Half term basketball camps
As a partner school of City of Leeds Basketball Club and one of our after-school club providers, we’re pleased to share details of their half term camps held locally at Allerton High School.
Living and Learning: Me and my money themed week
Geography walk
Last week, during Geography, we planned a walk in our locality so that we could investigate what the land is used for. This week, we walked the walked!
Here are the types of land-use we saw:
- residential – flats and houses
- commercial – shops and restaurants
- recreational – Moortown Park
- transport – roads
We really enjoyed getting our steps in while being geographers! We stayed safe by wearing high-visibility jackets, walking in pairs and taking care when crossing the roads.
Poetry Picnic
The fun, seasonal poem we’ve been learning this week is Five Little Pumpkins.
Hope you enjoy the (slightly raucous) performance!
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
On Tuesday, Year 5 and 6 went on a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to support our Art learning for next half term. We loved seeing all the amazing sculptures.
In the morning, we had a self-guided tour of the park and saw both abstract and figurative sculptures. We spent time discussing and sketching what we saw.
In the afternoon, we took part in a workshop with a real artist! We investigated patterns, textures and shape. The children did some artwork without looking at the page; they had to put their sketchbook on their heads. They also created artwork without taking their pencil off the page, which was a bit tricky! We spoke in depth about Barbara Hepworth’s Family of Man and had some brilliant ideas as to what each sculpture could represent. Finally, we made our own clay sculptures overlooking some of Henry Moore’s work. 
It was a brilliant day!
Help at home: Ask your child about the trip. What was their favourite part of the day? Which was their favourite sculpture and why? Or, take a look at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park website – can you find out more about the pieces of art we saw in real life?
Autumn 1: Week 7
Autumn
We’ve had a busy week doing lots of seasonal activities. After reading Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert, we looked closely at the beautiful leaf illustrations and used them as inspiration to talk about all the amazing changes we see in autumn.
We also began learning about hibernation and explored why some animals start to hibernate around October and November. We even made our own clay hedgehogs!
Help at home: Ask your child which animals hibernate and what they do to get ready for the colder months.
Maths
Our focus has been on using the language of ‘more than’ and ‘fewer than’ to compare groups of objects. Since we’re working with countable items, we use fewer rather than less.
Help at home: Gary and Barney are still arguing! Can your child help them out? Use this sentence to compare: “___ has more/fewer ___ than ___.”
(For example: Gary has more apples than Barney.)
Phonics
We’ve been busy recapping all the graphemes we’ve learned so far. There are no new graphemes or phonics sheets this week or next. Please continue to use the phonics home learning book.
Here’s a snapshot of some of this week’s seasonal chilli challenges…
Living and Learning: democracy
This week, our Living and Learning has been around one of the British Values, Democracy.
We use voting within the classroom. For example, what class reward the children would like or which book to read at the end of the day but this week it is our Junior Leadership Team elections so all the children had a difficult decision to make when giving their vote at the polling station.
Year 2 did a fantastic job delivering their speeches to be elected for the Junior Leadership Team (JLT). The children thought about what would make them a good leader and what ideas they would bring to the JLT.
Every child had their democratic vote by deciding who they’d like to see represent our class in the JLT.
Well done to Lydia May and Zara Mae for being voted as our new members of the JLT and thank you to Teddy and Rowan for doing such a good job representing the class as our junior leaders for the past year.
Help at home: Think about voting and why it is a fair way to make a decision. Are there any times you vote at home?
Visitors – PCSOs
This morning we had some visitors in school. They were our PCSOs. They came in to talk to us about fire safety, how to stay safe at Halloween and how to stay safe during Bonfire night. They taught us some really important and valuable things. Our favourite was the carrot trick. Where the year 1s were taught to stick the handle of the sparkler in the carrot and then use the carrot as a handle to help keep our hands safe and to increase the distance of the flame from our hands.
Living and Learning- Democracy
This week in Living and Learning, we have been learning about how to take part in democratic decisions . This has been perfect timing because our school has held our own JLT elections this week. We took part in an election style vote, where the Year 1s had to put an ‘x’ next to the name they wanted to be JLT and post it in the ballot box. Our winners were crowned today (Thursday 16th), and they were Zuri and Jesse! Congratulations and well done to everyone who took part and for all of their amazing speeches.
Here is a photo of the behind the scenes, where the children are writing their speeches.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Year 5 and Year 6 went on an amazing trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to support our Art learning for next half term.
It was great to see both abstract and figurative sculptures.
We started off the day by taking part in a workshop with a real artist! We investigated patterns, textures and shape. The children did some artwork without looking at the page; they had to put their sketchbook on their heads. They also created a collaborative piece where they had one minute to draw and then had to move on to someone else’s sketchbook to draw for another minute.
Another great moment was seeing Barbara Hepworth’s Family of Man in real life! We had a tour of the sculptures and learnt all about the story of what they represent.
Lastly, inspired by the sculptures we’d seen, we made our own out of clay, just like Henry Moore would have done. He used a maquette made out of plaster.
In the afternoon, we had a self-guided tour where we explored more of the park. We even managed to squeeze in some time for a run around and a game of infinity tig.
Help at home: Ask your child about the trip. What was their favourite part of the day? Which was their favourite sculpture and why? Or, take a look at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park website – can you find out more about the pieces of art we saw in real life?