New SEAL theme…Good to be me
Our new SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) theme for this half-term, Good to be me, focuses on three main areas of learning:
•Self-awareness – feeling good about yourself, taking risks.
•Managing Feelings – understanding feelings, and why and how they lead us to behave the way we do – particularly the feelings of being excited, proud, surprised, hopeful, disappointed, worried and anxious and standing up for yourself –assertiveness skills, standing up for your views.
•Empathy
This theme explores feelings in the context of the child as an individual, developing self-awareness and helping the child to realise that it really is ‘Good to be me’. The theme is about understanding our feelings as well as considering our strengths and weaknesses as learners.
As part of our current mini topic, What’s the matter?, children will also ask ‘What’s the matter?’ from a social and emotional point of view, understanding feelings and thinking about how they can solve problems.
The key ideas and concepts behind the theme of Good to be me are:
Building emotional resilience
Children need to become resilient if they are to be healthy and effective life-long learners.
Coping with anxiety and worrying
Worry and anxiety are major features in many children’s lives. Many children have good reasons to be anxious. Exploring worries is important.
Calming down
Although getting stressed, anxious or angry are important and useful emotions, sometimes these feelings can be overwhelming.
Assertiveness
The theme encourages children to become assertive – that is, able to recognise and stand up for their rights while recognising and respecting the rights of others.
Understanding feelings and how they influence behaviour
The theme explores the relationship between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and the way each impacts on our behaviour. It looks at Flight or Fight rapid response to situations of threat and our responses to feeling threatened /under stress.
‘I respond to difficult situations in a positive way’ is the first SEAL statement for this theme.
Merry Christmas to all…
Latest competitions
We’ve had a busy end to the term with two recent competitions.
Firstly, our Year 5 and 6 cross country teams braved the elements in traditional cross country weather to take part in the Leeds North East competition at Cardinal Heenan. Despite the conditions, all the children were keen to compete and a special well done to Gloria, finishing 14th in her race.
Back indoors was the second round of the Sports Hall Athletics competition at Roundhay School. Unfortunately we didn’t progress to the next round but the children never gave up and there were lots of cheering and encouragement to support the team. Well done to all children who took part. They’ve learnt lots of new track and field events in the process.
We certainly looked the part with our new school polo shirts and hooded tops purchased by the PTA.
Getting green-fingered
On Friday, Year 5 braved the cold and headed out onto the field behind school. We helped dig up oak tree saplings to be planted elsewhere and kept a few ourselves to plant when we’ve get our own green space.
Bedtime reading
We like these top tips to promote bedtime reading from Book Trust.
Although these are specifically for children who are starting to read by themselves, there are plenty of tips to support children of all ages.
(The Book Trust’s advent calendar is brilliant, too!)
Students become teachers
I was able to put my feet up earlier this week as the children became the experts. First, we recognised what aspects of our learning we were stronger and weaker at. We then practised how to teach somebody else something we were confident with. Finally, we paired up and had a go at teaching.
Both student and teacher were positive about this approach and asked if we could do it more often.
8Rs for learning
Resilience, resourcefulness, readiness, responsibility, risk-taking, responsiveness, remembering and …reflection.
This week we complete our 8Rs SEAL theme. Children will have the opportunity to not only reflect on their learning in general but also reflect on how the 8Rs supports their learning.
Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…
Can your child remember the 8Rs and the associated animal?
The run up to Christmas
There are two weeks left before we all disappear for the festive season. It’ll be busy, as usual, in Y5. What will we be up to?
Topic – We’re starting to round off the learning we’ve enjoyed about space through Tim Peake’s mission to the ISS (International Space Station). To celebrate what a fantastic topic this has been, we’ll be collating all of our knowledge to take on a D&T/Science project to create our own rocket for launch. We’re still using Makewaves to showcase our learning.
English – Our noses are in newspapers at the moment. We’ve explored reports of the moon landings from 1969 and we’ll be coming back to the present next week to report on Tim’s upcoming mission. For the final week, we’ll get our creative juices flowing again and see if we can write for a given audience. The aim will be to create a Christmas story book to be read to the children in Reception and Year 1.
Maths – Dig out your protractors next week as we start learning how to measure angles. We’ll recap the names of different angles before learning how to measure them and then explore angles in shapes.
I can make healthy choices
We had lots of brilliant, interactive pieces of homework this week. During our homework review, it was great fun not only looking at what we had all done, but playing the different games and challenges that had been set.
There were all sorts of different challenges: word searches, pairs game, top trumps, voting slips and much more.
Braces, fillings and other teeth queries
This afternoon, Dr Natwer Tibrewal, a local dentist from Corner House Dental Practice, visited us to answer lots of dental related questions alongside discussing the importance of dental health.
- ‘What are fillings made from?’
- ‘How do you brush you teeth with braces in?’
- ‘Why does the dentist call out letters and numbers when you go for a check up?’
It was interesting to see how aspects of health are linked to the world of work.