We are all different
Today, we were joined by some visitors from the National Institute for the Blind.
Following our own identities activities yesterday, we now thought about how people are not all the same.
People are different in many ways and today we thought about what it must be like to be blind or partially sighted.
I was so impressed with the questions the children asked.
“How does your white stick help you?”
“Do you bump into things a lot and hurt yourself?”
“How do you manage when going on the bus?”
All the children showed empathy and were very thoughtful when listening to the our visitors.
We had the chance to look through various types of glasses and goggles.
These either blurred or blocked our vision and gave us a good idea of what it must be like to be visually impaired.
Our very own islands
As mentioned in the news post about our topic review last week, one of the things the children have enjoyed the most throughout Explorers is designing their own islands.
Our writing was inspired by a fantastic book, The Land of Neverbelieve, which resulted in some brilliant descriptive pieces about exploring this fantastical land. It is an island in the shape of a dragon (although many children believed it to be a wolf) with weird and wonderful areas dotted around: The Dark and Spooky Mountains, The Flowering Meadow, Book Mountain and many more. We decided to create our own islands which have demonstrated incredible imagination and more amazing writing from the children.
Who do you think you are?
As part of our community week and a focus on identity, Year 1 joined in a workshop on mindfulness this morning. This is something we all can benefit from. The children were taught some techniques to help when emotions or situations become hard to deal with. Today’s learning helped us to realise how there were lots of different ways we could be mindful of ourselves and mindful of others.
Ask your child about mindfulness and breathing techniques.
In class, we looked closely at who we think we are. The children came up with some great responses to this. Following that, we started some work about our own individual identities.
Some super self portraits!
Mindfulness
As part of our community week and today’s focus on identity, Y6 worked on mindfulness this morning. This is something we’ve spoken about before but today’s learning helped us to realise how there were lots of different ways we could be mindful of ourselves and mindful of others.
We also learnt about lots of techniques we could take away and use if we were struggling with situations or if we just wanted to become more mindful.
Year 6 really enjoyed this session and we discussed which things they’d like to use in class. Ask your child about what they learnt and see whether there’s anything they could use at home, too.
Takeover Day Madness!
On Friday, the teachers weren’t feeling too good so let the children take over for the day! In Year 5, Mr Catherall didn’t really do anything all day because each member of the class had a job to do. It was great fun to take over the classroom and everyone did a great job – there were plenty of laughs throughout the day, too!
Anti-bullying drama!
Last week, in our living and learning session, we thought about Anti-bullying Week. We looked over our definition of bullying and discussed what we could do if we saw bullying happen. We then discussed the impact that being bullied could have on a person.
To conclude our learning, we acted out some short scenarios in groups. Each scenario showed an incident that could be deemed as bullying – we discussed each one as a class.
Charities
This week, we focus on identity, diversity and community in our Who do you think you are? themed week. As part of this week, children will think about our school charity. Currently, we support Yorkshire Air Ambulance and Leeds Mind. A previous School Council selected these because they wanted to help people, support a mental health charity and wanted to help local and regional charities. They were chosen because pupils passed on to School Councillors very clear and strong arguments.
We’ve helped these charities for two years now, so it’s time for a change. We need you to have a discussion at home about which charity would be best for us to support. We will now support one charity for a year. Each class will then discuss this and then the councillors will bring the views and ideas together to decide on the charities.
Once your child has decided on a charity, make sure they have clear, powerful reasons to support their views.
You might want to discuss whether we support…
- a local charity
- a children’s charity
- a charity which helps a vulnerable group in our community
- should we ensure the new charities are very different to the current ones or previous ones?
- should we need to have charities at all?
- if your child was to set up a new charity, what would (s)he choose, and (as always) why?
Shapes everywhere
During the week, as part of their maths learning, Year 1 have been looking closely at shape.
It’s important that by the end of Year 1 children can do the following:
- recognise and name common 2-D and 3-D shapes, including:
- 2-D shapes [eg rectangles (including squares), circles and triangles]
- 3-D shapes [eg cuboids (including cubes), pyramids and spheres]
The class have studied shapes carefully and have been learning to use appropriate shape vocabulary.
- name of shape
- sides
- curved or straight
- corners
- flat
- round
- point
We played a guessing game with shapes. The children had to guess the shape in the bag without seeing it. We gave clues by feeling the shape and describing it to our classmates. Year 1 were confident to use the mathematical language they had been taught to work out the correct name for the hidden shape.
This game would be easy to do at home, too!
After a shape walk around school (again a great activity at home or whilst out and about), we got to work on our own shape creations.
Take a look…
Taking over in spots!
Year 4 came into school looking slightly poorly yesterday. There were spots everywhere!
Luckily, no illnesses, just lots of support for Children in Need. It was great to see the effort made by the children (and possibly parents) in putting together an outfit that had spots. 
In addition to supporting a charity, Year 4 were able to take over some of the responsibilities in the classroom. This created a fair bit of excitement!
We discussed which jobs would be suitable and safe for children to take over and these are some of the ideas Year 4 came up with:
- taking the register
- delivering the tests
- handing out golden tickets
- delivering show and tell
- reading with Reception
- giving out stickers
- handing out cool class tokens
- writing certificates
- speaking in assembly
- reading the class novel
- and much more..
It was great to see some of the 8 Rs for Learning being put to use: - responsibilities
- risk taking
- being ready
- remembering
- being resourceful
The children did such a good job at taking over these roles with maturity, and a sense of humour, which is always a bonus!
Anti-Bullying Dance Workshop
Written by Grace and Noorpreet…
The dance workshop, for anti-bullying week, was great fun because we got to dance to songs. Each song was written by an artist who experienced bullying when they were younger. Our song was by Little Mix (Salute), encouraging us to stand up for ourselves. Near the end of the day, we got to share all of our dances, as did the the rest of KS2, and showed it to the rest of the school.
