Living and Learning: Being Safe
We took part in the NSPCC Speak out Stay Safe online assembly.
During the assembly, it highlighted children’s rights and gave the clear message of ‘Speak out, Stay safe’. The children were confident at identifying who their own trusted adults are and felt comfortable that they could ask for help.
We also heard about Childline – ask your child to show you the way to remember the number.
To follow up this learning, we welcomed staff from NSPCC to deliver a ‘Speak Out Stay Safe’ workshop. They were very impressed with the children’s learning and understanding.
Help at home: Discuss who your child would speak to if they needed help and/or visit the Childline website, which has age-appropriate advice for primary school children on topics such as bullying. It also has games and other interactive tools.
Summer 1: Week 3
This week, we’ve been enjoying the story The Bug Collector by Alex Griffiths.
In the book, George visits a wildlife museum and becomes fascinated by bugs. Inspired by his visit, he collects minibeasts from his garden and keeps them in jars—but soon notices they don’t seem very happy.
We had a thoughtful discussions about why:
The jars are closed, so the bugs can’t breathe.
The butterfly doesn’t have space to spread its wings.
They have no food or water.
They are not in the beautiful natural world.
They don’t have any room to move around.
This led us to explore the idea of habitats and why they are so important for living things.
Help at home: Can your child remember which habitats these minibeasts live in?
Thank you for sharing photos of your child’s home learning minibeast hunts—they’ve been a fantastic link to our story discussions!
Provision
Our construction areas have been especially popular this week, with children creating a range of fantastic models. Once they’ve finished building, we encourage them to photograph their creations using an iPad and add the pictures to the design books.
Here’s a selection of some of their amazing models—and their brilliant photography skills too!
Caterpillar Update
Our caterpillars are growing nicely—some of us think they’re getting fatter, just like The Very Hungry Caterpillar! We’re really looking forward to seeing stage 3 of the life cycle happen next.
Maths
This week, the children consolidated their understanding of the composition of 5, using their fingers to explore different ways of making 5 and recognising parts when some were hidden. We linked this to a familiar rhyme about monkeys/kittens jumping down from the bed, helping children visualise numbers decreasing.
We used this stem sentence to explain our thinking:
5 is made of ____ and ____; ____ and ____ make 5.
They also practised subitising (quickly recognising amounts) and explored how numbers 6 to 9 can be made as ‘5 and a bit’, using a range of practical resources and representations.
Help at home: Re-enact the rhyme about monkeys/kittens jumping off the bed using soft toys and a simple ‘bed’ (e.g. a shoebox). Encourage your child to join in and use their fingers to show how many are on and off the bed.
PE: skipping skills
In PE, Year 2 have been practising their skipping skills ready for our festival coming up in June.
There are five individual skills: double bounce, single bounce, hop and swap, side straddle and side swing and two group skipping skills: run in jump out and keep the pot boiling.
We’ve been using our personal best records to keep track of our best scores and trying to improve them.
Help at home: skipping ropes are available to buy (£3) in class for children to continue their practising at home.
Topic – Geography explorers
This week in our learning the wonderful Year 1s have been learning about the world we live in. Over the last two weeks, they have been learning about oceans and continents, and today they carried it on by learning all about the North and South Pole, the equator and the different hemispheres.
They did really well in this and were even able to identify countries from each hemisphere!
y
Africa Amazing Africa
This week, we began exploring our new class text, Africa, Amazing Africa by Mauni Feddag.
This engaging non-fiction book links closely with our Geography topic, where we are learning about the country of Kenya.
As a class, we compared the features of fiction and non-fiction texts. The children demonstrated a strong understanding, confidently identifying key characteristics and accurately placing them within a Venn diagram.
Help at home:
Explore some non-fiction books together and look out for the key features such as heading, sub heading, contents, facts and information, index.
Living and Learning: Staying safe themed week 18 May
Our next whole school themed week, based around Staying Safe, will be taking place from Monday 18 May 2026. The key message is how to be safe in a range of situations – at home, at school, online and in the environment.
A variety of events and visitors are planned to help us deliver this key aspect of education including road safety (Leeds City Council); water safety (Canal and River Trust and RNLI); fire safety (West Yorkshire Fire Service); first aid; safety in our community (PCSOs), martial arts (BMMA) and drug education (d:side). Some of the events require parental permission and these letters have been sent out separately.
There are also some opportunities for parents and carers, from all year groups, to get involved in the week.
Thursday 14 May from 8:30am West Yorkshire Police bike register event
Pupils are invited to bring along their bikes to be registered at this bike security marking event at school. Registering your bike helps police and retailers identify and verify the legitimate owner of bikes that have been stolen or are being resold.
Tuesday 19 May 3pm – 3:30pm d:side drug education drop in information session (playground)
A representative from d:side, a health education provider, will be available to discuss details of your child’s drug education learning in the themed week.
The themed week is a good opportunity to continue to think about healthy, active and safe ways to travel to school. Children are encouraged to travel to school in a sustainable way, keeping safe along the way.
For a chance to win one of three £10 vouchers, we’d love to see their active travel staying safe photos, maybe using a traffic crossing or wearing their bike helmet (send photos to moortownoffice@spherefederation.org). Photos should be sent by 10am on Thursday 21 May and winners will be announced on the same day.
Due to the rising costs of visitors to school, this year, we are requesting a voluntary contribution of £2 per pupil to go towards paying for visitors. This can be made on Arbor. Thank you for your support with this.
Finally, can you help? Does your job involve an aspect of safety? If you are able to support our Staying Safe themed week by coming into school to speak to the children, please contact me via the office or your child’s class teacher.
We will keep you up to date about events during the week on the class news pages on our website.
Thank you for your support to keep Moortown a happy, healthy and safe school.
SATs Breakfast Club
Living and Learning: Being safe
We took part in the NSPCC Speak out Stay Safe online assembly.
During the assembly, it highlighted children’s rights and gave the clear message of ‘Speak out, Stay safe’. The children were confident at identifying who their own trusted adults are and felt comfortable that they could ask for help.
We also heard about Childline – ask your child to show you the way to remember the number.
To follow up this learning, we welcomed staff from NSPCC to deliver a ‘Speak Out Stay Safe’ workshop. They were very impressed with the children’s learning and understanding.
Help at home: Discuss who your child would speak to if they needed help and/or visit the Childline website, which has age-appropriate advice for primary school children on topics such as bullying. It also has games and other interactive tools.
PE: Basketball
This half term our PE unit is basketball. We had our first lessons where we practised our throwing and catching skills whilst in a game setting. Then, we had our ‘fitness for’ session where the children went round to different stations to practise different skills: high knees, star jumps, burpees, etc. These sessions help us understand how fit basketball players need to be. Did you know most basketballers run about 5km during a 48 minute game (most players play for an average of 30 minutes)?
Help at home: Can you name all of the different types of passes?
Living & Learning: Being safe
Being safe is a key part of our Living and Learning curriculum and we took part in the NSPCC Speak out Stay Safe online assembly.
During the assembly, we heard about Sam and some things that were upsetting Sam.
Thankfully, Sam told a teacher about her worries. We thought about which grown-ups would be good to talk to in school and out of school (start telling other people). Brothers, sisters and friends would also be good to talk to and discuss feelings but telling a grown-up (over 18) would be the best thing to do to get help.
You could speak to safe adults at school like the safeguarding team.
Be brave and speak out – it will get better.
Our Living and Learning box, in the classroom, is another way the children can speak out and write down any worries.
We also heard about Childline – ask your child to show you the way to remember the number.
Help at home: Buddy Zone, on the Childline website, has some games and activities for the children to do.
