Living and Learning: STOP bullying
This week is anti-bullying week and Year 2 have been considering this across different areas of our learning.
In our reading lesson, we read through our school definition of bullying and considered words we weren’t sure of. We spotted the important message of STOP – several times on purpose.
We also used our inference skills, and our school definition, when looking at this photo to consider what might be happening and whether this is bullying?
‘We can see the children are hurting the feelings of the boy on the ground.’
‘We know the boy who is sitting down is unhappy and upset because of his face and his head is down.’
‘We don’t know if this is bullying as this is one time and bullying is when it happens several times on purpose.’
Thank you to all the families who supported Odd Socks Day. There were all different sizes, patterns and colours of socks on show and it was great that the children could express themselves and celebrate their individuality while raising awareness of bullying.
Andy Day, CBeebies star and his band, Andy and the Odd Socks, has again written a song for Odd Socks Day. This time it is called “Change”, based on this year’s theme Change Starts With Us.
Finally, we considered what to do if any children were bullied, again based on the STOP message – start telling other people.
All the children considered who they would tell if this was happening to them.
As noted in our new child friendly anti-bullying policy, the message is clear.
STOP bullying – bullying is wrong!
We’re a happy and healthy school.
Living and Learning: Anti-bullying Week
This week is anti-bullying week so hopefully, given our homework, you’ve had the opportunity to discuss bullying at home. In class, we’re making sure that everybody understands what STOP means:
Several Times On Purpose
This helps us to understand what bullying is and therefore ensures we can all recognise what is and what isn’t bullying.
Start Telling Other People
This helps us to know what to do if we think we’re being bullied or if we think somebody else is being bullied.
We’ve also been discussing the different types of bullying so see if you’re child can give you an example of:
- emotional bullying
- physical bullying
- cyber bullying
Creating Characters
This half term, our focus in writing is description. This week and next, we’re learning about character descriptions. Today, we read some character descriptions and we even designed our own character to describe to someone else and see whether they could recreate it.
We realised that we had to:
- use comparisons
- use adjectives
- describe bit by bit
- go in a sensible order
Talk about your favourite characters at home and see whether you can take on the character description challenge too.
Science Vocabulary
We’ve started a new science topic – light. We made a quick bar chat to show how many of us felt red, amber or green.
Help at home by discussing these words and using them in a sentence!
Living and Learning – Secret Agents of Kindness
Change starts with us! That’s why Y6 have been given a secret mission to become Agents of Kindness to spread positivity and make a change.
“It’s Anti-Bullying Week so we have been asked to be kind to someone in particular and disguise it by being kind to everybody,” stated Poppy.
“We’ve picked one person from the tub and that you have to be kind to that person (your secret target) all week,” said Kismat.
Zakariya said, “On Friday, whoever you got has to try and work out who their secret agent was.”
Watch this space!
It’s Anti-Bullying Week
This week, it’s anti-bullying week and the theme for this year is ‘Change starts with us’.
Don’t forget – we are also taking part in Odd Socks Day on Tuesday 12th November.
Recently, some of our Year 6 pupils have created a child friendly anti-bullying policy which will be shared with the rest of the school during this week.
Child friendly anti-bullying policy
Written by: Evie, Zidaan, Omar and Eve (Year 6)
What is bullying?
In our school, this is what bullying means:
Bullying is where you hurt someone, physically or emotionally, several times on purpose.
What might bullying look like?
If any of these things happen several (lots of) times, it is bullying.
- Hurting peoples’ feelings, for example, name calling, teasing, threatening, ignoring or spreading rumours
- Hurting peoples’ bodies, for example, hitting, punching or kicking
This could be in person or online (cyber bullying) and could be because of someone’s race, disability, gender or appearance.
What could you do if you are being bullied?
Start
Telling
Other
People
Who could you tell?
- Mrs Weekes/Mrs Freeman/Mrs Russell/Mrs Small (they are child protection staff)
- Mrs Taylor (Health Leader)
- Any other members of staff
- Friends
- Someone in your family
- Childline (0800 1111)
- Write a worry slip and put it in your Living and Learning box or the whole school worry box
- Email stayingsafe@spherefederation.org
Our views on bullying
STOP bullying – bullying is wrong!
We’re a happy and healthy school.
Learning at home
Thank you for all the ‘home learning moments’ you have been sending.
It’s wonderful to see how keen the children are to continue their reading and writing at home.
Please keep sending those ‘wow’ moments.
Phonics
Phonics
Thank you for attending the phonics mornings last week. We hope you found them useful.
We are continuing with phase 2 of our phonics programme, ‘Letters and Sounds’ and are learning ck, e, u and r. Children will be taught that two letters making one sound such as ck is called a digraph. Other digraphs include qu, th and sh.
In this phase children will be taught the phonemes (sounds) for a number of letters (graphemes), which phoneme is represented by which grapheme and that a phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, /ll/ as in b-e-ll. We use Jolly Phonics actions to help children remember these phonemes. Each week the children will bring a set of letters home to learn. Please practise these every day and keep them in their book bag for us to add to.
Your child will be taught how to pronounce the phonemes correctly to make blending easier.
Sounds should be sustained where possible (e.g. sss, fff, mmm) and, where this is not possible, ‘uh’ sounds after consonants should be reduced as far as possible (e.g. try to avoid saying ‘buh’, ‘cuh’).
We will begin learning ‘tricky words’ next week which are words which are not phonetic. Please help your child to read these by recognition. The first tricky words are the and to which we will be sending home for the children to learn.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask.
Treasure Hunt
We kicked off our Where in the World Am I? geography topic with a TREASURE HUNT in Moortown park!
In teams, we used a map, compass points and a trundle wheel to locate the stash!
We had to carefully read and precisely follow the directions – one metre South East instead of South West would have had catastrophic consequences!
Once each location was reached, we had to find the coin and note down the letter that was on it. There was a lot of excited cheers that kept ringing out across the park!
Ask your child to tell you the word that was spelled out on the treasure! Hint: it means the lines on maps that show how steep or gentle the terrain is.
Can you spot a way that we made sure we were safe on our treasure hunt?
Poppies
Ever since then, poppies have become a symbol of remembering not just those who gave their lives in World War One, but all those who have died on behalf of their country.
Today, we took the opportunity to have a go at sketching poppies. I’m sure you will agree, these drawings are simply stunning.
