Spring term after-school clubs
*UPDATE*
We do have the following availability for clubs should your child wish to sign up.
The after-school clubs for this term are available for booking. We hope your child/children can get involved with our extra-curricular activities.
Please contact the office if you have any queries about the after-school clubs.
Living and Learning: D:side drug education visitor
This week, we had a visitor: D:side Dave! Dave came in to talk to Year 5 about the impacts of smoking and vaping.
First of all, we played a game of ‘Which is the most dangerous?’.
- Knives or a plastic cup?
- A toolbox or a Year 5 maths book?
- Smoking or vaping?
The discussion led us onto the impacts and risks of traditional smoking. Have a look at the key points:
We then talked about the different types of vapes and e.cigarettes and how their packaging is incredibly similar to some packaging for sweets. Take a closer look:
Finally, Dave spoke about how smoking and vaping can impact our health.
Help at home: How many different health impacts can you list in a minute?
Spring 1: Week 2
Maths
This week, we continued to engage with counting activities. A key focus this week has been the stable order principle – understanding that the position each number holds in our number sequence does not change. To help us understand the stable order principle, we used cubes, blocks and other resources to make staircase patterns.
When making our staircase patterns, we discovered that each number has a value of 1 more than the previous number.
Help at home: Make a staircase pattern at home. What will you use?
Poetry Picnic
This week’s poem is a short poem called I can build a snowman.
Literacy
This week, we continued to read Lost and Found by Oliver Jeffers. For our writing challenges, we created missing posters and drew pictures of some of the things we would pack if we went on a journey to the South Pole. We also enjoyed watching the live penguin cam at Edinburgh Zoo. 
Help at home: With an adult, use the internet to find out some interesting facts about penguins. If you don’t have access to the internet, you could look at a non-fiction book. Please bring your facts to school!
PE
On Tuesday, we enjoyed our PE session with a Foot-Tech coach. This half-term, we’ll be developing our fundamental movement skills: running, hopping, jumping and skipping.
Here’s a snapshot of some of our winter learning activities this week…
Home-link challenge
Year 2 trip to Abbey House Museum
What a great day! Year 2 learned a lot about the past by being transported back to Victorian Leeds. At Abbey House Museum, the children found out how people lived over 100 years ago and explored the street and all the shops, including the grocers, the chemists and an ironmongers.
Help at home by discussing how life was different in the past. Ask your child what they remember from our trip to Abbe House Museum.
Abbey House Museum trip
Year 1 had a tremendous day at Abbey House Museum which took us back in time to Victorian Leeds. We explored the street and all the shops, including the grocers, the chemists and an ironmongers. After that, we had a wonderful time eating our excellent lunches! In the afternoon, we explored the toy museum upstairs and even Mr McGriffiths found a toy he used to play with! The final part of the day was a workshop with a member of museum staff where we learnt about life in Victorian times. We were able to handle and use the artefacts and we learnt lots and lots.
Science – fossils!
Hello!
Our new science topic is Fossils!
Last week, we learnt about what a fossil is and what different fossils there are in the world.
A fossil is the remains or trace of a living thing that lived a very long time ago. They can be fossils of animals, plants or even animal poo!
We decided that fossils are important because they tell us a lot about the past. For example, we know a lot about dinosaurs, what they looked like and even what they ate because of fossils that we have found.
Mary Anning is our key scientist as she is known as one of the greatest fossil hunters to have ever lived. She found fossils in Lyme-Regis and she made amazing discoveries just from observing and studying them! We’ve been reading about her during our reading fluency sessions.
If you have a fossil at home that you are happy to bring into school, please do! We would love to have a look at different fossils in real life.
Help at home when you are travelling somewhere, quiz each other on whether an object is living or not living and whether it could be made into a fossil! Is this pen living? No! Is this rock living? No! Is this apple living?
Children’s Heart Surgery Fund
This week, Lauren from Children’s Heart Surgery Fund came to visit.
Children’s Heart Surgery Fund is our new school charity, voted for by the Junior Leadership Team, and we learnt all about their work and how our donations will support the charity over the next year.
Here are some of our Junior Leaders with Lauren.
Living and Learning: I know what a drug is.
In Living and Learning, Year 5 have been learning what a drug is, why people use medicine and how vaccines can protect the population.
We defined a drug as ‘a substance that changes the way the body or mind works.’ Then, we moved on to focus how medicines can help:
- prevent someone from becoming ill or stop a disease from spreading
- help someone manage an ongoing health condition, such as asthma or diabetes
- help someone feel better and relieve pain, such as from a headache
- help the body recover from illness
To finish off, we played ‘the vaccination game’. This helped us to look at how different percentages of vaccinated people can affect the spread of diseases. We learnt that the more vaccinated people in a population, the less likely it is for someone to get the disease.
We are Historians
History is the focus of our topic learning this half term. During this topic, we will be ordering significant events in our lives and we’ll be discussing them using historical vocabulary.
As the half term progresses, the children will discuss how significant things have changed over time: the food that we eat, the shops that we visit and how trade has changed.
This week, we will be ordering key events in our lives on a timeline, ordering events within living memory (the last 100 years) and discussing the key vocabulary past and present.
Help at home by talking about what shopping was like when you were younger. Have shops changed? How about the way you pay for things?
We are looking for someone (maybe a grandparent) to come into school to answer the children’s questions about how shopping and life in the 1950s is different to today. Please talk to Mr McGriffiths if you have someone in your family who would like to come into school in the next few weeks. Thank you!
Non-fiction reading!
This week in our Reading lessons, we have focused on a non-fiction book called ‘A Street Through Time’. This book shows us how life has changed throughout history. We used the page about Romans because that’s our new topic!
We first spent a lesson reading through the text and picking apart the language and features. Non-fiction texts have headings, sub-headings, labels and pictures to help the reader.
We then summarised each part of the text by matching it up to its correct sub-heading. Summarising means finding the main parts and describing it in a clear and concise way.
Here’s how we got on:
Summarising a text and deciding what the main, important parts are can be tricky! Help at home by practising summarising. Can you summarise your day in 20 words? 10 words? 5? 1?
