Y4 REASONING 2008-09

This term we have been producing our own coaching materials for the Y4 Reasoning Group.

We looked first at the idea of CATEGORIES. CLICK HERE for a wide range of games and activities designed to reinforce this concept, as well as acting as tools to develop vocabulary building, spelling and short-term memory.

We also looked at finding the ODD MAN OUT - we considered lists of words, decided what the main category was, and selected the word which didn't fit into that category. CLICK HERE for our ODD MAN OUT test. Some questions have more than one possible answer: can you work out which? I hope to provide the answers along with my comments shortly.

We then moved onto the related ideas of ANTONYMS - words with opposite meanings and SYNONYMS - words with similar meanings. We produced two decks of cards and played two card games with each deck.

* SNAP - we shuffled the deck and turned over the cards one by one. When a player found a word which was an ANTONYM or SYNONYM (depending on which pack we were using) with a previous word he or she shouted the matching word. The first player to match two words correctly won those cards and the winner was the player with most cards at the end.

* PAIRS - we shuffled the deck and laid them out face down on the table. The players took it in turn to turn over two cards. If they made a pair (as above) the player won the cards and had another turn. Again, the winner was the player with the most cards at the end.

CLICK HERE for the cards we used (the first three pages are antonyms, the last three pages synonyms) or work with your child to create your own decks, then play the games we played in class.

The children then took a written test, which you will find HERE. Please feel free to help your children take the test again. I hope to post the correct answers, along with explanations and other comments, shortly.

We then moved onto how we can make words by finding hidden words in sentences, by rearranging letters of words (anagrams). More material of this nature will follow shortly.

We looked for hidden words in sentences HERE. To try to encourage the children's interest I hid the words in sentences relating to the children and their interests and personalities.

We then looked at the idea of ANAGRAMS and worked out some names of animals which had had their letters rearranged. You can find them HERE.

Before returning to the world of words and letters we took a detour into the world of LOGIC and worked through some simple SUDOKUS. You'll find some more SUDOKOS HERE. I hope to produce an interactive guide to solving simple SuDokus shortly.