We hope you’ve enjoyed this sunny week – this Indian summer.

Our Living and Learning theme has been a simple one this week: ‘I use good manners’. At school, this can mean greeting people politely (including adults as they arrive at school), saying please and thank you, and avoiding interrupting. Have a chat with your child about what it means at home, too.

Cooking

Over the course of the year, your child will enjoy three opportunities to prepare food…

• Year 1 and 2: fruit smoothies, overnight oats, and fruit bars
• Year 3 and 4: egg pots, chopped tomatoes and garlic, and savoury scones
• Year 5 and 6: vegetable and chickpea curry, pasta bake, and bread

We’ve a couple of requests, please:

Most importantly, please alert us to any allergies your child has. We’ll do our best to adapt recipes.

To make sure that we can continue to offer this, please make a voluntary donation of £3 to £6 to pay for the ingredients. We really appreciated your donations last year.

For more about our Cooking curriculum, please check out our Cooking and Nutrition Curriculum Guide – they include the recipes and background information including the food preparation skills children will practise. (We’re in Year B this year.)

Relationships and Sex Education

At the start of each year, we like to encourage you to be aware of our Relationships and Sex Education Policy. Later in the year, your child will have Relationships and Sex Education lessons. In those lessons, we’ll talk about anatomical terms and different relationships. However, we might need to use the terms at other times, such as when dealing with incidents of misuse or disrespectful language, and we’ll talk about lots of different relationships at any time of the year, too.

How we communicate home

Another thing we like to do at the start of the year is help you be aware of how we communicate home. Findings from our annual survey of parents and carers indicate the vast majority of you are happy with how we communicate, but we’re also aware of a small number of you who are less content. We do our best to stick to the following…

Texts

Anything urgent (such as the cancellation of an after-school club) or a quick reminder about something (like the photographer being in school) will be sent by text. If you have the School Gateway app, it might be useful to set it so you receive notifications of messages. Texts will automatically be sent to your app.

Emails

Our emails will usually be a longer message about one specific thing. We’re moving away from sending out hard copies of most letters (it’s better for the environment to send things electronically and things don’t always get to you if they’re sent home in book bags). Please try to check your emails daily, so you don’t miss anything important.

Weekly messages

Just like this one, our Weekly Messages usually contain more general information. They might include reminders, such as forthcoming events or policy details, but will mainly consist of other information that you might find useful. Usually, they’re published on the school website on Friday afternoons and emailed out a little later the same day.

Class news

For anything relevant to your child’s class, please check the Class News pages of the website (we recommend doing this at least once a week). Nursery and Reception classes use these pages a lot because there are often forthcoming events specific to the Early Years.

Homework

For children in Key Stage 1 and 2, your child should bring home a hard copy of their weekly homework, but you’ll also be able to find it on the Homework section of the website. (There’s no specific homework set for children in Nursery and Reception, but read the Class News articles for lots of ideas to help you support your child at home.)

Social media

Finally, we have Facebook. Messages on here are usually repeats of other communications, such as our Weekly Messages. Nothing urgent or particularly important will be posted only on social media because we know that not everyone accesses these things.

Healthier together

We’ve been asked to let you know about West Yorkshire NHS website Healthier Together.

The initiative was launched to provide families, children and young people with consistent, quality advice from local health and care professionals.

September can be a time when there are more common infections and illnesses amongst children. It’s important that families become familiar with different illnesses (fever, coughs, asthma, bronchiolitis, gastroenteritis…) and how to manage them ahead of the new school year.

And on that note, have a happy and healthy weekend, hopefully enjoying the last of the Indian summer!

We got some good news this week… We had our School Games Mark revalidated and we continue to have Platinum status – the top award.

Our Living and Learning theme this week… has been around our 8Rs for learning – all ways to promote good learning behaviour. Help at home: check out our short guide and then talk with your child at home about times when each of the Rs can be especially important.

Governor recruitment

We’ve a vacancy for a new parent governor…

The position will start properly on 20 November 2024. However, the new governor will be invited to attend our Governing Board meeting on 13 November as an observer. Any parent or carer is encouraged to express an interest; governors are especially interested in hearing from people with a financial background.

Look out for a separate email with more information later on today. The first stage is to complete an online expression of interest. If there’s more than one expression of interest, we’d open the recruitment to a vote and part of your expression of interest would be made available to all parents across Sphere Federation to help them decide who to vote for.

The rest of this week’s message comes from Mr Wilks, our Sphere Federation Topics Leader. The message is all about our new KS1 and KS2 topic…

We’re historians

What do we mean by topics?

Topics are the vehicle for delivering much of the learning in foundation subjects (eg Art, History, Geography). Each half-termly topic has a driving subject – the main focus for teaching pupils knowledge and skills.

What is this half-term’s topic?

This half-term, we’re historians. We’ll develop our understanding of the past, both in Britain and the wider world.

Each phase has age-related specific knowledge, skills and vocabulary. See pages 26 and 27 of our Topic Curriculum Guide.

Each phase also has key historical concepts which will feature within most lessons. These historical concepts are themes that are revisited, strengthened and deepened during your child’s journey through the history curriculum. See page 23 of the Curriculum Statement.

Years 1 and 2 

In this topic, children learn about a significant British historical event: the Great Fire of London. Children will learn about life at the time of the Great Fire of London. They’ll learn where the fire started and how it spread so quickly and the innovative ways that it was extinguished. Importantly, they’ll learn about the different sources of evidence that have helped us answer these questions, including Samuel Pepys’ diary. Finally, they’ll learn about the significant changes that occurred as a result of the fire, such as legal changes about the way houses were built and the beginning of a fire service in London.

The key concept that children will learn about in this history topic is innovation.

(Help at home… As well as thinking about History, talk with your child about ways to stay safe around fire.)

Years 3 and 4 

In this topic, children learn about Ancient Greece. Children begin by sequencing periods of British history and seeing where the ‘golden age’ of the Ancient Greek civilisation sits alongside. They’ll then learn about two contrasting city states: Athens and Sparta. Children will learn about the type of government these states had and what the lives of the people living there were like. They’ll then debate which city state was the best.

Importantly, they’ll focus in on the influence that Athens has had on the world: democracy, mathematics, philosophy, literature, culture… Finally, they’ll learn about how the civilisation ended.

The key concepts for this topic are power and innovation.

Years 5 and 6 

In this topic, children learn about Stone Age to Iron Age Britain and contrast it with Ancient Egypt. They begin by looking at and creating timelines which sequence the periods of British history and also placing Ancient Egypt on this timeline. They’ll learn about the advances and innovations that occurred during the New Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. They’ll learn about and understand that the sources of evidence we have are limited to archaeological evidence. They’ll then learn about the Ancient Egyptian civilisation and contrast this with what was happening in Britain at the same time – it’s a stark contrast!

The key concepts for this topic are innovation and power.

How can you help?

Talk to your child about what they’ve been learning in class. The Class News pages of the school website are a good place to go to find out more about what the children are doing.

Find some books from the library which match what your child is learning. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of books about the history your child will be learning about.

Watch television shows about history. Horrible Histories is great (regardless of your age!).

The BBC Bitesize history webpage have some really good pages about the different KS2 units being studied this half-term.

For KS1, there’s an excellent website about the Great Fire of London. As well as a game for children to play, there’s information for adults as well.

If it’s a rainy weekend and you’re looking for something to do, why not spend a morning or afternoon in a museum? A visit to Leeds City Museum (next to Millennium Square) would be great for all children but especially for Y3,4 and Y5,6 children as it has some Ancient Greek and Ancient Egyptian exhibits, including Nesyamum, the 3,000 year old Leeds mummy!

It’s been great to see you at the school gates and to welcome the children back to school – and to welcome new children joining us, too. The atmosphere in school has been very calm and contented, happy and healthy.

Summer competition

Did you enter our Summer competition this year?

Thank you to those of you who did. We invited you to send in a pic of each letter that makes up MOORTOWN – each year group had a different letter to work on. We’ve loved checking out all the wonderfully creative ways to make an M, an O, an R etc! Today was the deadline to send in a pic – we’ll be deciding the winner next week.

Attendance update

With just four days in, our attendance is 97% – well done to all, and especially to Year 6 with 100%!

Here’s an important update from Leeds City Council about absences from school…

One of the things to be aware of is that if a parent takes their child on holiday during term-time every year, then the penalty notice is higher the second time and by the third year, they’ll face legal action.

The impact of five days off school is significant. In our Weekly Messages over the year, we’ll feature examples of lost learning in different subjects.

Our website

As it’s the start of a new school year, we thought it might be a good time for a quick ‘tour’ of some of the key pages of our website.

The Find Out section is there mainly for the key information you need to know about. Particularly useful pages are:

• the Calendar: at the start of the year, we send home a list of key events across the year but for a fuller and up-to-date picture of what’s going on, check out the calendar (have a look at our weekly Living and Learning theme at the start of each week in the calendar, too – this week, our theme’s been ‘I follow the school rules’ so please talk about these at home)
• Policies and Other Points: this page contains lots of information, including our Positive Relationships policies and our Uniform policy – important ones for you to know about
• Meals: check out the current school dinners menu here!

The Join In section describes lots of different ways that you and your child can get involved, from wraparound care and clubs to any job vacancies we may have. There’s information about our Governing Body in this section, too. (Look out because we’ll have a vacancy for a new parent governor soon!)

The Learn More page is where to go for ways to support your child’s learning. The Class News pages are always the some of the most visited pages – they help to keep you up to date with what your child’s learning. Other pages give you information about different subjects – Reading, Writing, Maths and other curriculum subjects. If you’re a parent of a child in Reception, check out the Early Years page, too.

Talking of supporting your child at home, next week we’ll talk about our new topic for children in Years 1-6. It’s a History topic – start asking your child now what they’ve been learning in History!