Start your day with an active journey
Today marks the start of International Walk to School month.
During October, we’re working alongside Living Streets to encourage families to travel in active ways to school. There are prize draws every week for children who have made active journeys to school (biking, scooting, walking or park and stride) with an added prize draw for those children who have made active journeys to school throughout October.
We realise that some families do need to come in the car to school so we are promoting Marks and Spencer car park (200 2 hour free spaces) as a place to park and then ‘stride’ the last part of the journey to school. This will avoid congestion at the school gate, improve health benefits to families and counts as an active journey.
Tomorrow, we will be working with Leeds City Council road safety trainers to deliver pedestrian training to Years 1, 2 and 3. Reception class will enjoy a class based safety session and Year 5 will be using the speed indicator device to check vehicle speeds in the 20mph zone outside school.
To start the day, join us for a mass park and stride meeting at Harrogate Road outside Marks and Spencer from 8:30am.
What? Mass Park and Stride
When? Tuesday 2nd October from 08:30am
Where? From Harrogate Road outside Marks and Spencer (200 free 2hr park and stride parking spaces)
Why? To encourage families to make active journeys to school and keep cars away from the school gates.
Who? Leeds City Council’s Road Safety Team, Kerby the road safety mascot, Living Streets representatives plus as many families as possible.
If you don’t come by car, join us on the route to school.
Early Reading and Writing Workshop
Don’t forget our workshop on Wednesday at 2.15 and 6.00.
Would you like to learn about phonemes, graphemes, split digraphs and more?
Find out how you can support your child at home with reading and writing.
Don’t worry if you haven’t returned a slip – just come along!
See you there!
Assembly
Year 4 will be performing their assembly ‘Around the World in 20 Minutes‘ on Wednesday 03 October at 2.40pm.
We look forward to seeing you there!
All aboard
Our travels through time have begun. With a focus on transport through the ages, Year 4 started off their journey learning about chronological order. The children put together a time line of events through history.
Following this, we studied early humans and how artefacts found have given us clues as to how these people lived. This initiated a conversation as to how history has shaped the lives we lead today.
Year 4 confidently carried out some research into cave paintings. I was very impressed by some of the children’s prior knowledge.
“Blood was used to add detail and colour. Bones were hollowed out so ‘paint’ could be blown through them onto the walls,” commented Albie.
“They had to use their legs as transport and the animals carried heavy items,” stated Jessica.
Did you know?
Four boys searching for a lost dog discovered paintings at Lascaux, France in 1940. These paintings were created around 15,000 BC, which would make them about 17,000 years old.
What did the paintings mean?
We discussed reasons as to why cave paintings were created.
There are three theories that the prehistoric man might have painted animals on the walls of the caves.
- The cave man wanted to decorate the cave and chose animals because they were important to their existence.
- The second theory could have been that they considered this magic to help the hunters.
- Prehistoric man could have used the painting of animals on the walls of caves to document their hunting expeditions.
Methods of Painting
Prehistoric people would have used natural objects to paint the walls of the caves. To etch into the rock, they could have used sharp tools or a spear. The paint or color that they probably used was from berries, clay, soot, or charcoal. The tools used to apply the paint could have been made by attaching straw, leaves, moss, or hair to sticks. They might have used hollow bones or reeds to spray the color on, similar to an airbrush technique we use today.
When we had finished our research and discussion it was time to create our very own cave paintings. Using different media, the children selected appropriate resources to make their painting look as realistic as possible.
Stay posted as lots more paintings to follow.
Pattern making
We’ve been busy copying and making patterns this week. Recent research has found that young children’s ability to spot mathematical patterns can predict later mathematical achievement.
Copying patterns is important as it helps children to focus on ‘What is the same and what is different?’
Why not encourage your child to spot patterns around them? They could have a go at copying repeating patterns and making their own.
Our favourite time of the week!
On Fridays, we read with our Reception friends!
For us, it’s great to practise our expression…
… and to make friends with our newest members of school.
For Reception children, it’s great to listen to different people reading…
… and fun to investigate different areas of school (with big chairs!).
Homework heroes
This week, we thoroughly enjoyed discussing a future invention that could help the world of today. The children had thought carefully about what the problem was and what a possible solution could be. It was great to see some creative spellings, too!
Spelling Practice
We’ve discussed what the expectations are for spelling practice today as this is a crucial part of our ability to improve with something that we all find difficult.
Here are some good examples of spelling practice to help the children know what to do for their homework.
Practising creatively will make it more enjoyable and encourages you to notice which parts of a word are tricky. There are lots of ideas in the back of your homework book for this.
Make sure you follow the instruction if you’re given a spelling activity. The activity was to come up with –ible and –able words and then create word families for them. Rohan has followed that instruction.
Positive about negative numbers
In maths, we’ve been counting forwards and backwards with positive and negative whole numbers (including through zero).
To practise, we’ve been playing a couple of games, including…
… using a number line …
… dice and counters.
You had to roll the dice, predict where your counter would end up, and move along the number line.
The person to get to their end first won!
Next up was Negative Numbers Connect Three.
The object of the game was to roll two dice and decide whether to add them together or subtract one from the other. 
The numbers on the grid ranged from -5 to 12 and were randomly placed.
It was challenging working out whether to add or subtract depending on which numbers you needed to cover!
Living and Learning – Y5 are resilient
This week, we’ve been focusing on our fifth and sixth of the 8Rs for learning: resourcefulness and resilience.
As we’re already pretty resourceful (we go and get resources when we need them or we use our surroundings to help us), this week’s Living and Learning session revolved around resilience – something we’re always keen to work on.
In small groups, we had to build towers using really tiny blocks. It was very fiddly and, of course, they kept falling down. It was very frustrating at times. In order to build the biggest tower, we had to work well as a team, keep calm and never give up.
We discussed our emotions throughout:
It’s important to recognise your own emotions and manage them effectively so that you persist with your task. This includes keeping giddy, happy emotions to an optimum level and angry, frustrated ones under control.
We’ve also looked at some maths that required resilience in order to solve the problem. Even if we didn’t get all the answers correct, or even finish, we never gave up trying. Here are some of our celebratory poses:
