Spring 2: Week 4
Literacy
This week, we’ve been reading the traditional tale Jack and the Beanstalk. We planted our own beans and talked about what a bean needs in order to grow. After planting our beans, we wrote a set of instructions about how to plant a bean.
Yesterday, we introduced the children to life cycles and talked about what a life cycle is.
What is a life cycle?
EB – small to big
BT – Something is a baby then turns into an adult.
RN – Baby chicks grow into a mummy and daddy.
SW – When babies are small they keep growing.
AG – Bugs start off as an egg and they get bigger and bigger.
RZ – They grow and grow and grow!
We watched a video about the life cycle of a bean and talked about the 4 stages.
Help at home: Can your child remember the life cycle of a bean?
Maths
This week, we consolidated our understanding of the composition of numbers by investigating the numbers within 7. We investigated the whole number using the part–part–whole model, e.g. 5 is a part. 2 is a part. 7 is the whole. We used cubes to show that 7 can be made by combining parts in different ways. We also played a game called Missing parts. Mrs Wood hid some cubes (a part) behind her back and we had to think about the missing part. This is something called partitioning (splitting the whole it into parts).
Help at home: Practise partitioning numbers up to 7 into two parts. You could use your toys, fruit or pencils.
Phonics
This week, we continued to read and write longer words including words ending in -ing.
Help at home: Practise writing these words: looking, marching, farming, waiting, morning, winking, singing. Don’t forget to use your phoneme fingers to segment!
What else have we been up to?
This week, our chilli challenges were linked to our focus story.
Poetry Picnic
Click here to watch this week’s poem.
Finally…
Thank you to all the parents/carers who came to watch our class assembly on Wednesday. We were blown away by how many of you turned up! We hope you enjoyed it.
REMINDER!
- Learning journey drop ins – Tuesday 26th & Thursday 28th March
9-9.30 & 3.15-3.45
Please return your sign up slip by Friday 22nd March.
Leeds Rhinos ticket offer
As part of our partnership, and as a thank you for all the great work that the children have been doing this year, Leeds Rhinos would like to offer children and their families an amazing opportunity to attend a match at AMT Headingley Stadium at a special discounted schools rate.
Date – Friday 5th April 2024
Kick off – 8pm
Opposition – Warrington Wolves
Venue – Headingley Stadium (LS6 3BR)
Tickets can be booked now through the school via School Gateway. Please note that tickets will go off sale at 10am on Monday 25th March 2024.
We look forward to welcoming Leeds Rhinos for an assembly next week too.
World Book Day
We’ve had a wonderful day we’ve had celebrating World Book Day. Our classroom was full of wonderful book characters. Thank you to all the parents/carers who came to our stay and learn session this morning. It was lovely to see our classroom so busy!
World Book Day Stay & Learn
The classroom is all set up ready for our World Book Day stay & learn session tomorrow morning. We look forward to inviting parents and carers into our classroom. See you all tomorrow!
York Railway Museum
Today, Reception went on their first school trip to York Railway Museum. We enjoyed looking at the trains in The Great Hall. We particularly enjoyed sitting on the high-speed Japanese bullet train – the world’s fastest passenger rail network. We also found the replica version of Stephenson’s Rocket.
We look forward to sharing more photos in our class assembly next Wednesday.
The Secret Garden
It was a pleasure to welcome M&M productions to perform ‘The Secret Garden’ for us. It’s a classic story (written in 1911!) about resilience and friendship. They gave it a modern twist with some familiar songs – it was very entertaining!
What a start to the week it was! Keep your eyes peeled for what we get up to on World Book Day, this Thursday.
Help at home by discussing what your child liked about the performance using the pictures above! Can your child retell the story?
We loved it!
Y2 – I really liked it because Master Colin was able to walk. He believed in himself.
Y6 – It was funny and had all the things a play should have. I’ll definitely be checking out the book from the library.
Y3 – The sign language song was cool and interesting!
Y5 – I liked the show because they had a creative way to change the scene. They had a great voice projection.
Spring 2: Week 2
Literacy
This week, we’ve been reading The Hundred Decker Rocket by Mike Smith.
This story has a very important message about keeping our planet clean. We watched a video about the 3 Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle. After watching the video, we thought about what we could do to look after our planet.
Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog (it’s along the play bar) and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip
after clip.
Put rubbish in bins.
Respect our planet.
Don’t leave rubbish on the beach because it could hurt our animals.
Put garden rubbish in the brown bin.
Reuse our water bottles.
Take old clothes and toys to a charity shop.
For our writing, we used our imaginations to design new decks for a rocket.
Yesterday, we watched a video of first moon landing and looked at some rockets from the past.
Help at home: Watch and talk about the above video again at home.
Art
This week, we used our artistic skills to do an observational drawing of a bunch of tulips.
Help at home: Choose an object to draw at home.
Morning activity
Every morning, Reception have a go at doing a writing activity before phonics. They particularly like it when there’s an interesting picture on the board for them to write about.
Help at home: Write a sentence about the above picture. Don’t forget to check your sentence.
Take a look at some of this week’s space chilli challenges…
Poetry picnic
Pop, pop, pop went the popcorn! We hope you enjoy watching this week’s poem as much as we did learning it.
School trip
We’re very excited about our first school trip to the National Railway Museum next Tuesday!
What will my child need?
- Rucksack
- Packed lunch
- Water bottle
- Suitable coat
PLEASE LEAVE YOUR CHILD’S BOOKBAG AT HOME.
Big Walk and Wheel
We are taking part in the 15th year celebration of Sustrans Big Walk and Wheel, the UK’s largest inter-school cycling, walking, wheeling and scooting challenge. The challenge runs from 11-22 March 2024. It’s free to take part and we would love everyone to be involved.
Last year, in our category of small primary schools, we finished in 24th place out of 514 schools with an average of 91.14% of our journeys to school being active. We achieved the highest national (24th) and Northern England (5th) ranking out of those schools in Leeds taking part.
What do you need to do?
Encourage your child(ren) to walk, scoot or cycle to school on as many days as possible during the event. Park and stride can also be included if you park at Marks and Spencer or further away from school and walk/scoot or bike the final part.
Why we are taking part
Sustrans Big Walk and Wheel is a great way to build physical activity in children’s daily routine which is important for their physical health and mental wellbeing.
Active school journeys also help to reduce congestion and air pollution outside the school gate. A 2021 YouGov study showed nearly half of UK children worry about air pollution near their school. And that children thought active travel was the best away to bring down these pollution levels.
Plus there are some great prizes to be won every day if we get enough children taking part!
Useful resources
To help you prepare, Sustrans has developed a handy free guide to walking, cycling or scooting to school. It is packed with advice to help you have hassle-free journey to school.
Download your free family guide using this link: https://www.sustrans.org.uk/sign-up-to-receive-your-free-school-run-guide/
For more information about the event go to www.bigwalkandwheel.org.uk . Enjoy the challenge!
Spring 2: Week 1
Welcome back! I hope you all had a wonderful half-term break. Thank you to those who have emailed some pictures. If you’ve not sent any, please do send them to moortowneyfs@spherefederation.org. Sharing photos from home helps to develop your child’s communication and language skills.
This week, we’ve been reading The Train Ride by June Crebbin. We pretended we were looking out the window on a train. We used our imaginations to think about what we might see.
Yesterday, we learnt about the first locomotive. We used this website to find out lots of information about Robert Stephenson’s Rocket. We looked at different train pictures from the past and present. After talking about what’s the same and what’s different, we had a go at putting them in order from the oldest to the newest.
Help at home: Look at the website again with your child at home. Talk to your child about Stephenson’s Rocket.
Tricky word password
This week, we’ve introduced our new tricky word password. When the children come in and out of the classroom, they have to read the tricky word on the door. We will change the tricky word daily to help children remember the tricky words.
Help at home: Continue to practise reading and writing the phase 2 and 3 tricky words.
Maths
This week, we further developed our comparison skills by looking at different sets. We encouraged the children to focus exclusively on the numerosity of sets, without being diverted by colour, shape or size. We reinforced the language of ‘more than’, ‘fewer than’ and ‘an equal number’ when describing how many objects were in each set. ‘Fewer than’ was used rather than ‘less than’, as the focus was on countable things.
Help at home: Which hand has more pom-poms? Which hand has fewer pom-poms? How do you know?
Poetry Picnic
Click here to watch this week’s poem. We had lots of fun mixing, pouring, frying and tossing pancakes.
We’ve got some exciting events coming up in March!
Monday 04 March – Whole school theatre performance
You should have received a message about this.
Tuesday 05 March – Our first school trip to the National Railway Museum
We are very excited about this!
Thursday 07 March – World Book Day stay and learn session – 9-10am
Come and read a story or two with your child.
Wednesday 13 March – Our class assembly – 2.40pm
Cross country star
Congratulations to our Year 3 runner who represented Leeds today in the West Yorkshire cross country final. Competing against pupils from Calderdale, Bradford, Wakefield, Kirklees and Leeds, he ran a fantastic race at Temple Newsam and should feel very proud of achieving a top 15 finish.
