Author: Mr Roundtree

Following the success of our veggie burgers, half of Year 6 returned to the kitchen today for a new recipe. This time, we cooked paneer tikka masala which every single child said was delicious!

First, we needed to create a marinade for the paneer.

Then we created the base of our sauce.

Once that was done we blended all of these ingredients together (minus the cinnamon stick) and put it back in the pan. Miss Rushbrooke cooked the paneer once it had marinated for half an hour as it can be quite spitty.

A small amount of cream and butter were then added to create a smooth texture and we added garam masala and fresh coriander at the end along with the cooked paneer.

Everybody had a taste, using poppadoms as spoons and then we each got a box to take home with us. Another great session of cooking with Year 6 and another successful recipe.

Today, visitors came to speak to us about sign language. Everyone learnt how  to say ‘How are you?’, ‘I’m fine thank you’, ‘What’s your name?’, My name is____’, ‘How old are you?’ , ‘I am ______ years old’ and how to spell their names in sign language.

We were learning about this because our themed week is community and there are a few deaf people who live in Leeds.

Also, we were visited by members of the police who split the class in half, treating one half very nicely and the other half not so nicely: they gave one half Ribena and the other water; gave one half more talking time than the other; told one half they were cool; and gave tokens to them. This was to show that it would be unfair to treat people differently for no real reason. Hate crime is when people discriminate against others because of their race, gender, religion/belief, disability or sexual orientation.

We learnt that we are all the same and all different and we should treat others how we want to be treated.

Written by Pippa and Neive.

As mentioned in the news post about our topic review last week, one of the things the children have enjoyed the most throughout Explorers is designing their own islands.

Our writing was inspired by a fantastic book, The Land of Neverbelieve, which resulted in some brilliant descriptive pieces about exploring this fantastical land. It is an island in the shape of a dragon (although many children believed it to be a wolf) with weird and wonderful areas dotted around: The Dark and Spooky Mountains, The Flowering Meadow, Book Mountain and many more. We decided to create our own islands which have demonstrated incredible imagination and more amazing writing from the children.

As part of our community week and today’s focus on identity, Y6 worked on mindfulness this morning. This is something we’ve spoken about before but today’s learning helped us to realise how there were lots of different ways we could be mindful of ourselves and mindful of others.

We also learnt about lots of techniques we could take away and use if we were struggling with situations or if we just wanted to become more mindful.

Year 6 really enjoyed this session and we discussed which things they’d like to use in class. Ask your child about what they learnt and see whether there’s anything they could use at home, too.

Alas! We have come to the end of our Explorers Topic – one which we’ve all really enjoyed. We always take a look back on topic learning by reflecting on the work in our topic books, looking at news posts, recalling our favourite learning and discussing the skills we’ve developed along the way.

Year 6 came up with loads of learning we’ve done throughout this eight week topic:

In pairs we then thought about what our favourite learning had been and we created a diamond nine to show this:

Then, we rearranged our thoughts to reflect on which activities helped us to learn the most:

Finally, we thought about how our learning related to the real world and ordered it in terms of which has been most important:

Year 3 came to visit us today as well so that we could share our topic learning with each other. First, Year 3 took the Year 6s on a tour of their topic book, explaining their learning as they went and then Year 6 took the role of tour guide.

We finished off by looking at each other’s diamond nines and the Year 6s guessed how Year 3 would have ordered their learning from favourite to least favourite.

All of Key Stage 2 took part in a dance workshop today, dancing to songs sung by artists who had experienced bullying. Year 6 dance to Justin Bieber and had a great time with quite a complicated routine.

Here we are preparing for our big performance.

At the end of the day, we performed our routine to the school and enjoyed watching what the other classes had prepared too. This is all part of anti-bullying week which has involved us discussing what bullying is in class too: different types of bullying; suggestions for it you are bullied; suggestions for if you see bullying; and why a bully might be making those choices. Ask us about the discussions we’ve had at home and see what we remember.

We know that we talked about our cooking last week, but the rest of Year 6 did it today. We used the same skills: bridge and claw cutting methods, grating, frying, blending, moulding and – once again – washing up.

Once again, not everyone expected they’d enjoy it but everyone really liked them. Mushroom-based was the favourite of the group. We did the same recipes as last time: courgette-based, carrot-based and mushroom-based veggie burgers.

We took some more photos.

Pippa made a carrot avalanche or carralanche!

Some of us decided to taste them there and then.

Lots of children wanted to make the burgers at home so here’s the recipe.

• 2 shallots (chopped)
• 2 cloves of garlic (finely chopped)
• 2 tbsp of breadcrumbs
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp of cumin
• 1 tsp of paprika
• 150g of cheddar (grated) or 200g of feta (crumbled)
• 1 tin of mixed beans (optional)
• 2 carrots (grated) or 2 courgettes (grated) or a punnet of mushrooms (chopped)

Fry the onions and garlic (and mushrooms if you’re using them) and then place all of them into a large bowl. Use your hands to mix all of the ingredients together thoroughly. Once mixed, get a handful of mixture and use your hands to shape it into a burger. Place the burger shapes onto a baking tray and put in an oven (180 degrees) for 20 minutes.

Enjoy in  a bun, with a salad  or even with chips!

Written by Neive and Pippa.

We all took on a tricky crossword today which gave us clues to words in a text. We had to understand the definition of the word in the clue and then find it in the text above to decide whether it was the correct word.

Once we’d got all of the answers, we checked that we now knew what these word meant, using the clues and how they were used in the text above.