Class News

Assembly

It is our class assembly on Thursday 18 October. It starts at 2:40. The children are looking forward to sharing their learning.

See you there!

Thanks…

…to all friends and family who came along to the Class Assembly for Year 4.

This week, our SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) is I can make a fresh start, which is part of the SEAL theme New Beginnings.

A highlight for me was seeing how powerful this SEAL statement is in different contexts: learning, friendships, behaviour…

Here are some of your comments:

• “Impressed with the children’s confidence and their obvious enjoyment.”
• “Loud and clear message done really well.  Great performance (as always!).  Loved it.”
• “Great acting and good messages.”
• “Excellent entertaining assembly.  Loving the ‘X Factor’ style singing.”

Freeze-framing

Our class novel is Street Child by Berlie Doherty.  It’s given us great opportunities to explore narrative in many different ways.  This week, we tried to show how some of the characters might be feeling when they were evicted from their home.  Jim lives with his Ma and two sisters; when they can’t pay their rent they are thrown out onto the street.  These photos are where we created a freeze frame showing how the family may have felt when they heard the news.  The freeze frames were then given a caption to show what they were trying to portray.

Researching the old with the new

Year 5 became historians this week, researching how life was for Victorian children.  The iPads should have been steaming when we had finished – we found an amazing amount of facts!

     

                              

Juggling fun

Even more circus fun!

More circus fun

Circus fun!

We had a great time when Aaron from Splats came to see us last week. Thank you for your contributions so that this could happen. Take a look at what we got up to!

Spinning the diabolos

Observational drawing

Year 4 are drawing different types of transport through the ages.

Phonics teaching in Reception

We have begun our daily phonics sessions in Reception.  These are fun sessions involving lots of speaking, listening and games where the emphasis is on children’s active participation. They learn to use their phonic knowledge for reading and writing activities and in their independent play.

At Moortown we use a systematic phonics programme called Letters and Sounds alongside the actions of Jolly Phonics.

Letters and Sounds is divided into six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. There are no big leaps in learning. Children have time to practise and rapidly expand their ability to read and spell words. They are also taught to read and spell ‘tricky words’ which are words with spellings that are unusual or that children have not yet been taught. These include the words to, was, said and the.

At the moment we are focusing on phase one which will have begun in nursery. This phase paves the way for the systematic learning of phonics. We plan activities that will help children to listen attentively to sounds around them, such as the sounds of their toys and to sounds in spoken language. We teach a wide range of nursery rhymes and songs and read good books to and with the children. This helps to increase the number of words they know – their vocabulary – and helps them talk confidently about books. The children learn to identify rhyme and alliteration.

Ways you can support your children at home