Basketball
This afternoon, in our PE session, we’ve been learning basketball skills with Carnegie coaches.
5-a-day
This morning, we worked with children from Y1 and Reception class thinking about what foods count toward your daily target of 5 portions of fruit and vegetables. We then tasted had time to taste some!
Read some good guidance about this.
Self-image
This morning we’ve been looking at ourselves and talking about the ways that we are different and the same.
We talked about how boring it would be if we all looked the same.
It’s all about health
This week is the first themed week of the year and it’s all about health.
Over the week classes will work with different visitors to school including:
- d:side (drug education)
- Catering Leeds (food nutritionists)
- Leeds Force basketball
- Leeds City Council road safety team
- Tsukuru Judo Academy
- Leeds University dental students
- Rachel Frazer – Yoga teacher
- Heart Research UK
- Dr Natwar – Corner House dental surgery
- Claire Sparrow – pilates teacher
There will be lots of learning in class too – hand washing, body image, emotional health, 5 a day and much more. Keep an eye on our class news pages to find out more.
On Monday 23 November, 3:00-3:30pm, there will be an information session for parents, led by d:side, where you can find out more about the drug education sessions delivered to each class this week. No need to book – just come along.
Health Week
This week is a themed week. We’ll be focussing on health, discussing ways in which we can keep ourselves healthy. That might include food and drink choices; ensuring that we’re being active enough each day; maintaining personal hygiene through hand-washing and brushing our teeth thoroughly; and being aware of our mental health.
There are lots of visitor sessions to look forward to: drug education, judo, pilates, basketball and ‘Learn by Heart’. Additionally, the children will work with other teachers each discussing a different aspect of health.
Help at home by discussing how you stay healthy and ask what special learning the children have been doing each day. Will what your child has learnt affect any of the choices (s)he makes from now on?
Phonics mornings
Thank you to everybody for attending the phonics sessions last week. The children really enjoyed having you there to share in their learning.
Although phonics is important in teaching the mechanics of reading, reading is about much more. We also want children to read for pleasure. Reading to your child regularly will help them to develop a lifelong love of books and reading.
At the moment the children are enjoying ‘Room on the broom‘ by Julia Donaldson and ‘In the witch’s kitchen‘ by Nick Sharratt.
Takeover day
The running of school today was taken over by… our very own children! Dinners were served by Year 4, Y5 children were in the school office and even assembly was taken over by Year 6 (what a good job they did!).
The class were successful in taking over registration, giving out book bags and homework, giving out ‘cool class tokens’ in assembly and dismissing the class for lunch. They did a great job and they showed how responsible and mature they were. Well done!
Taking the register 
Giving out ‘cool class tokens’
Taking the register
Phonics feedback
Mrs Burke and the other Reception staff were delighted to welcome nearly all parents / carers into the classroom this week to watch the Reception children learn phonics – so important in developing reading and writing skills.
Parents who visited either on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday gained an insight into the general teaching that goes on in Reception, but more specifically learnt about how we teach phonics and how they should support their child’s learning at home:
‘It was useful to see the step-by-step process in which the children are taught so that I can attempt to support in a similar fashion at home. It was helpful to hear the language used in context (grapheme, phoneme etc).’
‘Very informative and well-organised. Definitely helps with how to support at home.’
Lots of parents left impressed by the children’s learning behaviour:
‘I was happy to see how well the children are engaged.’
Finally, we asked how we can make these sessions even better. We had a couple of suggestions – a longer session was suggested, and the session a little bit earlier in the year. We’ll consider these, although in previous years we’ve tried different things and this seems about right for most people. One parent suggested that we should remind others ‘that phonics is not the be all and end all’ and that we should ’emphasise the importance of reading for fun’ – we agree. The purpose of the session was kept quite specific, but Mrs Burke will include some reminders about this in subsequent newsletters because we certainly want to promote a love of reading.
Thanks again to everyone who came along. The next sessions are on 20, 21 and 22 January.
Creative homeworks
This week’s favourite anti-bullying homeworks as chosen by the children:
Column addition with regrouping
Earlier in the week, we were looking at column addition without regrouping (you may recognise this as “carrying the ten”). Since then, we have moved onto column addition with regrouping.
Let’s have a look at this calculation. To solve it using column addition, we would have to line up our columns first. 
In class we’ve been using hundreds, tens and ones counters to help us solve column addition questions. We’ve been drawing hundreds, tens and ones grids (HTO grids) to arrange these counters. 
We’d start by representing the top number on our HTO grid. We have one hundred, two tens (twenty) and nine ones.
Next, we’d add the ones column together by adding three more ones counters in our ones column.
After that, we’d “regroup the ones” by replacing ten ones counters with one tens counter.
We can’t have a tens counter in the ones column so we move it to the tens column.
We’d represent this regrouping in our written calculation like this. We have two ones left (two) in the ones column and an extra ten added to the tens column. 
Following that, we’d add up the tens column. We need to add three extra tens to do this.
We have five tens in the tens column and one extra ten from our regrouping totalling six tens (sixty).
Finally, we’d turn our attention to the hundreds column. In this instance, we don’t need to add anything up in the hundreds column.
For more information or if you need any advice talking about this at home, check out our calculation videos or catch me after school.