“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”

from Matthew 5:9

John Marshall   06031996

In 10 weeks’ time, we shall celebrate the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus Christ and the start of a new millennium. It may be worth reminding ourselves of Christ’s words in the sermon on the mount. He said:

“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”

The Bill could assist us all in becoming peacemakers, and would make a small contribution to ensuring that the next millennium is a millennium of peace.

Matthew 5

John McDonald 19101999

For Maths do the next exercise from your CMP book.

Continue to read from Robinson Crusoe and give me a 200 word summary of what you have read.

If you find you have time then go on to the next couple of exercises from the pinkish Grammar Book (A Basic Course in English)

Have a good day

We thus returned to our old friend and theme – categorisation.

Anyhow we ended with an adequate summary of the passage in 25 words. Well done

Today we had a good time looking at transformation through translation and rotation. I think you did well here and I look forward to seeing the homework.

We also looked at your Robin Hood work. You continue to show a wonderful talent for writing. You have some good control over the words you use because your awareness of grammatical constructions (particularly in terms of conjunctions) is growing. We shall do some lessons on this later.

We finished off by reading a piece on an alleged “new” Shakespeare play and saw that the article was based on the interesting uncertainties that allow people to hang various conspiracy theories on and around Shakespeare (his vocab was too wide for one man,  his plays show too much culture for a jobbing actor, Marlowe and others routinely collaborated in their work etc.) I would like you to summarise this in 200 words.

Homework

Copy up English work on Robin Hood

Finish the book and summary of Robin Hood (200 words)

Two maths exercises CMP 3.3, 3.4 (Translation)

Copy up science work (gap filling neatly)

Copy up old maths work with workings

Write 200 words on Shakespeare’s new play (summarising the article we read)

Your two minute summary of hard times was exceptional. You have a good eye for gist and for detail. Your vocabulary was good as was your sentence construction. For a thirteen year old the construction of your spoken work was “A” grade. You do need to work on your diction and other aspects of speech though.

Your written summaries of Hard Times was also very very good. It showed a maturity that is missing from other parts of your life.

What a pity you had to spend most of the lesson copying up and doing corrections. Still, I had previously said that the only work to be in the clear/red folder was to be loose neat work. I added that anything else found in there would have to be copied up. You chose to “forget” that and as such had to do what appeared to be “pointless” copying up.

Your corrections were done at great speed and as such were far too untidy. This is why you had to repeat so many of them.

Finally, as to your Maths – I asked you to repeat the exercises because you had not shown workings. In some Maths papers they do ask for working out so that they can give credit even where the final answer is incorrect. When we went over multiplication of decimals earlier in the week you were uncertain about the decimal place. This is why I asked you to do the sums in full without a calculator. Once you can do them with your eyes closed then I will say “okay use a calculator” because it will save time. Loads of young people have an insecure grasp of a lot of Maths because they didn’t “pay their dues” and so can’t do the work without a calculator.

Nat, excellent lesson. Your home work was of the “just about enough” variety (which isn’t good enough) but your work in class was excellent. We continued to identify your writing style as overly informal (for the purposes of our work on architecture). This informality and chattiness is probably what makes others say that your English is very good. I would rather say that you have a “way with words” (the spoken word to be specific). You have much to do in your written work. The two aspects we looked at today were the structure and the style of your work. Structure was not on the level of the whole piece but rather on the level of the paragraph (how does it fit together).

You attempted very successfully to transpose your sentences and to use alternative lexis (vocabulary) to force yourself to think about the style and grammar. The results were very gratifying. Your writing was clear, concise and attractive. Keep it up and make sure you do the homework. Homework is to copy up your preferred alternative sentence (of those you developed out of the originals) and then to supply either an “elaborating sentence” or a “linking sentence” (look up the word elaborate – and don’t take the “fancy”/”ornate” meaning ). Well done.

Jos Homework

• Spelling and other corrections in blue folder
• Copy up Vasco da Gama work as instructed
• Repeat the two CMP exercises as instructed in your blue maths book
• Read up to page 49 of Robin Hood and do a 200 word summary and prepare a 2 minute talk.

Nat Homework

* see above

Jos, Your homework is to read fifty more pages from Hard Times and to write a two hundred word summary of your reading. I didn’t get to see whether you had done the CMP exercises yesterday. If you have completed them then go on to the next two exercises (or if you can’t manage them then go to the two previous ones). You have other corrections to do that are in your black folder. Make sure that only neat loose work is put into the red folder inside the clear one.  Finish off your Vasco da Gama work (it has to be finished by Friday anyway). Remember any work that is not neat will be done again.

Nat I want you to turn the notes we took down on architecture into a page and a half of writing.