Class News

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

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.

Homework Review

Written by Lori and Nicky…

First, we went looking around at each other’s homework, which was excellent of course. After that, we watched Danny’s presentation. Then, we threw the bean bag around to see which one people liked the most.

Here’s a few examples of our favourite responses:

From STOP to Takeover Day – Year 3’s Weekly Round-Up

This week’s Living and Learning theme was: “I know how to stop bullying”. This underpinned a lot of what we covered in class.

In our Living and Learning session, we discussed the impact that our words have on others.

Using our ‘friend’, we took it in turns to say mean things about them. With every hurtful comment, we ripped our friend to pieces.

Once there was nothing left of our friend, we took it in turns to say nice things about them, putting them back together as we did so.
We were able to put our friend back together, but what do you notice? Our words had changed our friend. We discussed how important it is to build each other up and understand the power of words.

In reading and writing sessions this week, we have analysed instructions by following some to make our own treasure maps (Learning Objective: Retrieving Information)…

…and collecting a word bank of appealing recipe language (Learning Objective: Which words interest the reader?).

In maths, (Learning Objective: Multiplying and Dividing By 4) we’ve used story problems and bar models to support our learning. We’ve used reasoning skills to explain if diagrams were true or false:

Thank you to the masses of parents that came to our assembly on Wednesday! The hard work you’ve been putting in at home really shone through.

On Thursday, we had some visitors from Y6 to share opinions with and discuss our learning.

Friday brought with it the long-awaited Takeover Day! Roles were shared amongst the class such as “Star Chart Monitor” and “Register Taker”. Children were extremely enthusiastic and relished the responsibility! They even asked if they could take on more chores at home!​

Well done to certificate winner Emily, for always knowing the right thing to do, especially how to stop bullying, and all of Year 3 for their fantastic assembly using all the 8 Rs for learning.

Money

This morning we’ve been combining coins to make amounts. We’ve spotted that there are different ways to make the same amount.

Celebrating learning

It’s the end of our Explorers topic this week and we’ve spent time reflecting on what we have learned.

This morning, we met with our Year 1 friends to discuss the topic. We looked at each other’s topic books and talked about the different learning. Next, we looked at some specific skills which we might have used during the topic (e.g. comparing and contrasting, teamwork, problem solving) and found pieces of learning which evidenced these skills.

The children were questioning each other about their learning.

• “Tell me about this work. What did you find out?”
• “Explain this learning to me.”
• “Would you like to do any of the activities again and why?”

Have a look through our photos showing how we celebrated our learning.