BLAST!
Alright, Charlie is coming to Moortown Primary on Monday 08 February.
Alright, Charlie is a gender neutral, age-appropriate resource for young people which aims to raise the awareness of grooming and how to stay safe from unsafe adults for young people aged 8-11. The BLAST Project been developed in Leeds by a nationally recognised service working to prevent child sexual exploitation (CSE). It’s been funded by the Department for Education and will be available for all primary schools across the country from the end of March; however, schools in Leeds have been piloting the resource since September and so far it has received great feedback from parents, teachers and young people alike.
On the same theme, did you watch the horrific, but true, docudrama on BBC3 last week? Murder Games: The Life and Death of Breck Bednar tells the true story of Breck Bednar, a 14-year-old schoolboy who was lured to his death after being groomed online by Lewis Daynes while gaming. Whilst this seems a world away from primary school, Breck was only 14 years old. (Please note: it contains strong language and upsetting scenes.)
Check out our advice for staying safe on-line.
The last page of our age-related expectations contains age-appropriate skills your child should have in Year 5 and Year 6.
This week
Maths
This week in Maths, we’ve been looking at finding equivalent fractions. Equivalent fractions are two (or more) fractions that are the same size. We’ve compared fractions using fractions tables.
As you can see 2/4 are the same size as 1/2. Why not ask your child if the can spot any other equivalent fractions?
We’ve also started to look at using multiplication to find equivalent fractions. The golden rule for this is to always do to the numerator what you do to the denominator (ask your child to explain this).
English
In English, we’ve been looking at reports on animals. We spent this week practising writing a report on owls and next week we will be doing an assessed piece of writing based on the animals we saw at Animal Intuition. Animal Intuition was a workshop in school where we all go to handle a variety of animals we might not normally get to see.
Even Mrs Bald got a hold!
Life
During Science this week, we’ve been learning about different diets and food groups. We came up with our own actions to help us remember the name and purpose of the key food groups: carbohydrates, proteins, fruit and vegetables, fatty and sugary foods and dairy. Why not ask your child about their evening meals and what food groups they can see?
Sticky learning!
PE
For our PE lesson on Thursdays, we are enjoying dancing to ‘The Carnival of the Animals‘ by Camille Saint-Saëns. It is a musical suite of fourteen movements where each movement represents an animal. We are learning to dance in response to the music. We know to do heavy-footed movements for the elephant music and not move like dainty butterflies!
This week, we focused on movement. We were thinking about how the different animals move and how we can show this with our bodies. We had fun playing games where we had to guess the animal and did some great dancing! Here are some pictures showing some freeze-frames and our animal movement guessing game!
The day the animals came…
Silk painting
We’ve all tried something new this week. Our art project, linked to our Life topic, has been to create a new hybrid animal and then paint it onto silk. None of us had ever tried silk painting before and we all enjoyed doing something new.
Once we’d designed our new animal, we drew it on silk before going over our design in ‘gutta’. This is an outline which hold the paint inside the lines of your drawing. We practised on paper before using the gutta on silk.
Once our outline was complete, we painted the silk and loved watching how the colours would merge and bleed into each other to create a lovely effect.
What do you think of our final paintings?
Animal Antics
We really enjoyed getting up close and personal with some real life animals as part of our Life topic this week. We wore a snake as a scarf and learnt all about how the patterns of its scales help it to hide from its prey.
We also used our maths skills to estimate how long it was and then measured it against our own height to compare.
Next, we met some rainforest chickens and learnt all about how the mother has to sit on her eggs to keep them warm so that they’ll hatch.
Finally, it was time for the creepy crawly – a tarantula. Only the bravest dared hold this little creature.
What a fantastic experience for us all. Thanks to Miss Valentine for organising it!
School dinners
Our school dinner menu was discussed by our School Council this week. They also talked about ways to encourage others to try some of the new meals that are on the Spring term menu.
Did you know the menu is available to view on our website and also displayed on our dining room window. This is a good way to make your child aware of what the daily meals are.
The menu follows a three week cycle and it changed on a termly basis.
Here are the options for today.
Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year begins on 08 February 2016 and this year it is the Year of the Monkey.
Year 1 found lots of similarities to celebrations that we may experience including spending time with family and friends, enjoying special food, wearing new clothes and sending cards and presents.
- ‘I wear new clothes for Diwali.’
- ‘We give presents for birthdays.’
- ‘We decorate our home when it is Christmas.’
- ‘We have special food when it is Eid.’
The Chinese zodiac follows a twelve year cycle, each of the years being named after an animal. The Chinese believe that people born in a particular year take on the characteristics of the animal associated with that year.
We watched the story of how the order of the animals was decided and the children were encouraged to find out what animal they are.
For Chinese New Year, there are lots of events happening in Leeds if you want to get involved.
Gong Hey Fat Choy!
Animal Antics
Mags, from Animals Intuition, came into school this morning to show us and teach us about her animals. Here are some pictures:
