Pumpkins!
We’ve been practising our fine motor skills using pumpkins.
Early Maths Workshop
Don’t forget the Early Maths Workshop on Tuesday 07 November at 6pm.
See you there!
Reading with Reception
At Moortown, we do lots to create a love of reading: read a class novel, enjoy regular library sessions, have a weekly ‘love of reading’ free read session, read a range of interesting texts, take part in the ‘Extreme Reading’ competitions, etc.
In Year 5, we also enjoy reading with our Reception friends on a Friday. Reception and Y5 both look forward to this session. Year 5 do a great job of patiently reading to the younger children, asking questions to check their understanding while YR do a great job of reminding Y5 about phonics (and showing them how to stop after ‘3, 2, 1 Stop!’).
Here are a few pics from our most recent session…
Debate – Should eSports be in the Olympics?
During our reading session on Friday, we had a debate: Should eSports be in the Olympics?
We were given some information from FirstNews and had time to think about both sides of the argument. We thought about what a ‘good’ debater looks like and used sentence stems to shape the discussion.
We’ve been practising our debating skills quite a lot this year and have made huge improvements in our ability to use information to inform our viewpoint before putting forward a concise, logical argument.
Well done, Year 5!
From Fallen Pegs to Emergency Evacuations – Year 3’s Weekly Round-Up
This week, our big topic highlight was the highly-anticipated den building! After lots of fantastic contributions to our construction resources, Thursday arrived and we couldn’t wait to get started.
First, in class, we discussed what a den actually was, and all the equipment we would need to be successful. Our first task was to group ourselves into teams of four, which was easier said than done!
We divided our building resources between our groups and found an area in the hall. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed something!
One of the hardest parts was tying our resources together and making everything secure, but we worked together in our teams to make our dens as strong and sturdy as possible. There were a few times where an emergency evacuation was needed to rescue children from inside falling bed sheets, but we lived to tell the tale…
Some of us had the brilliant idea of having strength in numbers and decided to band together to form larger teams! What a great idea! (This came in very useful when it came to packing away some very confusing clothes horses.)
Once our dens were assembled, we walked carefully around the hall to give feedback to each group and to note ideas for how to improve our own!
Next, to enjoy the fruits of our labour, we all relaxed inside our dens with our books, using torches, and listened to music. We think we have the explorer life cracked!
We even invited other classes to come and see our hard work, and we escaped with only one collapsed den!
Finally, it was time to clear up. This was probably the most tiring part! We had to work together really well to make sure everything went back to how we found it.
We had a brilliant, but exhausting, day and we couldn’t have done it without your generosity, so thank you very much for sending in your supplies once again. We do, however, send our apologies to the fallen pegs that didn’t make it home.
Please look through our pictures from the day below!
-Mrs Burgess and Miss Wilson
Promoting a Love of Reading
Today, we visited the library for our weekly love of reading session (my favourite part of the week). We had the chance to sit in the library, relax and read. When we’re reading, we have our writing books with us in case we come across any vocabulary that we’d like to ‘magpie’ for our writing. If we find a word or phrase we like, we jot it down in our personal dictionaries.
We also use this time to read with an adult in our guided reading groups. We discuss what we’ve read and if we’re enjoying it.
Help at home by encouraging your child to read regularly. Even better, read with them!
Den building
Linking in with our current Big Topic, Explorers, Year 4 have been thinking about shelters and dens. These, of course, are an absolute necessity when exposed to the elements! This morning, the children set to work on building their very own dens. Loaded with sheets, pegs, clothes horses and much more, the teams set to work.
Attaching the material to various supports proved quite a challenge.
Having a shelter is important when you’re an explorer!
All the children worked well together and were able to overcome a few construction issues. As the dens started to take shape, the teams suggested improvements for their designs and compromised with their ideas.
The finished dens were stable, well constructed and fairly strong. However, all the dens were separate to each other so we decided to link them together.
Using tunnels and more sheets, the children successfully managed to join all the dens together, creating one big one!
Finally, the dens were complete!
Time to relax and read inside on some cosy cushions.
Even a spot of meditation.
A big well done to all the children!
Such great fun!
Marvellous Maths Learning
In our maths lesson today, we carried out a little investigation (LO: square numbers). We were given 36 counters and had to arrange them in as many different arrays as we could.
However, one array in particular seemed to be different to the others:
We noticed this array was shaped like a square. Without realising, we’d taught ourselves what square numbers are. We then used the counters to show other square numbers. Now that we were confident identifying square numbers, we had a go at some pretty tricky reasoning.
Some of us applied our knowledge to this super challenging challenge:
We haven’t been able to solve it (YET!) but we will do. I was super impressed by how resillient everybody was and it was great to see people working together to tackle all of the reasoning and problem solving questions.
It also made for some particularly interesting self assessments:
- ‘I enjoyed having to be resilient.’ Ripley
- I found the challenge (very) hard but I tried and tried and I know feel confident.’ Amrit
- ‘I feel proud because I was resillient.’ Ethan
Gymnastics
Today in PE, we practised our balancing and jumping skills for gymnastics. We’ll be focussing on gymnastics in our Wednesday PE lessons for the next half-term.
In today’s lesson we worked together to create a range of balances before learning how to do a headstand. We’re not quite there yet but we have a much better understanding of the technique needed to perform this tricky balance. We also know how to do this safely – even how to fall safely if we lose our balance. Some of us could already perform a headstand so we acted as coaches to help everyone else through the various stages of a headstand.
A word of caution – don’t try this at home!
Fountains Abbey trip
Today, Y5 and Y6 visited Fountains Abbey as part our Explorers topic. The trip was particularly exciting because each group were able to plan their own exploration of this National Trust site.
Whilst some of us were off exploring the Studley Royal Gardens, the rest of us were spending ‘A Day in the Life of a Monk’. In this fun workshop, led by National Trust volunteers, we visited the abbey, learnt lots about its history and learnt how monks lived their fascinating lives. Did you know that monks considered heating using a fire a luxury? Or, that they had seven church services a day and one in the middle of the night? Even harder to imagine, they lived almost their whole life in silence. (Some of us would certainly struggle with the last one!)
When exploring, we each had a role to play within our group: map-reader, photographer, visitor surveyor, artist and time-keeper. We were in charge of making sure we visited the places of interest the people in our group wanted to see and had to ensure we were back at our ‘base’ at the correct time. It was really fun to politely approach members of the public and carry out a visitor survey (a geography fieldwork skill). Can you believe that someone had travelled all the way from the USA?
To enhance our geography learning from the classroom, we continued to compare Fountains Abbey with Machu Picchu. We found lots of similarities: they have similarly interesting histories, they are both ruins, they first became ruins in quite similar ways, both places were used by religious people to celebrate a god and we found out that farming was crucial in both places.
We all had a great time and will certainly sleep tonight (the adults will anyway). As always, the children were fantastic ambassadors for our school and we received several compliments from the public.
Here’s some quotes from the day:
- ‘I love nature now!’
- ‘It was great that we chose which parts of Fountains Abbey we wanted to explore.’
- ‘My favourite part was learning how a monk loved their life!’
- ‘It was great finding out about the life of a monk!’
- ‘It was really fun to go for a walk in a nice place!’
