Year 5 also have a Practice Makes Perfect each week. This week you have been assigned three tasks on Mathletics to be completed by Wednesday 14 October.
Don’t forget to press the ? if you’re struggling. We have just been learning about decimals in class so you should be able to complete this on your own.
Help Moortown Primary to stay a happy and healthy place to learn over the winter months.
Every so often, we receive a health and safety bulletin from Leeds Health, Safety and Wellbeing Team. The most recent one has some useful advice that you can follow at home, and encourage your child to follow everywhere. Below is an extract…
The winter is nearly here and with it will inevitably come Norovirus, more commonly known as the ‘winter vomiting bug’. This bug thrives in warm atmospheres where there are a lot of people concentrated in one place – like schools, which are the perfect breeding grounds and are often some of the worst hit places with staff and pupils becoming ill. The illness itself often comes on quite quickly and can last a few days.
Although it cannot be eradicated completely, there are some ways schools can attempt to reduce numbers and hopefully avoid a full outbreak.
This is some of the guidance from Public Health England to reduce the risk of contamination / outbreaks:
- Regular thorough handwashing – use soap and warm water, rubbing front and back of hands and between fingers, rinse carefully with water and then dry hands thoroughly. Washing your hands properly should take at least 15 seconds – or about the length of time it takes to sing ‘Happy birthday to you’ twice through!
- Hand-washing is especially important after going to the toilet and before touching any food.
- Children need to be encouraged to wash their hands by being shown how to do it properly and having a good example set for them by adults.
- If you have a cold, use tissues to cover your mouth and nose when you cough or sneeze, throw used tissues away as soon as possible and wash your hands. Try not to cough and sneeze directly into your hands and wash them immediately if this is unavoidable.
At Moortown, we encourage the ‘vampire method‘ if we’ve no tissues nearby!
“An enjoyable and very helpful workshop. I’m leaving with some good ideas and new ways of helping my son with his reading.”
Just a small number of people attended the Reading Workshop this afternoon.
“An enjoyable and very helpful workshop. I’m leaving with some good ideas and new ways of helping my son with his reading.” (Year 3 parent)
In the 2015 Annual Survey, 82% of you agree that adults in school explain how to support your child’s reading at home. We want this to be higher and have arranged for more workshops this year than ever before. Please try to come. To help, Mr Owen and Miss Rushbrooke are arranging some repeat sessions to start at 6pm – we hope this means more of you can attend.
Workshops coming up…
…and look out for the evening workshops, too!
Noctua Teaching School Alliance offers places on School Direct routes into teaching.
Are you thinking of a career in teaching? If you are, you’ll be interested in School Direct Primary and School Direct Early Years with Early Years Teaching Status.
Come to the information evening on Wednesday 21 October from 6.00pm to 7.00pm at Pudsey Primrose Hill Primary School, LS28 6AB.
Pudsey Primrose Hill Primary School on behalf of Noctua Teaching School Alliance is pleased to
announce that it has been selected by the National College of Teaching and Leadership to offer places
on the School Direct routes into teaching.
We offer three School Direct routes:
The entry requirements differ for School Direct (Salaried) and School Direct (Fee Paying). A salaried
trainee must have at least three years of paid employment prior to beginning the course. School Direct
(Early Years) is a fully funded course. Further details will be given at the information event.
At the information event we will:
For further information or to book a place at these events please email: [email protected]
This week’s spellings will be tested on Friday 09 October.
They are homophones whose spelling shouldn’t be difficult, but understanding their role in the sentence (noun or verb) is trickier.
advise – advice
devise – device
license – licence
practise – practice
prophesy – prophecy
compliment – complement
descent – dissent
Year 5 also have Practice Makes Perfect homework each week. Last week, lots of children didn’t complete their Mathletics tasks. Therefore, they had to use their playtime to do this. If homework cannot be completed for any reason or might be difficult to complete (due to technology being required), please tell me before the due date and efforts will be made to complete it in school.
This week’s Practice Makes Perfect is due on Wednesday 07 October.
To answer questions about data.
Look carefully at the data and use it to answer the questions.
This week’s homework is Talk Time and is due on Wednesday 07 October.
Some people leave to go holiday and some people leave because they have to.
Discuss.
Lots of us like to go on holiday but some people are forced to move away from their homes. Why might people have to leave when others don’t have to? How would you feel if you were forced to move away from your home? Where would you go?
Last week’s homework has filled the classroom with Lego.
I can design a Lego mosaic/model.
Some of us chose to design a model for a First News competition commemorating the Queen becoming the longest reigning monarch.
Some of us chose to design a model linked to the Holidays topic.
Well done, Year 5. Keep it up.
Having thoroughly enjoyed our mini-topic ‘The Lost Thing’, we’ve now started a Big Topic called ‘Holidays’. The topic began by exploring two suitcases and predicting where we could be visiting (real and imaginary) in the next 8 weeks. We then look at the top ten holiday destinations from the UK in Summer 2015 and researched one of these countries in greater detail.
Topic – In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be planning a holiday abroad, looking at temperature, rainfall and all sorts of other important deciding factors. We’ll delve into the world of physics to understand how planes stay in they sky and boats don’t sink as well as starting to compare the UK to a (currently mystery) destination in the Americas.
Help at home by searching flights online, looking at how long it takes and discussing the children’s idea for how the plane works.
Maths – Alongside this, we’ll learn lots about other countries by understanding graphs, tables and charts in our maths lessons. We’ll need to answer basic retrieval questions as well as compare data and use graphs that might be less familiar to us (pie charts).
Help at home by exploring different ways of presenting data and see which you think are the clearest and what makes them easy to understand (labelled axes, titles etc).
English – We’ll look at different types of sentences (simple, compound and complex) and practise writing these accurately before moving on to writing discussions to put forward different sides of an argument.
Help at home by discussing guided reading books and how sentences vary their openers, some are very short and some very descriptive and there are different joining words (but, because, although) used to link ideas together.
The final review of responses to the Annual Survey includes feedback on Mathletics, topics and themed weeks amongst other aspects of teaching and learning.
In this, the final review of this year’s Annual Survey, we talk about your responses on page 2 of the survey. This part asks more open-ended questions about key areas of school life. This year, we asked about the different subjects of the curriculum because there have been so many changes introduced by the Department for Education over the last year or so.
Maths
“Mathletics is a fabulous way for children to learn.” (Year 4 parent)
We’re delighted that Mathletics has proved to be so popular. Children tell us they enjoy it, and your responses help us to know this is a valuable investment so that children can practise at home, too. Aspects of Mathletics you praised include the competitive aspects, the certificates and the ability to practise at home so regularly, whether doing the teacher-set activities or not. One of the reasons we’ve invested in Mathletics is that you’ve told us in the past you’d like more ways to support your child at home, especially in Maths. Other schools ask parents to fund this by making a donation; we’ll continue to fully fund this, partly by using a small amount of pupil premium funding, for as long as we can – certainly another year. One or two of you made some suggestions (including an alternative to Mathletics which help develop greater understanding) or put forward points to act on (such as appropriate times to post the activities) – these comments will be passed to Mr Owen, who leads on Maths in school, or to the relevant teacher for a particular child.
There were two concerns raised: the increase in screen time amongst children and the feeling of pressure to answer questions quickly. We agree these are valid concerns. Regarding the first, children don’t spend a great deal of time in front of computer screens at school, and when they are, it’s always active learning rather than passive viewing (studies suggest there’s a crucial difference in terms of health and attitudes). Regarding the latter, it’s true that one element of Maths is some rapid recall of facts and responses to calculations; it’s not the whole aspect of Maths, however, and we encourage you to try different ways to promote Maths skills if this pressure is excessive for your child – we can give you suggestions if you ask.
Whilst we prompted you to comment on Mathletics, we were also interested to read your responses about Maths in general. There were just a few.
Amongst these, requests for more challenge in Maths came up twice – I do encourage you to attend our workshops on Maths (19 October 2015 at 2.30pm) and on What is Mastery? (16 November 2015 at 2.30pm). The last one is especially important to help communicate the shift primary schools are making in response to the National Curriculum and expectations set out by the Department for Education and Ofsted – briefly, there is a move away from rapid progress to more secure learning where children will remember and better able to use and apply their skills. For higher attaining pupils, we need to explore ways of providing more depth to their learning with challenge in different contexts.
The other responses were a request for more Maths to be included in creative homework tasks (a great idea) and more worksheets (something which many education and Maths specialists might disagree with, but we’re open to the idea; in Year 1, we are trialling a new Maths scheme from Singapore which includes workbooks, and in Year 5 and 6 last year, based on parents’ feedback, we introduced weekly Practice Makes Perfect homework which often features a worksheet).
English
Lexia is a programme to support skills in English which is made available to all Year 1 and Year 2 children and some older children who need the extra support. Whilst we prompted you to comment on Mathletics, we didn’t do so for Lexia. Despite this, quite a few of you praised it which we’re really pleased with as it confirms the decision to invest in this programme to raise standards even more in phonics and wider literacy skills.
“My daughter enjoys using Lexia and practising her targets. This really motivates her to do more and improve her English overall.” (Year 1 parent)
It was also great to read praise for First News, a children’s newspaper we’ve begun to subscribe to.
“Reading ‘First News’ has led to some good conversation at home so that to gets a big thumbs up.”
Overall, people praised various aspects of English – some say their child loves how we teach grammar, others enjoy reading comprehensions and so on.
Of concern for a couple of parents was the lack of reading books sent home at the start of the year in one particular class – this problem was sorted a few weeks into term and I want to take this opportunity to apologise. This year, Miss Rushbrooke is working hard to promote reading in our school – she’s started by promoting the library service’s Summer Reading Challenge more than we’ve ever done before (and with great effect: from five people completing the challenge in 2014 to at least 17 this year) and her next big job is improving the quality and availability of books in the library (that’s why you may have seen quite a few books being sold at the start of the year – guidance is that books over a certain age should be disposed of so children access up-to-date books). Teachers have also improved their reading areas in school wherever possible.
Other points raised were more use of the library (and Miss Rushbrooke’s on the case with this one!) and not having time to finish guided reading books (thankfully, this parent left their name so we can sort this out in future – we agree this is not good). Finally, one parent asked for more guidance around choosing appropriate books out of school (again, that parent left their child’s name so we can speak directly and explore ways to solve the problem).
Topics
Of the 39 completed surveys, 31 contained comments in this section (eight had no comment).
Only one contained a criticism: “Some topics have been boring and not varied enough.” The remaining 30 comments were positive. Many noted that they help to really engage their children and stimulate discussions at home (“We know what the topic is about due to the increased questions and interest in that topic at home.”) and the variety they bring (‘The topics vary the learning.”)
A few parents suggested more Science-based topics. Lots of the mini-topics (the shorter, two week topics) have a strong Science focus. Also, in the Spring term, is a whole-school Big Topic called Life, which covers lots of biology.
Lots of parents cited particular favourite topics, and even more responded to the prompt to suggest other topics – thanks for these suggestions, which will be passed to Mr Wilks and Miss Valentine who lead on this area of teaching and learning. We can’t promise every suggestion will be taken up, but they will help to form a ‘bank’ of ideas for teachers.
Find out more about our curriculum.
(PS We won’t be repeating the medicine theme as part of the Time Travel topic – far too gruesome for Year 3!)
Other learning
The same number of completed surveys had comments in the final box, which asked for general comments about learning, but which featured some prompts such as themed weeks and Hobby Half Days. Both of these were subject to lots of praise – that’s great news, and we’ll make sure we say a big well done to Mrs Taylor, who organises the themed weeks; Miss Valentine, who organises the Hobby Half Days; and to our support staff, who lead many of the Hobby Half Day activities.
“My son loves the themed weeks as the children mix with other years for their lessons. Hobby half days are great – he loves to do different things in lessons which aren’t normally taught.” (Year 5 parent)
Themed weeks and Hobby Half Days are times when visits and visitors to school are frequent. These were also praised.
“My daughter has really enjoyed some of the new physical activities she has been introduced to – for example, she has raved about the boxing session… she enjoyed and found useful the visit from the police during the themed week.” (Year 1 parent)
A few parents also praised PTA events in this section for the events which they put on. They mentioned the trip to the panto and the movie nights – well done and thank you to all who actively help out in the PTA (and others are always welcome).
There were no critical comments here, just some suggestions which we’ll try to respond to:
Thank you to everyone to responded and gave us your views. Please don’t wait until next year’s survey if you have any questions, comments and concerns – tell us whenever they arise.