Santa’s Setbacks
A big well done to all children in Year 2, Year 1 and Reception who have performed three fantastic shows this week. Even after many rehearsals, we’ve been very impressed with the children’s focus and enthusiasm. Here is the cast…
Thank you to all family and friends who came to watch. We hope you enjoyed the show.
The Witches
On Tuesday, we had a brilliant time at West Yorkshire Playhouse watching The Witches.
Both classes had a great time and enjoyed seeing Roald Dahl’s famous story come alive.
There’s always lots on at the theatre – why not take a look? https://www.wyp.org.uk/about/whats-on/
Cookery skills
This morning, Year 2 had chance to develop their cookery skills while following a Christmas themed recipe.
We have recently been learning about instructions so we were able to identify some of the features of the recipe such as the title, what you will need, subheadings, numbered instructions and imperative verbs (bossy words to tell you what to do).
Can you identify the following skills and equipment that we used?
School Meals
Our school dinner menu is usually changed on a termly basis but this is now changing to half yearly. Our new menu will therefore be from February 2017.
When we return from the Christmas holiday, we will start on Week 3 of our current menu until the new menu is introduced.
Birdfeeder
This week, one of our Reception children brought a new bird feeder into school. She explained to the class that she had noticed the old feeder had broken and she’d like to replace it. After choosing a few friends to help, she set off to find a suitable place to hang the new feeder. The front playground seemed like the best option. The birdfeeder was filled with sunflower seeds and hung up in the tree along with a Christmas star!
There will be some happy birds around!
Have a look around the front playground and see if you can spot it.
Thank you.
What forces are in action here?
We’ve been learning all about forces for our mini topic and, once we understood pushes, pulls, levers and pulleys, we created our own Rube Goldberg machines. The children worked in groups and planned and made their creations all from their own ideas once we’d explored and researched examples of them through the internet.
Here are a couple of our machines. Our first one had a little hiccup but we really liked their pulley at the end to raise the flag. The second was our most successful; they even managed to sound the buzzer! You’ll see just how excited we were that it worked.
https://youtu.be/S0KjxWH24_Y
https://youtu.be/HUijnyElfWI
PE – Dance
Yesterday, in PE, Y5 became urban freestyle dancers.
We had a great time choreographing and performing an urban-style dance -off. We started by performing a section of the routine that we were given before creating our own short dance sequences in groups.
I was particularly impressed with the fantastic attitude shown by all of Y5 throughout the lesson. Despite dance not being everyone’s favourite PE subject, they all got involved, gave it a go and, most importantly, had fun. It’s important that we challenge ourselves to do things we might not always do on a regular basis – taking a ‘safe risk’, you could say.
Here’s a collage of pictures from the lesson. You might not recognise some of us as our urban dancer alter-egos!
Mathletics
Well done to children who, in recent weeks, have been awarded a Mathletics certificate.
We’ve not had any for a couple of weeks so why not log on and attempt some of the multiplication and division (our recent Maths learning) tasks that have been assigned.
While Mathletics is an optional activity to do at home, it’s a good way to reinforce learning which we’ve been doing in class.
Do let us know if you have any access or log in problems.
02 December 2016
This week, as usual, we have two homeworks. Both pieces are due on Thursday 08 December 2016.
The first is Talk Time:
I can reflect on my start to the year.
This links to our current SEAL theme: The 8 Rs for learning. It is an opportunity for children to think about their own learning and their attitude towards it. In class, we reflect a lot on our learning and Y5 are very good at this. They are honest and are not afraid to admit to making mistakes: this will undoubtedly make them better learners in the future. I’d like them to be as honest in this reflection as possible. Is their attitude consistent across the day/week? Is it consistent across subjects? And most importantly, I’d like them to make suggestions for how they could improve. No matter what is said, this conversation should be positive as it should lead to improvements.
The second is Practice Makes Perfect.
I can show I understand word classes.
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about word classes so far this year (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, articles) and this is a chance for children to show that they have remembered this learning.
Children have been given a sheet to help them show their understanding.
Forces – levers and pulleys
This week, we started our new mini-topic: Forces. We’re focusing on levers and pulleys.
To begin with, we used some paper and a toy car to figure out what we we already know about forces. Help at home by asking your child what forces act on a toy car or a falling piece of paper.
After that, we investigated levers and pulleys. Levers and pulleys are essentially a mechanism to exert a larger amount of force with less effort. To demonstrate this we did a little experiment:
That’s right. Despite weighing less than half what I do, Noah was able to lift me up. Ask your child how this works?
We also thought about more common examples of levers and pulleys – ones we might use in everyday life like scissors (ask your child about how were going to remember the silent ‘c’ in the word scissors) and lifts.
Tomorrow, we’ll begin working on a little project, in which we’ll apply our knowledge of forces, levers and pulleys: (attempting) making a rube goldberg machine.