Wake up Shake up leaders
Thank you to our KS2 WuSu leaders who have led our daily WuSu physical activity this term and taught us lots of new routines.
Thank you to Mrs Charlesworth who has helped to run our WuSu after-school club where they have created all of the routines.
Next term, we will be running a KS1 and KS2 dance /WuSu club which will lead into a dance festival after Easter.
Happy Holidays!
We have reached the end of the first term in Reception and can’t believe how well the children have settled-and grown!
They have been so motivated to learn and kept us all on our toes! Every child has made fantastic progress, developed good friendships and are happy to join in and take part in all the activities.
Thank you for your help and support over the term.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Living and Learning: Creative cultural and spiritual homework
Wow – what fantastic creative homework based on the children’s cultural and spiritual experiences. We spent time looking at all the homework and the children were able to give stars to each other about what they liked. The homework gave a great insight into the identity (our current Living and learning theme) of the children in terms of what they celebrate or what they enjoy culturally.
We even heard about a festival for dogs, Dog Fest, and Jack had a great suggestion for a brand new festival to celebrate friendship.
All about levers
Our Science learning continued this week by exploring how levers work. Levers are a fantastic invention which require a smaller force to be applied to lift or move a load.
We used rulers and pencils to create our own levers and investigated what we needed to do to balance coins of different weights.
Grace made a great observation that the heavier coin needed to be nearer to the fulcrum (ask your child what that is) and the lighter coin should be further away. Once she made this suggestion, lots of us were successful in balancing two different coins.
We moved on to investigate this on a larger scale, finding out how far from the fulcrum different masses (900g, 800g… all the way to 100g) had to be to balance a 1kg mass.
100g had to be 79cm away from the fulcrum but it did balance with 1kg! Amazing.
See whether you can create your own lever at home and whether you can find some levers around the house. We started off our learning by realising just how useful a nut cracker is – it’s a lever you know!
Creative Homework
For this week’s homework, most children decided to share what they know about a religious festival. We learnt about Christmas, Diwali, Korean New Year, Eid and the Mexican Day of the Dead.
We enjoyed learning from each other…
Here are some piece of homework we really liked…
Humariah created a quiz about Christmas and The Day of Dead.
Martha wrote a letter to Stanley (the main character in our class novel)
Ben created information about Christmas using PowerPoint
Rohan learnt all about St Kitts (where members of his family come from)
Science: forces
We’ve been scientists this morning.
We predicted which of these cars rolled furthest. The result was that the car with the four big wheels rolled much further than the others.
After that, we thought about how we could make the car with the four small wheels roll further. We knew that we needed a smooth surface and we learned that this meant there would be less friction.
Jodie had the great idea to put whiteboards on the carpet and it worked as the car rolled further.
Amazing mazes from the Year 3 scientists!
As part of our mini Topic (Forces: Magnets) Year 3 have become scientists and have been identifying magnetic and non-magnetic materials.
We have also been identifying everyday objects that have magnetic components in. We discovered some games use magnetic forces to add to the excitement of playing them.
With this in mind, we decided to make magnetic mazes. The class shared their real-life maze experiences and we came up with a criteria for a good made. This included lots of dead-ends to trick the player and a clear start and finish point.
We started by drawing on the tables!
Don’t worry though, it was only with our whiteboard pens!
Then we were restricted by a smaller square, drawn onto the table, to practise drawing a maze on a much smaller scale.
Then we drew our mazes onto our bottles. The aim of the maze was to get the paperclip out of the bottle without touching it or tipping the bottle over.
We used magnets to attract the paperclips and trace our maze routes. We knew we were successful by getting the paperclip to the finish line.
Can your child remember the word that we use to describe what happens when a magnetic object is placed near a magnet?
Amazing mazes year 3. Well done!
Art inspired by Stuart Davis
We’ve been looking at art by Stuart Davis for the last couple of weeks. He creates shapes which cross over each other and change colour as they do. We used this to explore complimentary colours and have used watercolour pencils too.
After exploring how to create this style of art and different media, we used our own ideas to do a final piece of art.
Living and Learning
This week in Living and Learning, the statement is: I respect my community and other communities.
Year 3 explored the meaning of community. We discovered we are part of different communities. We are also part of a shared community at Moortown Primary School. We also talked about the fact that we are able to be a part of several communities at the same time.
Aadil shared that he is also part of a community at his Islamic school.
Harman shared he is also part of a community at his football club.
We discovered that we gain different skills from different communities: swimming, languages, gymnastics, socialising with different people, dance and caring for others and the environment.
We spoke about the fact that it is nice to be a part of a community as it gives us a sense of belonging.
Number facts – how to help at home
During this term, our focus in Year 2 has been to reinforce the children’s knowledge of number bonds to 20, in order to support their progress toward age-related expectations in maths. The ability to quickly recall addition facts and corresponding subtraction facts within 20, helps children solve more complicated calculations as they move up the school. For this reason, it is very important that children continue to practise these basic facts.
‘Hit the Button’ game is a great way to encourage children to practise addition and subtraction facts. If you have access to this game at home, spending just ten minutes a few times a week working on these would go towards helping your child internalise these facts and use them when solving more complex problems.