Food Technology: Summer Garden Salad
On Friday, Year 4 made a Summer Garden Salad. The children prepared all the ingredients, assembled the salad and enjoyed taste testing it afterwards.
We chopped most of our vegetables, grated the carrots and boiled the potatoes.
We stayed safe by keeping our fingers away from the knife and taking our time.
After we assembled all of the vegetables, we whisked together the yoghurt, oil and vinegar for the dressing.
Everyone tried it and the majority of us loved it! The dressing made all the vegetables really tasty and we all liked the different colours of all the ingredients.
Help at home by making it again! The recipe has been sent home with the children. Can you add something new? Could you try a different dressing?
Staying Safe themed week
Our next whole school themed week, based around Staying Safe, will be taking place next week. The key message is how to be safe in a range of situations – at home, at school, online and in the environment.
A variety of events and visitors are planned to help us deliver this key aspect of education including road safety (Leeds City Council); water safety (Canal and River Trust and RNLI); fire safety (West Yorkshire Fire Service); staying safe around dogs (Dogs Trust); first aid (Leeds Beckett and Red Cross); safety in our community (PCSOs) and e-safety (d:side).
Here are some events taking place.
Monday 08 July 3pm – 3:30pm d:side e-safety drop in information session
A representative from d:side, a health education provider, will be available to discuss e-safety issues and details of your child’s e-safety learning in the themed week.
Thursday 11 July from 8:30am West Yorkshire Police bike register event
Pupils are invited to bring along their bikes to be registered at this bike security marking event at school. Registering your bike helps police and retailers identify and verify the legitimate owner of bikes that have been stolen or are being resold. This is a first come first served event.
Friday 12 July 2:35-3:15pm Leeds Beckett University Carnegie Great Outdoors basic first aid session for parents/carers – there are limited places available so please confirm your place via school gateway.
The themed week is a good opportunity to continue to think about healthy, active and safe ways to travel to school. Children are encouraged to travel to school in a sustainable way, keeping safe along the way.
For a chance to win one of three £10 Love2Shop vouchers, we’d love to see their active travel staying safe photos, maybe using a traffic crossing or wearing their bike helmet (send photos to moortownoffice@spherefederation.org). Photos should be sent by 4pm on Thursday 11 July and winners will be announced on Friday 12 July.
Due to the rising costs of visitors to school, this year, we are requesting a voluntary contribution of £1 per pupil to go towards paying for visitors. This can be made on school gateway. Thank you for your support with this.
Finally, can you help? Does your job involve an aspect of safety? If you are able to support our Staying Safe themed week by coming into school to speak to the children, please contact me via the office or your child’s class teacher.
We will keep you up to date about events during the week on the class news pages on our website.
Thank you for your support to keep Moortown a happy, healthy and safe school.
Leeds Industrial Museum – Armely Mills
Yesterday, Year 4 embarked on our last school trip of the year! We visited Armely Mills; the museum was full of amazing, old machines that take wool from a sheep and make it into fabric.
Each class had a weaving workshop where they carded wool to make it smooth and straight. This used to be done by hand or, in the later years, by machines! Back in Victorian times, children as young as 7 were working on the machines… We decided that we’d much rather be in school learning!
Finally, we had a go at weaving ourselves. When we weave, there are two threads called a weft and a warp that go in different directions. The weft goes from left to right and the warp goes from top to bottom. We weaved a variety of fabric to create some beautiful weaves!
We spent the rest of the day exploring the other parts of the museum and the gardens.
A fun-filled day had by all!
Help at home by watching this BBC Bitesize video about weaving. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0015x4s/bitesize-daily-79-year-olds-art-89-year-olds-3-weaving
Living and Learning: healthy me and my body
In Living and Learning, we’ve been learning about our bodies.
The question we have been thinking about is: how are females and males different?
We came up with lots of ideas about how they are different but actually decided that many females and males have lots of similarities. For example; favourite colours, hobbies or hair colour.
One thing we decided that is definitely different is the body parts.
Year 4 discussed how animals (including humans) have different bodies for different reasons. For example, females can produce milk for their young whether they are a cow or a cat.
It’s important that we know the names of our body parts and that they belong to us. We reminded ourselves of the NSPCC pants rule:
Help at home by naming as many body parts as possible! How many can you name?
Waterstones!
Yesterday, 10 children from Year 3 and 4 went on a trip into Leeds to visit Waterstones!
The children all chose a book to take home and we had great fun looking at all the different choices that were available.
Take a look at some of the books that we chose below! Have you/would you like to read them?
We are designers!
This half term in topic, we are designers.
We’re going to be design, making and evaluating a pouch! Year 4 will get to choose the purpose of their pouch; it could be a pencil case, a purse or a general pouch.
A key skill that we’ll be using to make these pouches will be sewing. We have been practising sewing using a running stich and an over stitch.
We followed these instructions:
1. First, thread the needle and tie a knot in the thread.
2. Then, complete a running stitch using your Binka fabric.
3. Finally, tie a knot at the end of the stitch and cut the excess thread.
The vocabulary for this topic can be found below:
Help at home by asking your child to define what a product is.
Spelling list for 3.2
This half-term, our spellings are linked to the rules and strategies we’ll be learning in class:
- alternative graphemes: tion, sion, ssion, cian
- alternative graphemes: i, ie, y, i-e
- homophones: he’ll, heel, plain, plane, groan, grown, rain, rein, reign
- alternative graphemes: sc
- spelling patterns: que
- alternative graphemes: u spelled ou
Each Friday, you’ll be tested on 8 of the words from the list below.
| he’ll | scenery | bicycle | mosque | enough |
| heel | decide | possession | direction | mission |
| describe | plain | height | surprise | fascinate |
| league | plane | scissors | increase | magician |
| exercise | fatigue | groan | unique | country |
| guide | confusion | grown | rain | science |
| passion | tongue | fraction | rein | rogue |
| picturesque | politician | optician | reign | rough |
England Schools’ Swimming Association Primary Team Championships
This weekend, our Year 5 and 6 swimmers took part in this prestigious national finals event at Ponds Forge, Sheffield after recently qualifying in the North East regional heat.
Competing against schools from all over the country from Westminster to Guernsey to Devon, and with tough competition, all the team put in 100% in their mixed stroke and freestyle races. For some of our swimmers, this was their first experience of competitive swimming. We are very proud of how well all the children represented Moortown with such a great, supportive team spirit.
A huge thanks go to parents for their support with the team over the two events.
Races can be watched back on the following link.
1:08:00 lane 2 mixed stroke
2:40:50 lane 7 freestyle
Year 4’s observation over time
Last week, Year 4 completed our final investigation in our observation over time.
Over the course of the year, we have observed how the living things in our school grounds have changed.
We ventured into our school grounds and recorded what living things we found.
We then compared our results to what we recorded in autumn and spring.
We found that there were many more insects in summer compared to autumn, particularly bees! We also observed how we didn’t see any flowers in autumn but in summer there were too many for us to count!
Help at home by asking your child what they observed change in our school grounds during our observation over time.
What can you achieve?
Today, Jess Wright, who is a coach with PE Partner and leads one of our after-school clubs, came to speak to the children in an assembly.
At only 17, Jess has been playing football for over ten years and currently plays for Sheffield Wednesday. She also coaches at different levels from children to adults and referees too.
Jess has another role which is to try to get children, especially girls, into football and providing opportunities for children who want to get involved.
Jess shared information of how to get involved in local physical activities. This could be our school after-school clubs, other local physical activities listed in our guide for parents and carers or other opportunities especially around football and getting girls into football.
Leeds City JFC are a local club looking for new members especially in their girls teams.
Wigton Moor JFC are another local club with opportunities.
Catalan Soccer offer classes and camps.
Thank you to Jess for coming into school to inspire the children and to share her experiences around football and the opportunities and skills it provides.