How’s our Life topic going?
We’re all enjoying learning about ‘Life’. There’s been oceans of learning this week. We began by sorting animals according to criteria we chose ourselves:
- water, land and air
- colour
- deadly, not deadly
- vertebrate, invertebrate
We then had to try to sort them into which class they belonged to: mammal, reptile, amphibian, bird, fish, insect and plant. There were some animals we disagreed with and we had to learn more about these classes to be able to sort them correctly.
We’ve then focused on life in the ocean, looking at what different types of animals live there and finding out the similarities and differences in their life cycles.
BLAST!
Alright, Charlie is coming to Moortown Primary on Monday 08 February.
Alright, Charlie is a gender neutral, age-appropriate resource for young people which aims to raise the awareness of grooming and how to stay safe from unsafe adults for young people aged 8-11. The BLAST Project been developed in Leeds by a nationally recognised service working to prevent child sexual exploitation (CSE). It’s been funded by the Department for Education and will be available for all primary schools across the country from the end of March; however, schools in Leeds have been piloting the resource since September and so far it has received great feedback from parents, teachers and young people alike.
On the same theme, did you watch the horrific, but true, docudrama on BBC3 last week? Murder Games: The Life and Death of Breck Bednar tells the true story of Breck Bednar, a 14-year-old schoolboy who was lured to his death after being groomed online by Lewis Daynes while gaming. Whilst this seems a world away from primary school, Breck was only 14 years old. (Please note: it contains strong language and upsetting scenes.)
Check out our advice for staying safe on-line.
The last page of our age-related expectations contains age-appropriate skills your child should have in Year 5 and Year 6.
Silk painting
We’ve all tried something new this week. Our art project, linked to our Life topic, has been to create a new hybrid animal and then paint it onto silk. None of us had ever tried silk painting before and we all enjoyed doing something new.
Once we’d designed our new animal, we drew it on silk before going over our design in ‘gutta’. This is an outline which hold the paint inside the lines of your drawing. We practised on paper before using the gutta on silk.
Once our outline was complete, we painted the silk and loved watching how the colours would merge and bleed into each other to create a lovely effect.
What do you think of our final paintings?
Animal Antics
We really enjoyed getting up close and personal with some real life animals as part of our Life topic this week. We wore a snake as a scarf and learnt all about how the patterns of its scales help it to hide from its prey.
We also used our maths skills to estimate how long it was and then measured it against our own height to compare.
Next, we met some rainforest chickens and learnt all about how the mother has to sit on her eggs to keep them warm so that they’ll hatch.
Finally, it was time for the creepy crawly – a tarantula. Only the bravest dared hold this little creature.
What a fantastic experience for us all. Thanks to Miss Valentine for organising it!
School dinners
Our school dinner menu was discussed by our School Council this week. They also talked about ways to encourage others to try some of the new meals that are on the Spring term menu.
Did you know the menu is available to view on our website and also displayed on our dining room window. This is a good way to make your child aware of what the daily meals are.
The menu follows a three week cycle and it changed on a termly basis.
Here are the options for today.
School Council elections 11 February
Our current school councillors held their final meeting today as we prepare to elect our new school council. This year’s election date is Thursday 11 February.
Children from every class, including Reception, are encouraged to prepare a speech to present to their class as part of the election process. Our whole school homework before the election date (05 February) will give children the chance to plan their speech.
Thank you to our existing school council who have been involved with many decisions and discussions throughout the year. On today’s agenda, there have been discussions around the new school dinner menu, classroom reading areas, e-safety and general suggestions put forward by children in each class. It appears they have enjoyed the role as they all intend to stand again at the elections.
Leeds City Museum visit
We enjoyed our visit to Leeds City Museum on Friday morning. In three groups, we each focussed on one animal: polar bear, gorilla and sea turtle.
We started by visiting one of the museum exhibitions in order to find our animal and sketch it, noting what features it had and what it might use these for.
Then, once we’d had a chance to take a look around at all of the other interesting things inside the exhibition, we decided to take a closer look at some animals, exploring skulls and taxidermy.
We thought about how these animals were adapted to live in their environment before working as a team to create a 3D collage of our animal.
We had a great time and returned very excited to continue learning through our Life topic.
Borrow a book, borrow a bike
With 100 days to this year’s Tour De Yorkshire, a local bike library has been set up locally at Moor Allerton Library.
Leeds City Council has introduced a new Yorkshire Bike Bank which will allow residents to borrow bikes as well as books from the library.
Some of our latest Creative homeworks
More fab homework to kick off our Big Topic. Lots of creative ideas made our weekly homework review very enjoyable and we learnt lots from, and about, each other.
Diagrams, messages, facts and pictures were just some of the things we saw around the classroom.
We really enjoyed this poem from Riya…
Many of use decided to go ‘techno’ this week so we also enjoyed listening to, reading and playing the many PowerPoint presentations, blogs and coding that came from the Y5 email.
Update on ‘Life’ in Y5
This week has seen the launch of our new Big Topic, ‘Life’.
It’s an exciting week for us as it comes with a great (very informative) class assembly and a trip to Leeds Museum on Friday morning. We started our topic with an incredible journey from the beginning of Earth, 4.6 billion years ago, to this very day.
As a class, we created a giant timeline in our classroom and then wrote some fantastic, detailed recounts on it.
We’ll be using our ‘Life’ knowledge in English over the next few weeks to write informative texts on various animals: old, new and some just plain old fictitious. Help at home by looking through animal information books, magazines and websites for some vocabulary the children could learn and use in their own writing.
In Maths, we’re focussing on fractions, percentages and decimals. We need to know the relationship between these three areas of Maths and be able to fully understand what they mean and how to use them. At home, help by drawing images of fractions and then identify the equivalent percentage and decimal.