Author: Mr Roundtree

08 February 2019

Create ways for you to remember how to spell these words and generally practise using the strategies in the back of your homework book. Don’t forget to try adding prefixes and suffixes to the words. Spelling practice is best done little and often so make sure you come back to the spellings at least three times in the week. Date your practice and ask an adult to sign it to show that you’re practising regularly. There will be a test on Friday 15 February.

  • language
  • leisure
  • lightning
  • marvellous
  • mischievous
  • muscle
  • necessary
  • neighbour
  • nuisance
  • occupy
  • occur
  • opportunity

Staying Safe Week

What a start it’s been to our Staying Safe themed week! First, the children thoroughly enjoyed their scooter training. It was fantastic to so many children come to school on their scooters. It would be great to see the children continue to come to school on their scooters and put all those safety tips they learnt into practice.

We also had a visit from Richard from One Day Creative. We learnt lots about staying safe online thanks to Richard. He told us a brilliant story about a pirate called Captain Digi and the many adventures he had been on sailing through the seas of the internet. In the story, Capital Digi showed us how to escape phishing mermaids and dodge the tentacles of cyber bullies. He also taught us the importance of keeping our pirate identities secret.

On Tuesday, we were very lucky to meet some of our areas PCSOs. The officers talked to us about the importance of staying safe in the environment and that they are always there to help if we need it.

Living and Learning: Staying safe in the home

As Year 6s, the children will need to be more independent around the home so we learnt how to use the kitchen safely on our own.

We discussed making toast with the toaster and using a grill. We decided it would be safer to use the grill with an adult around but we could use the toaster on our own. At home, ask us how we can use the toaster safely – we should have loads of tips!

We talked about that pesky situation where your piece of toast is too small and you can’t get it out safely with your hands.

We know how to use the hob safely so we can cook our beans to go on toast.

And, we learnt the dos and don’ts when cooking jacket potatoes in the microwave.

Finally, we finished with pudding and now know how to make the safest hot chocolate. Ask us to make you a tea, coffee or hot chocolate – we can do it safely.

The children were really interested and involved in the whole session with lots of suggestions and questions to further their learning.

Living and Learning: Staying safe in our environment

Y6 visited the local park this week as part of Safety Week. On the way there, we discussed what risks we might come across: traffic on the road, trip hazards, dogs in the park and slippery equipment.

We enjoyed playing on the equipment – safely of course – before heading back to school and filling in a risk assessment for visiting the park.

This sort of activity is increasingly important for our Year 6s as they’ll be taking more and more responsiblity for themselves as they get older and move into high school. At home, start discussing doing things on their own and what they can do to do those things safely.

An awesome author in Year 6

We’ve got some great writers at Moortown Primary. It’s brilliant to read about one of them, Thomas in Y6, being recognised for this. The writing below was done at home. Thomas was inspired by listening to an audio book of a Sherlock Holmes story read by Stephen Fry – and what great results just from listening to the story and soaking up the language!

The writing was shared on Twitter and a top literacy advisor, Pie Corbett, was impressed.

In some tweets to Thomas’s mum, Pie Corbett comments that it’s a good example of how children imitate their reading: ‘It’s a marvellous example of a child capturing the right tone through listening carefully to the book being read.’ It just shows that audio books – not just written books – can inspire impressive vocabulary and description! Pie Corbett goes on: ‘It’s interesting that he ‘heard’ it which also makes the point about the value of being read to…’

Well done, Thomas – we’re all very proud of you!

Follow Pie Corbett on Twitter.

01 February 2019

This week’s homework is Practice Makes Perfect and will be marked on Friday 8 February.

I can find a percentage of an amount.

There are lots of practice questions to do at home to make sure we’re really confident with this skill. Make sure the children are being careful to include the units on their answers and, for the last column of questions, it’ll be easier if they convert the measures before calculating the percentage. For example, 5 hours becomes 300 minutes.

01 February 2019

Create ways for you to remember how to spell these words and generally practise using the strategies in the back of your homework book. Don’t forget to try adding prefixes and suffixes to the words. Spelling practice is best done little and often so make sure you come back to the spellings at least three times in the week. Date your practice and ask an adult to sign it to show that you’re practising regularly. There will be no test on Friday 8 February. Instead, there’ll be a crossword to complete.

  • familiar
  • foreign
  • forty
  • frequently
  • government
  • guarantee
  • harass
  • hindrance
  • identity
  • immediately
  • individual
  • interfere
  • interrupt

Living and Learning – Let’s be more active

Across the nation, school’s are working towards providing a more active environment to learn in. Here at Moortown, we all Wake Up and Shake Up everyday to increase our heart rates which benefits our physical, emotional and mental health as well as improving our brain function.

In Year 6, we went on a bike ride in the class room for around 10 minutes which was great fun and got all of our hearts racing.

Impressive writing

This half term, Year 6 are learning how to use colons, semi-colons and dashes.

Here’s some great writing from Martha about a mythical beast where she’s used these skills independently.

Martha will now use the feedback to help her to improve her writing and aim to write just as well and with fewer mistakes in her next piece.

At home, read this together and ask your child what they wrote about. Can they show you how to use colons and semi-colons correctly?