Evolution
In Science, Year 5 have been learning about evolution and how things adapt over time.
We learnt about Darwin’s finches – a study conducted by Charles Darwin where he explained why different birds had different beaks. Darwin hypothesised that birds with long, pointy beaks had adapted in order to eat insects. On the other hand, birds with shorter, sharp beaks had adapted to eat hard fruits.
We conducted an experiment to see which beaks would be better suited to eat sunflower eats. We used chopsticks to represent the long, pointy beaks with chopsticks and tweezers to represent the shorter, sharp beaks.
Ask your child which instrument was better for picking up the sunflower seeds and therefore what we concluded from this experiment!
Learning how to stay safe
A great week of learning all about staying safe.
Fire Safety
This week, we were joined by four firefighters from Moortown Fire Station. They came in to educate us about fire safety. It was incredibly useful and we learnt lots about how to stay safe. We were also very lucky to see the fire engine and ask lots of questions.
We learnt what fires need to get started: the Triangle of Fire. Ask your child if they can remember what this means.
Abbey House Museum
Today, we had a great day at Abbey House Museum. We were all impressed with how well behaved, enthusiastic and engaged the children were. Today, was a wonderful opportunity to cement our learning from topic lessons. We learnt more about how shopping has changed and what life was like in Victorian Britain.
Living and Learning: Staying safe week – safety around dogs
The visitor from our current school charity, Dog’s Trust, taught us all about keeping safe around dogs. Again, the children were excellent listeners and asked some great questions.
There were five main things to remember. Ask your child to talk about these and to show the action that goes with each one.
1.When a dog is sleeping, we leave them alone.
2. When a dog is eating, we leave them alone.
3. Remember to be quiet around dogs.
4. Dogs don’t like hugs. They like gentle strokes.
5.We never take. We always swop.
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!
