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.
One of your 5 a day for free
Our weekly fruit tuck shop runs on a Tuesday playtime. It’s for Key Stage 2 children, with a charge of 20p per portion and a pre-payment option available.
Today, as part of health week, all children, including Reception and Key Stage 1, were invited to an extra tuck shop free of charge. This gave children who might not normally come to the tuck shop the chance to try it out.
It was great to see everyone enjoying a fruit-filled playtime.
Healthy packed lunches
As it is health week, copies of our Guide to Healthy Packed Lunches have been given out at lunchtime today as a reminder for children who choose to bring a packed lunch to school.
We encourage at least one piece of fruit or vegetable in packed lunches and snack items occasionally, as a treat, but aim for healthy options. Lots of learning has taken place in health week looking at quantities of sugar in drinks and the importance of drinking water to keep hydrated. We therefore encourage water which is freely available for packed lunch children.
There were also some prizes for healthy packed lunches.
More things for Health Week
Health week has been in full swing today. We started the day with a bit of judo, learning about the need to be respectful as well as handy tips for keeping each other pinned (safely and comfortably) to the floor.
In Key Stage 2, we’ve also completed half of our carousel activities and, in Year 5, we were learning all about the sugar in our snacks and drinks compared with how much we should be eating each day.
Health Week visitors
It’s been a great start to Health Week. We’ve looked at different types of exercise so far, playing basketball and learning about the benefits of Pilates on our posture and long term health.
Perfect Posture
Brilliant Basketball
We’ve also worked with d:side on the dangers of drug abuse and are looking forward to starting our health carousel tomorrow where we’ll work with all of the KS2 staff on a range of different aspects of health.
AstroPi
This week’s topic is all about technology. We’ve learnt how to write in HTML to create a webpage and we’ve then styled it using a programming language called CSS.
We’ve then been launching and programming our own Raspberry Pi which is a tiny computer that can be plugged into a monitor and controlled by a mouse and keyboard.
We had to work together to build our computer and this required quite a bit of problem-solving.
Finally, we had our computers made and ready to programme.
All that we had left was tackling the tricky language of Python to programme a message for Tim Peake to send home from the ISS on Christmas Day.
Tim is actually taking two Raspberry Pi into space so we also looked at how ‘sensor hats’ can collect data in space for us to compare to conditions down here on Earth.