Year 1 and 2 had a great time at Harlow Carr today. We soaked up the sun, searched through the trees and savoured some delicious ice-cream. A full recount will follow, but the children are going to write one themselves tomorrow so I’ll save it to be in their words. Here’s the story of the day in pictures…
Last week’s homework was to show what plants you could see around and we had some really creative responses. Well done, Year 2.
Our Governing Body Chair, Mrs Becky Lawrence, reviews the year.
Our Governing Body Chair, Mrs Becky Lawrence, writes:
Work the Governing Body has undertaken this year includes:
The Chair of our Resources Committee, Andy Miller, has been leading the discussions with Leeds City Council in planning how the school will make use of the land that has been acquired as part of the new housing development behind the school site.
Rachel Greenhalgh has been reviewing how the school makes use of Pupil Premium funding (money that is received from central Government to support learning for disadvantaged pupils) and monitoring the impact of how this money is spent.
Jackie Sykes is our Link Governor with the School Council. Jackie has been attending School Council meetings to ensure that the Governing Body hears issues that are concerning children in school, and to help school councillors understand the Governing Body’s role in leadership and management of the school.
The Governing Body as a whole has reviewed our working practices and identified some areas where we could be more effective. We have drawn up plans to improve our approach to succession planning; to create more consistent induction processes for new governors; to better define the responsibilities of each distinct governor role; and to undertake a skills audit to inform our training needs.
Vivienne Gaskin has picked up the role of link governor for the Early Years and has observed lessons and met with our school improvement adviser. Vivienne has enjoyed seeing the fantastic learning taking place in Reception.
This year governors have also been involved in:
- recruiting new teachers;
- seeing that end of key stage tests are administered in line with the Department for Education’s rules;
- setting a budget for the next three years and monitoring the in-year budget position;
- monitoring attendance levels and agreeing strategies for improving attendance;
- ensuring the school fulfils its health and safety and child safeguarding requirements;
- monitoring the educational attainment and progress of pupils across the school; and
- setting and measuring performance objectives for Mr Roundtree.
Much of our work over the next year will be around developing our newer governors and enabling existing governors to share their skills so that we are building up a knowledgeable and effective team.
The big event this week is our school trip to Harlow Carr. We’ll be going on Wednesday for the whole day so don’t forget that all of the children will need packed lunches. It’s going to be hot – hot – hot! We have school hats to protect our heads from the sun but it would be a good idea to send your child with sun-cream and a water bottle (in addition to a drink in their lunch) and make sure they’re in a skirt or shorts. As we make our way around the gardens, we’ll be spotting the well-known plants that we’ve been learning about as well as seeing what new plants we can find.
Maths – We’re revisiting fractions and time this week. Help at home by asking what time it is and making sure your child is using an analogue clock. o’clock, quarter past, half past and quarter to are important but we also need to be able to read 5, 10, 20 and 25 past and to the hour.
English – We’re finishing Year 2 with a long narrative project inspired by a picture book with no text. Reading short stories (picture books) will help the children pick up on story-telling language and find adjectives and sentences openers they can use in their own writing.
As we’d picked lots of different types of leaves on our walk in the woods, we looked at them closely today and were able to do some maths, too. We knew that leaves were important for photosynthesis because they collect the sun’s light. By working out the area of the leaves, we could estimate which leaf would collect the most sunlight (the leaf with the largest area).
As always, we practise our spellings everyday in phonics lesson. Green group have been working on prefixes and suffixes for a lot of the year so this week we played a game to recap the double-up rule.
This week’s homework is Practice Makes Perfect and is due on Thursday 02 June 2015.
I can work with fractions and time (Mathletics assigned tasks).
Log on to Mathletics and you will see that you have been assigned three tasks and a test on fractions and time. See if you can complete these on your own using the ? button to help if you get stuck. If your child has any problems logging on to Mathletics, let me know and I can give him/her time to complete this activity in school.
You don’t need to write anything in books for this. I will make a note as to whether the activity has been completed or not when homework books are handed in.
What a great morning. Year 2 took a walk to the woods to have a look at the different types of trees we could find. Isaac turned out to be our nature specialist as he was able to tell us the names of many common trees just by looking at their leaves. Everybody had a great time and all of us were really excited about our topic learning.
Having worked so hard on planting our seeds and making sure they’ve got the best environment to grow, we’ve now planted them outside in our new Y1/2 planter. Come down past the dining room to see how they’re doing. We’ve got nasturtiums, sunflowers, courgettes, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers and broad beans growing. Hopefully, we’ll have another planter soon to get all of our seedlings outside.
Green Fingers continues and we’re moving our growing outside. New school planters have arrived so this week will see us building and planting in these. We’ll move the seedlings that have been getting on so well in the shared area into the planters to see how they do in the outside world. On Wednesday we’re going to go to the park as our learning moves from flowers to trees. We’ll be exploring the local environment to see what trees we already know the names of and which we can identify using the shape of their leaves.
Maths – Returning to multiplication means times table practice is, as always, extremely helpful for our learning in class. Go counting crazy as you walk up the stairs, travel in the car, walking to school; you could even try the 3 and 4 times tables in preparation for moving into Year 3. As part of multiplication, we’ll also be working with money so if you go to the shop and buy 3 oranges at 50p each, see if we can tell you how much by using our 5 times table knowledge.
English – Entering the world of SPAG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar), we’ll be recapping nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Use Post It notes to label your house’s nouns then go round again and add an adjective to each one. Play verb charades then make it harder by adding an adverbs.