Safety Week!
Hello!
Moortown Primary School are half way through their first themed week of the school year – Safety Week.
Year 4 have been visited by a handful of different experts in being safe and more specifically, being safe on the roads, online and around fire!
Monday focused on road safety and the children learnt this sequence for when walking out and about:
- THINK
- STOP
- LOOK
- LISTEN
Each group then ventured out into Moortown to put it to good use!
Tuesday was Safer Internet Day where the children learnt about being safe online. They had a great visitor (a previous police detective!) who talked through all of the must dos and must don’ts when online! The key points included:
- the importance of being kind online,
- how to keep personal information safe,
- being careful to avoid strangers and scams
- who to talk to if you experience or see cyber-bullying.
Ask your children at home on how to stay safe online!
Today, we were visited by fire fighters and the police. STOP, DROP and ROLL plus GET OUT, STAY OUT and CALL 999 were a focus. The children were so inquisitive when it came to learning about the visitors day to day lives and especially loved seeing the fire engine!
We’re looking forward to the rest of the week… bring it on!
Living and Learning: Staying safe week – road safety
We had a great morning with Harriet, our visitor from Leeds City Council’s road safety team, learning all about keeping safe while crossing the road. It was lovely to hear Harriet’s positive comments about the behaviour and listening from the class.
Here are the actions to help to remember the four steps of the green cross code.
Finally, when thinking about staying safe in a car, we looked at what height children need to be to not need a car seat. The height is 135cm so all the class should still be using these while travelling in a car.
Staying Safe
It’s great to be back! I had a lovely week with the children last week -I had really missed them!
This week is a themed week, ‘Staying Safe’. The children will be learning all about how we can stay safe in our home, near water, on the roads and around dogs. We have lots of visitors coming in to school and I am sure it will be a very exciting week.
Phonics
We are continuing to learn digraphs (two letters that make one sound). This week our new digraphs are oo, ar and or.
Reading
The children read their phonics book at least three times in the week with an adult. This book will be sent as an e-book at the end of the week. If you are having problems accessing your child’s book, please let me know. Most of the children are telling me they enjoy reading these at home.
Maths
This week we are learning to compare sets of objects and use the language more, fewer and equal. We are continuing to investigate numbers to 6.
We have a trainee teacher, Miss Brownbridge, with us this term. She will be teaching some activities and sessions.
A request
We really need some junk modelling materials for our technology area. These could include boxes, cereal packets, egg boxes and plastic containers.
Active maths
As we are starting to learn the two, five and ten times table, these Super Movers active songs are ones we use in class to help with our maths learning and for a brain break too.
Drop down morning
This term we have introduced the idea of a drop down morning. This is a whole morning dedicated to looking back at our previous topic learning in order to cement this knowledge and commit it to the children’s long term memory.
Year 1 had a great time looking back over our Geography and Art topics from this year. We first took a big piece of paper and wrote down everything we could remember about the UK. After that, we revised the countries, capital cities and surrounding seas of the UK by sorting them into groups and then labelling a big map. I was very impressed at how much the children had remembered from the Autumn term!
Next, we looked back at physical and human geography and tried to find either a human or physical feature for every letter of the alphabet. We couldn’t think of any for k or x, so if you know of any let us know!
After break time, we looked again at the artists we had learnt about, Paul Klee and Leonardo da Vinci. We talked about how they were different, including their use of colour and shape. Then, we were given two new pictures and we had to decide whether it had been painted by Leonardo da Vinci or Paul Klee and how we knew. It was a brilliant morning!
Living and Learning: Identity
Identity forms part of our Living and Learning curriculum where children learn about similarities and differences and how we should respect ourselves and others too.
There are things that are the same or different that are immediately obvious (physical features) as well as things you cannot see such as things you like doing, your religion or your family.
There are lots of things the same about us all but everyone is different too – nobody is exactly the same, everyone is unique.
No-one is good at everything but everyone is good at something.
After we had talked about what makes us different and what makes us the same, we drew a picture of our partner and what makes them special!
Living and Learning: Identity
Identity forms part of our Living and Learning curriculum where children learn about similarities and differences and how we should respect ourselves and others too.
There are things that are the same or different that are immediately obvious (physical features) as well as things you cannot see such as things you like doing, your religion or your family.
There are lots of things the same about us all but everyone is different too – nobody is exactly the same, everyone is unique.
No-one is good at everything but everyone is good at something.
We listened to the story, It’s ok to be different by Todd Parr.
Then, we did an activity to create our own imaginary creatures. Maybe you could have a go at this at home too? First, we had to draw the head and fold over the paper. Then, after swapping it with a friend we added the imaginary creature’s body. We folded the paper again and finally we swapped it with another friend to add the legs and feet. These were our finished creatures!
On Identity Day, we enjoyed sharing our differences and what makes us unique.
Topic recap morning!
In the middle of each half term, we have a morning where we revisit learning that we’ve done in previous topics.
Today’s drop-down morning included:
Geography – Where in the world am I?
Geography – human and physical features
DT – structures
We began our drop down morning by playing a chase the vocabulary game – 
See if your child can remember our vocabulary.
In the second geography session, we identified human and physical features in different landscapes.
See if your child can remember the different human and physical features in this picture below and explain why:
In our DT session, we played bingo by collecting answers to questions all about our topic.
We finally created a structure using Lego and tested which one was the most stable! See if your child can answer these questions about our DT learning:
Well done, Y3!
Welcome back!
It was great to see Mrs Burke back at school today; I know she’s been missed by children, parents and staff.
Thanks to everyone who joined our early reading workshop this evening. As always, if you have any further questions about phonics, e-books or any other issues, please ask one of us at school.
Some more great learning in Reception last week. There was some fabulous den building and exploring – children going on lots of adventures discovering all sorts of things.
There was also some awesome jumping in PE and phonics learning, along with some building and investigating the dark.
I wonder what we’ll discover this week!
Super Scientists
This half term, we’ve been learning about biology. Our topic is evolution and inheritance.
We’ve been finding out how animals and plants have adapted to the environment they live in. If they didn’t change to suit their habitat, their species would eventually die out.
Adaptation is one of our science vocabulary this half term along with:
- natural selection
- variety
- prehistoric
- trait
- inherited
- evolution
- fossil
Challenge your child to define these words!
Check out our fabulous posters below, displaying information about the specific adaptations of some amazing animals.
