Geography: Fantastic Fieldwork!
On Friday, Year 5 ventured to Moortown Park – an urban green space – to conduct their Geography fieldwork. The children were trying to measure carbon stores in the locality. Carbon stores are known as ‘places where carbon is stored in the environment’. To calculate this, they measured the girth (the distance around the outside of something thick) of different trees. They did this by sampling: a way of collecting fieldwork data without measuring everything.
This coming week, we will use this information to work out how much carbon is stored in the trees.
Have a look at us being geographers:
Help at home: To link with our writing skills, spot the parenthesis used in this post!
Performance Poetry
During Reading this week, we have been reading poems by Paul Cookson. The first, The King of All the Dinosaurs and the second, Mr Shadow’s Shoes.
We watched Paul Cookson perform one of these and had a think about what made his performance so good! These are the R2s that we took from him:
- read with prosody
- well-rehearsed
- add actions
- change tone of voice
- change volume of voice
- involve the audience
We then used these R2s to do our performances! We worked in small groups to add actions, rehearse and practise reading with prosody. The performances were fantastic with some even memorising the words after 20 minutes!
Help at home by reading another poem by Paul Cookson. There are plenty to choose from here: https://www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/extract/13318/100-Brilliant-Poems-for-Children-by-Paul-Cookson.html
Leeds Diving
This week, we welcomed James and Oli from Leeds Diving. They came to visit Year 2 and 3 as part of their talent in diving program to unearth the next generation of world class Olympic divers in Leeds.
The children took part in lots of different exercises, including jumping, agility, flexibility, strength and speed, while James and Oli looked to see who may
have the right characteristics to be world class performers.
Well done to Sophie, Isla and Ailie who have been invited to take part in the second phase.
Autumn 1: Week 5
On Wednesday, we went on our local walk around Moortown. Before going on our walk, we used Google Earth to track our route. I was amazed at how sensible they were. Well done, Reception!
Yesterday, we had a go at drawing our own maps of our local walk.
Maths
This week, we’ve explored how numbers can be composed of 1s.
Throughout the week, we’ve been collecting groups of 2, 3 and 4 objects to help us understand that a ‘whole’ is made up of smaller parts.
Help at home: Can you make collections of objects at home? Remember the objects don’t always have to be the same!
Literacy
This week our focus was We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. We’ve had great fun using actions to retell the story. Click here to watch us.
Help at home: These pictures are mixed up. Can you remember the order of the story?
Chilli challenges
In the construction area, we had to build a cave for a bear. 
The Bee-Bots were very popular this week. We had lots of fun controlling the Bee-Bots around the bear hunt mat. Some children decided to make their own road!
Poetry picnic
This week’s poem is a short poem called Falling Apples. After listening to the poem, we talked about apple trees.
I’ve got an apple tree in my garden.
This apple is from my apple tree.
I have an apple tree at my Grandma’s house.
Click here to watch this week’s poem.
Reminders!
- Don’t forget to come to our Phase 2 phonics Stay & Learn and coffee morning next Thursday at 9am.
- Library books need to be returned every Monday.
- Please make sure your child’s reading record is in their bookbag every Thursday.
Marvellous Maths!
This week in Maths we have been beginning to learn about addition. We have been using the language of parts and a whole. For example, 3 is a part. 2 is a part. The whole is 5. We have been drawing part whole models and writing out addition number sentences. Below you can see some pictures of Year 1 marvellous maths work. Well done Year 1!
Help at home by investigating how different numbers are made. Remember to use the language of parts and a whole. Your child could then practise writing some addition number sentences.
The Spider and the Fly
This week, Y6 have been reading The Spider and the Fly – a poem by Mary Howitt. It was written in 1829 and used as a way to entertain but also to warn children about being overly trusting.
Below are some pictures of our reading lesson where we were using retrieval skills to draw the spider, fly and setting.
Don’t we look proud!
Y6 met Liz Pichon!
This morning, we had a surprise video call from author Liz Pichon – who writes the Tom Gates novels.
Liz talked about where she gets inspiration for her stories and how she plans out the novels before writing. She talked us through how she draws the doodles in her stories and we also had a go – what do you think of our bugs?!
Finally, she read an extract from her new book, Five Star Stories.
Watch us while we work
Thank you to those parents who were able to join us for our watch us while we work session this week. It was lovely to see so many.
Here’s a summary of what we covered and how we are encouraging the children to become more responsible for their learning at home.
Spellings – use the spelling guide for ideas to help with learning weekly spellings.
Daily reading – we thought about some of the reading skills the children are learning in Year 2 (fluency, prosody (using expression in their voices), retrieval, interpret and learning new vocabulary). Reading needs to happen daily to build up these skills. A brief note in their reading record books is needed after reading at home. We will continue to monitor the use of e-books at home. Please alert us to any access issues.
Maths – our number tennis games included counting in 2s, 5s and 10s and number bonds to 10 and 20. Play these when you’re in the car, walking to school or making breakfast. Hit the Button is a great online game to build up the recall of these facts.
Numbots certificates are awarded every Tuesday and it’s great to see children already achieving their next levels in Year 2.
Finally, here’s the help at home section of the website.
Please get in touch if you need any further support with your child’s learning at home.
Living and Learning: protected characteristics
In living and learning this week, Y6 learnt about discrimination, examples of it and its impact on the people around us.
Discrimination is the unfair treatment of people because of who they are or because they have a certain characteristic or characteristics.
Certain characteristics are protected by law and these are:
- age
- being married or in a civil partnership
- being pregnant or on maternity leave
- disability
- gender reassignment
- race
- religion or beliefs
- sex
- sexual orientation
We had lots of discussion about how those involved would feel and what could be done about it. Help at home by asking your child what they thought to these scenarios.
Challenge your child to name all of the protected characteristics without looking, if they can!
Watch Us While We Work
Thank you to all the adults who came to Watch Us While We Work this morning; it was lovely to see you all in our classroom. If you were unable to make it, continue to read to find out what we got up to.
To start, we looked at different strategies to help us learn our spellings. As you know, we have 40 spellings to learn by the end of the half term and therefore, finding fun ways to learn them is essential.
Here are a few we completed in class today:
We then moved on to practise our times tables, using our counting stick and dry wipe times table worksheets. To end the session, we read this week’s reading fluency text (I wandered lonely as a cloud by William Wordsworth) with a focus on our oracy targets.
We hope to see you next time!