Stay and Play!
From Code Breakers to Saving Mr Owen – Year 3’s Weekly Round-Up
Miss Wilson is reporting for Moortown Magazine.
Moortown Primary School, set in picturesque North Leeds, was where ground-breaking learning took place this week. Experts claim that Moortown Primary is home to some of the most hardworking pupils in the country.
This week, Year 3 has enjoyed: brilliant raft building, a confusing code breaker, phenomenal physical education, resilience in reading sessions, and fantastic fact files.
After being presented with the challenge of designing and creating a raft in order to save Mr Owen, who was stranded on a desert island, the students worked in pairs to meet the design criteria.
Will, a member of the class, said: “It was really exciting and fun.”
Jessica commented: “I liked using our own designs.”
On Monday, the students’ creations will be put to the test to see if they actually float and can save the poor Y4 teacher.
Problem-solving has also appeared in maths this week, where children were faced with a code-breaker situation. Number sentences were given to the young mathematicians, who had to use column addition to work out the answer. Their resulting number translated to a letter which formed a word. This is what the code breakers had to say:
Rayn, who enjoyed the task despite its difficulty, stated: “I found it really tricky to match the number answers to the letter codes.”
“It was hard because it was a race against other teams,” fellow classmate, Emma, said.
The class will apply this knowledge to their subtraction studies next week.
Year 3 were visited once again by local gymnastic experts. The focus, mirroring previous weeks, was balance and coordination alongside lots of elements of fun.
“I liked it because it was fun sliding on the benches using our bodies!” a visibly excited Yusayrah purported.
Leo claimed: “It was tricky bending down on one leg with the other one sticking out in front of you.”
Check out these epic slow-mo videos captured at the scene:
Stretching tall and jumping high
Balancing on the benches
Bunny hops
During reading this week, Year 3 has sampled a variety of tasks. One of these challenges was ‘Draw and Label’ where students listened to a description from their class novel and had to sketch out how they imagined the scene to look.
Hifza, who is soon to turn 8, said: “I thought this activity was interesting because I’ve never done it before.”
Meanwhile, Musa alleged that it was fun because he enjoyed labelling the drawing.
Continuing their geography theme in topic lessons (‘LO: to know about global regions’), Year 3 worked collaboratively to build a country fact file in pairs.
Regarding the task, Jemima remarked: “It was hard because some of the words were really tricky.”
“I enjoyed searching on the iPads,” said Mr Laverick, aged 7.
If you haven’t already guessed, this week and next week’s English theme is newspapers! We have discussed the features of news reports and learnt about the punctuation required for quotes and speech. (Ask your child what a colon means! “Hang on…”) This has been tricky for many, as it may be completely new, so when we did succeed with our learning, it tasted even more sweet!
It was great to meet lots of parents at the homework review on Thursday and I hope you enjoyed looking at and hearing about our amazingly creative homework! Here are some highlights:
I look forward to seeing you on Monday or Tuesday for parents’ evening.
Moortown vs Mill Field
Today, our U11 football team visited Mill Field Primary School. They played exceptionally well but unfortunately lost 2-1. Archie scored a wonder goal in the top corner to give Moortown hope but they narrowly missed out.
There were some brilliant individual performances and they all showed great teamwork skills throughout the game.
Exploring our local area
We had a great homework review today as the homework completed on exploring the local area was top notch. Archie created a great video of walking to school but with the camera around his dog’s neck; Edward presented a bird’s eye view of some local landmarks to us; Neive created a video of her exploration; and Ollie created a ‘guess where’ game for us to play.
Here are some more for you to see at home.
Photos of going to the shops
Lift-the-flap map with information about each area
Map with places labelled with pictures
A diary entry of a walk around the area
Some great quality spelling work this week, too, which was great to see, having discussed this as a class last week.
Class assembly
A big thank you to all family and friends who came to see our class assembly today. We hope you agree the children did a great job.
The children said they felt ‘great’,’fantastic’, ‘happy’ and ‘proud’ afterwards and so they should! Well done, Year 2.
Sensational Semi-colons
This was our first lesson on how to use semi-colons in a list.
We had to place the semi-colons and commas correctly.
We worked in groups so that we could discuss our decisions and help each if needed.
Using ‘contributions tokens’ helps us to make sure that everyone is contributing equally to group discussions. (Ask us how this works.)
By the end of the lesson, most of us could change a sentence which just required commas for a list into one which needed semi-colons.
School council elections
Our school council elections will take place next Thursday 19 October.
In an assembly this week, our current school councillors told us what characteristics are needed to be an effective school councillor.
These included:
- use all the 8 Rs for learning
- be respectful
- help others
- be a good speaker and listener (to members of your class and in the meetings)
- tell the truth
- be confident with your ideas
- accept the views of others even if you don’t agree
- be friendly and approachable
- make good choices in class and around school
Watch out for the whole school homework this week all about the election and democracy.
What an act of folly!
Y6 are taking part in yet another competition!
Fountains Abbey is hosting a ‘Design a Folly’ competition, the of winner of which will have their folly built in the grounds of the abbey itself.
Yesterday, we were visited by Chris Hinett, an architect who is working on the project. He helped us to mark out the size of the actual folly on the floor of our classroom so we could understand how big it would be when it was built.
We had to move all the tables and chairs it was so big!
Then, he taught us about scale and how our designs for the folly would have be drawn at a 1:20 scale. We learnt this in relation to how tall we were. Our actual height is a 1:1 scale and, if we drew ourselves as half the size, this would be 1:2.
We drew around ourselves (1:1 scale).
Then had a go at drawing us at 1:20.
Finally, we used our Maths skills (divide by 20) and Chris’s fancy ruler to check how close our drawings were. Our attempts were pretty close and Zack’s and Owen’s were pretty much spot on.
We finished the session by looking at some examples of follies and sharing our initial ideas before getting some ideas jotted down in our Arty Ideas books. We’ll be finalising our entries next week for them to be sent off over half term.
It’s our class assembly tomorrow
We hope you can join us for our class assembly at 2:40pm tomorrow (Wednesday 11th October).
The children are excited to show you some of our learning so far in Year 2.
Which of the 8 Rs for learning do you think is the most important?
In our Living and Learning session today, we’ve been reviewing how the 8 Rs for learning help us. In groups, we also ordered the 8 Rs according to which we thought were the most important. There was lots of discussion and differences of opinion.
‘I think being ready is important because then you are listening.’
‘I think resilience is important because you should try your best and never give up. Even if you get it wrong, it is still ok.’
‘You should take a safe risk and always try to do your learning even if it is hard.’
‘You need to be resourceful because if something is hard, you should find something in the room to help you.’
‘If you take a safe risk it means you have tried. It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong.’
It’s been great to see children using these 8 Rs during the school day.
Well done, Saahir for remembering to change our class calendar today without prompting.
Leah – you always respond in full sentences to show you have listened to the question.
Harpreet – you are always ready for learning with the correct equipment.
Billy – you show a confident attitude and take safe risks to further your learning.
Amrit M – you have shown resilience when using Mathletics at home to try to improve your score.
Amrit S – you have taken responsibility for your maths learning by doing extra practice at home.
James – you have been resourceful by independently using a hundred square to check your numbers are the right way round.
Tanvi – you have reflected about different methods to use for addition in maths.
We’re looking forward to seeing all your 8 Rs homework this week. Please join us to review this on Thursday at 2:40pm in the classroom.
Ask your child which of the 8 Rs they feel they have improved so far in Year 2 and which they might still need to work on. This guide for parents gives a few ideas to support this at home.