Author: Mr Catherall

During our reading session on Friday, we had a debate: Should eSports be in the Olympics? 

We were given some information from FirstNews and had time to think about both sides of the argument. We thought about what a ‘good’ debater looks like and used sentence stems to shape the discussion.

We’ve been practising our debating skills quite a lot this year and have made huge improvements in our ability to use information to inform our viewpoint before putting forward a concise, logical argument.

Well done, Year 5!

Today, we visited the library for our weekly love of reading session (my favourite part of the week). We had the chance to sit in the library, relax and read. When we’re reading, we have our writing books with us in case we come across any vocabulary that we’d like to ‘magpie’ for our writing. If we find a word or phrase we like, we jot it down in our personal dictionaries.

We also use this time to read with an adult in our guided reading groups. We discuss what we’ve read and if we’re enjoying it.

Help at home by encouraging your child to read regularly. Even better, read with them!

In our maths lesson today, we carried out a little investigation (LO: square numbers). We were given 36 counters and had to arrange them in as many different arrays as we could.

However, one array in particular seemed to be different to the others:

We noticed this array was shaped like a square. Without realising, we’d taught ourselves what square numbers are. We then used the counters to show other square numbers. Now that we were confident identifying square numbers, we had a go at some pretty tricky reasoning.

Some of us applied our knowledge to this super challenging challenge:

We haven’t been able to solve it (YET!) but we will do. I was super impressed by how resillient everybody was and it was great to see people working together to tackle all of the reasoning and problem solving questions.

It also made for some particularly interesting self assessments:

• ‘I enjoyed having to be resilient.’ Ripley
• I found the challenge (very) hard but I tried and tried and I know feel confident.’ Amrit
• ‘I feel proud because I was resillient.’ Ethan

Today in PE, we practised our balancing and jumping skills for gymnastics. We’ll be focussing on gymnastics in our Wednesday PE lessons for the next half-term.

In today’s lesson we worked together to create a range of balances before learning how to do a headstand. We’re not quite there yet but we have a much better understanding of the technique needed to perform this tricky balance. We also know how to do this safely – even how to fall safely if we lose our balance. Some of us could already perform a headstand so we acted as coaches to help everyone else through the various stages of a headstand.

A word of caution – don’t try this at home!

Today, Y5 and Y6 visited Fountains Abbey as part our Explorers topic. The trip was particularly exciting because each group were able to plan their own exploration of this National Trust site.

Whilst some of us were off exploring the Studley Royal Gardens, the rest of us were spending ‘A Day in the Life of a Monk’. In this fun workshop, led by National Trust volunteers, we visited the abbey, learnt lots about its history and learnt how monks lived their fascinating lives. Did you know that monks considered heating using a fire a luxury? Or, that they had seven church services a day and one in the middle of the night? Even harder to imagine, they lived almost their whole life in silence. (Some of us would certainly struggle with the last one!)

When exploring, we each had a role to play within our group: map-reader, photographer, visitor surveyor, artist and time-keeper. We were in charge of making sure we visited the places of interest the people in our group wanted to see and had to ensure we were back at our ‘base’ at the correct time. It was really fun to politely approach members of the public and carry out a visitor survey (a geography fieldwork skill). Can you believe that someone had travelled all the way from the USA?

To enhance of our geography learning from the classroom, we continued to compare Fountains Abbey with Machu Picchu. We found lots of similarities: they have similarly interesting histories, they are both ruins, they first became ruins in quite similar ways, both places were used by religious people to celebrate a god and we found out that farming was crucial in both places.

We all had a great time and will certainly sleep tonight (the adults will anyway). As always, the children were fantastic ambassadors for our school and we received several compliments from the public.

Here are some quotes from the day:

• ‘I love nature now!’
• ‘It was great that we chose which parts of Fountains Abbey we wanted to explore.’
• ‘My favourite part was learning how a monk loved their life!’
• ‘It was great finding out about the life of a monk!’
• ‘It was really fun to go for a walk in a nice place!’

Today, our U11 football team visited Mill Field Primary School. They played exceptionally well but unfortunately lost 2-1. Archie scored a wonder goal in the top corner to give Moortown hope but they narrowly missed out.

There were some brilliant individual performances and they all showed great teamwork skills throughout the game.

This afternoon, we made the short trip to Allerton Grange for our PE lesson. We were taught a range of sports by some Year 10 sports leaders. As always, we were fantastic ambassadors for our school and this was appreciated by the sports leaders and their teachers. Well done, Year 5!

Thanks to our class photographer for the afternoon: Farai.