: they grumble, they complain about whoever left it there, they squeeze past — and nobody moves it. Finally someone — usually a young person carrying a heavy load — stops and rolls it out of the way, and finds a purse of gold underneath with a note saying the reward belongs to whoever moved the stone.

It is a perfect sequence-of-events story, which is presumably why it is the test. Practise by listing the travellers in the order they arrive.

The lesson, if you are asked: complaining about a problem and solving a problem are not the same thing.

“Edit” does not mean copy it out more neatly. It means change things. Go through the draft three times, hunting one thing each time — three easy passes beat one impossible one:

1. Does it make sense? Read it out loud. Anywhere you stumble, a reader will stumble too. Does the story have a beginning, a middle and an end?
2. Better words. Find three boring words and swap them. Went → marched, crept, wandered. Said → whispered, shouted, mumbled. Big → enormous, towering.
3. Capitals, full stops, spelling. Last, because there is no point polishing a sentence you might delete.

Then write the final copy. Writing the neat version first is what makes editing feel impossible — nobody wants to cross out their best handwriting.

Friday builds the scarecrow from the story you wrote. The trick to making them match is to go back through your draft and underline every place you described your scarecrow — the hat, the patched coat, what it was stuffed with, the face.

Build those details. If your story said the scarecrow had one button eye, give it one button eye. That is the part that shows the story and the model are the same project.

Art’s vocabulary word is wax-resist, and the idea is simple: wax and water do not mix.

Draw with oil pastel or crayon first, then brush watercolour over the whole page. The paint soaks into the bare paper but slides straight off the waxy lines — so your drawing shows through the colour without you having to paint carefully around it.

Tip: press hard with the pastel. A faint line leaves gaps where paint can sneak in.

Friday’s STEM target asks you to tell three kinds of energy apart:

• Light energy — what you see with. Travels from the sun.
• Thermal energy — heat. What makes things warmer.
• Sound energy — what you hear. Made by things vibrating.

A solar oven turns the first into the second. That is the whole trick, and it is worth being able to say:

1. Shiny foil reflects sunlight from a wide area and aims it into a small space.
2. Inside, something dark absorbs the light and turns it into heat. (Dark absorbs, light reflects — that is why the inside is black and the outside is silver.)
3. Clear plastic or glass traps the heat: light gets in easily, but heat finds it much harder to get back out.

Oops! The sun is not making the oven hot by being close, and the foil is not making heat. The foil only aims the light; the dark surface is what actually does the converting.

rojo — red · azul — blue · amarillo — yellow · verde — green · negro — black · blanco — white · naranja — orange · morado — purple · rosa — pink · gris — grey · café / marrón — brown

Three that are nearly free because they sound like English: azul (azure), verde (verdant), rosa (rose).