Author: Mr Roundtree

04 December 2015

This week’s homework is Talk Time and will be discussed on Wednesday 09 December.

To reflect on our topic, ‘Mission to Space’.

As Tim Peake’s launch draws closer, the end of ‘Mission to Space’ does, too. Over dinner, in the car, on your way to and from school, have discussions about the topic.

  • Have you enjoyed it? Why?
  • What new things have you learnt?
  • Is there anything you’d still like to find out?
  • What’s been the best thing about it?
  • How could it have been improved?

Remember to write yourself some short notes to help with our discussion in class.

 

What’s for breakfast in your home?

It’s Health Week and a timely reminder about the importance of enjoying a healthy breakfast before school.

Porridge? Cereal? An egg and toast?

It’s Health Week and a timely reminder about the importance of enjoying a healthy breakfast before school.

A new study has revealed that primary pupils who eat breakfast are up to twice as likely to do well at school as those who do not.

In particular, the research showed a strong link between a healthy breakfast – such as cereal, bread, dairy products or fruit – and doing well at school.

The study of around 5,000 pupils was led by a team at Cardiff University and looked at performance in Key Stage 2 teacher assessments.

More things for Health Week

Health week has been in full swing today. We started the day with a bit of judo, learning about the need to be respectful as well as handy tips for keeping each other pinned (safely and comfortably) to the floor.

BeFunky Collage

In Key Stage 2, we’ve also completed half of our carousel activities and, in Year 5, we were learning all about the sugar in our snacks and drinks compared with how much we should be eating each day.

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Health Week visitors

It’s been a great start to Health Week. We’ve looked at different types of exercise so far, playing basketball and learning about the benefits of Pilates on our posture and long term health.

Perfect Posture

collage

Brilliant Basketball

colage

We’ve also worked with d:side on the dangers of drug abuse and are looking forward to starting our health carousel tomorrow where we’ll work with all of the KS2 staff on a range of different aspects of health.

AstroPi

This week’s topic is all about technology. We’ve learnt how to write in HTML to create a webpage and we’ve then styled it using a programming language called CSS.

We’ve then been launching and programming our own Raspberry Pi which is a tiny computer that can be plugged into a monitor and controlled by a mouse and keyboard.

We had to work together to build our computer and this required quite a bit of problem-solving.

collage

Finally, we had our computers made and ready to programme.

photo 4

All that we had left was tackling the tricky language of Python to programme a message for Tim Peake to send home from the ISS on Christmas Day.

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Tim is actually taking two Raspberry Pi into space so we also looked at how ‘sensor hats’ can collect data in space for us to compare to conditions down here on Earth.

Supporting your child

Have you attended one of our recent learning workshops? Find out more about future events to support your child at home.

Learning workshops are a chance for you to find out more about the best ways to support your child’s learning at home. The last of these workshops took place last night – a Maths one.

Once again, parents and carers who came were very positive:

  • ‘Discovering the Maths videos on the website and knowing the expectations for times tables for different year groups was good.’
  • ‘Very useful session and well-delivered. Will help reinforce learning at home.’
  • ‘I’ve now got a better understanding of the on-line resources and the language to use at home. I’ve a clearer understanding of what [my Reception daughter] will be doing now. It was well-structured and delivered.’

Thank you to Mr Owen and Miss Rushbrooke for running these sessions – much of the feedback chose to praise them:

‘I enjoyed listening to both teachers highlighting the teaching and ideas in school and how to support at home. Thank you for offering your time.’

Whilst this was the last learning workshop, we have other events coming up to support your child at home:

  • Homework open afternoon, 2.40pm on Wednesday 02 December – parents/carers of children in Years 1 – 6 are invited into the classroom to help you to be aware of the standards of homework in your child’s class; it will also give you an insight into how we give feedback to your child even if the homework does not appear to be marked.
  • Core skills open morning, 9.00am-10.30am on Tuesday 08 December – we invite all parents/carers into school to see some Maths and English teaching and learning taking place, and then to review what was observed with Mr Roundtree and/or Mrs Weekes (those who came last year found it helped to know what was happening so they could talk more with their child about their learning, and it raised some expectations, too!).
  • Reception phonics teaching, 9.00am-9.30am on 20 / 21 / 22 January – the second chance to see how your child is learning these essential skills to support reading and writing; over the course of the three mornings, all Reception parents/carers are expected to attend.
  • Core skills open morning, 9.00am-10.30am on Wednesday 27 January – a second invitation for parents/carers to see some Maths and English teaching and learning taking place.
  • Topic open afternoon, 2.30pm on Thursday 17 March – you’ll get a chance to share in the review of the Big Topic on Life which will be coming to its end (parents/carers are welcome, too, although Reception children will not necessarily have joined in on this whole-school topic).
  • Reception phonics teaching, 9.00am-9.30am on 27 / 28 / 29 April – the third chance to see how your child is learning phonics; again, all Reception parents/carers are expected to attend on one of the mornings.

Health Week

This week is a themed week. We’ll be focussing on health, discussing ways in which we can keep ourselves healthy. That might include food and drink choices; ensuring that we’re being active enough each day; maintaining personal hygiene through hand-washing and brushing our teeth thoroughly; and being aware of our mental health.

There are lots of visitor sessions to look forward to: drug education, judo, pilates, basketball and ‘Learn by Heart’. Additionally, the children will work with other teachers each discussing a different aspect of health.

Help at home by discussing how you stay healthy and ask what special learning the children have been doing each day. Will what your child has learnt affect any of the choices (s)he makes from now on?

Phonics feedback

Reception staff were delighted to welcome nearly all parents / carers into the classroom this week to watch the children learn phonics.

Mrs Burke and the other Reception staff were delighted to welcome nearly all parents / carers into the classroom this week to watch the Reception children learn phonics – so important in developing reading and writing skills.

Parents who visited either on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday gained an insight into the general teaching that goes on in Reception, but more specifically learnt about how we teach phonics and how they should support their child’s learning at home:

‘It was useful to see the step-by-step process in which the children are taught so that I can attempt to support in a similar fashion at home. It was helpful to hear the language used in context (grapheme, phoneme etc).’

‘Very informative and well-organised. Definitely helps with how to support at home.’

Lots of parents left impressed by the children’s learning behaviour:

‘I was happy to see how well the children are engaged.’

Finally, we asked how we can make these sessions even better. We had a couple of suggestions – a longer session was suggested, and the session a little bit earlier in the year. We’ll consider these, although in previous years we’ve tried different things and this seems about right for most people. One parent suggested that we should remind others ‘that phonics is not the be all and end all’ and that we should ’emphasise the importance of reading for fun’ – we agree. The purpose of the session was kept quite specific, but Mrs Burke will include some reminders about this in subsequent newsletters because we certainly want to promote a love of reading.

Thanks again to everyone who came along. The next sessions are on 20, 21 and 22 January.

20 November 2015

This week’s Practice Makes Perfect is due on Wednesday 25 November.

I can use homophones correctly in a sentence.

One of the things we’re finding tricky in Year 5 is to recognise which spelling we need when a word is a homophone.

Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelt differently and have different meanings. Write 10 sentences using homophones. There are lots to practise from our spellings last week but everybody needs to practise ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ as we make mistakes with these a lot.