Living and Learning: Healthy Eating
This week’s Living and Learning lesson focused on healthy eating. By the end of the lesson, Year 5 were able to:
- plan a healthy meal
- explain how to prepare a healthy meal at home
- recognise adverts are designed to influence food and drink choices
- describe some ways that home-cooked food might be healthier than ready-made (takeaway / processed) food
The children discussed the different food groups and how we could get a good balance of each food group into our diet. The Eatwell Guide is a key document to show how much of what we eat overall should come from each food group to achieve a healthy, balanced diet. The bigger the section the more food from that group we should eat. The balance of foods from each group does not need to be achieved with every meal but we should aim for the balance over a day or even a week.
The children shared meals that they thought were healthy and how they could help prepare them at home.
Help at home: look at the Eatwell guide together and think about any improvements that could be made. This may be having an extra vegetable a day, trying a new fruit or vegetable, switching to brown bread or pasta or having a healthier snack after school.
Reading: Performing Poetry!
This week, Year 5 have been looking at the poem ‘Rang-tan‘. It is about Rang-tan’s forest home being destroyed to clear the way for palm oil – an ingredient used to make products for humans. This poem has linked incredibly well with our Geography unit where we are looking at the Amazon Rainforest.
Today, the children had time to practise and perform thispoem. They focused on their oracy targets: eye contact, voice projection, gesture and fluency.
Help at home: Watch the video and discuss how we can help stop the destruction of forests.
Science: A smelly experiment!
For this unit of science, we are chemists. We are currently learning about reversible and irreversible changes; this lesson was focused on irreversible changes. Irreversible means ‘when a change cannot be undone to get the same substances back again’.
In groups, the children measured the starting components – vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. Next, they added them together into a bottle, with a balloon on top, to collect the gas that was created (carbon dioxide). This was an irreversible reaction. The scientific enquiry type was comparative and fair tests.
Help at home: Discuss other irreversible changes. For example, burning toast.
Living & Learning: Health and Prevention
Year 5 have been learning about germs and how to prevent spreading them.
We started off the lesson by taking part in a quiz. Did you know that the kitchen is normally the most germiest room in the house? And, there are 100,000 microbes in a sneeze?
The children then discussed cross contamination and how quickly germs can spread. We talked about the need to wash our hands to help prevent this spread. We could use soap or hand sanitiser.
Help at home: Discuss other ways we can stop germs from spreading.
Summer term after-school clubs
***Update***
The following clubs have availability and there is still time to sign up.
The after-school clubs for this term are available for booking from this Wednesday. We hope your child/children can get involved with our extra-curricular activities.
This term, clubs will run for 10 weeks rather than 8 weeks starting week commencing 29th April.
Please contact the office if you have any queries about the after-school clubs.
Super swimmers
UPDATE 26.04.24
Our team have qualified for the Nationals. What a great achievement – well done to all the children.
Our Year 5/6 swimming team competed in the English Schools’ Swimming Association North East Primary Schools’ Team Championship at the Grammar School at Leeds. A special thank you goes to one team member who joined the team late on.
All the children performed brilliantly throughout the afternoon competing against schools from Yorkshire. We are proud to announce the team came away with two silver medals in the freestyle (missing out on 1st place by just 1.2 second) and mixed stroke races.
Here are part of the team celebrating their success.
Following the team races, there was chance for the children to compete in individual races. In their breaststroke, backstroke and freestyle heats, the children came away with four 1sts, two 2nds, one 3rd and one 4th place.
The children were a credit to the school – supporting each other and giving 100% in every single race to get some great results.
A huge well done to the whole team.
We are chemists!
This week, we have started our next unit in science: reversible and irreversible changes. For this topic we are going to be chemists. Chemistry is the study of the properties of substances and the changes they go through.
In today’s lesson, we tested which substances could be dissolved in water. If our substance did dissolve this meant that it was soluble and created a solution. If it did not dissolve, then the substance was insoluble.
Our scientific enquiry type was ‘comparative and fair testing’.
Help at home: Discuss our new science vocabulary.
PE: Basketball
This half term our new PE unit is basketball. We had our first lesson and we practised our throwing and catching skills whilst in a game setting. Next lesson we will be perfecting our passes and thinking about tactics.
Help at home: Can you name all of the different types of passes?
Moortown Netballers
Some of the netballers from our after-school club took part in the Leeds Well School Partnership Bee Netball competition at Allerton High this week.
This was their first team event and we were very proud of their performance and team work. Thank you to parents for supporting and for helping with transport.
The Tuesday after-school netball club will be restarting in the summer term for those children who would like to come and join.
Netball activities are also available over Easter from Leeds Rhinos Netball.
Big Walk and Wheel final position
After the two week Sustrans Big Walk and Wheel walking, scooting and cycling challenge, we now have the final results.
In our category of small primary schools, we finished in 20th place out of 459 schools with an average of 89.81% active journeys to school. We achieved the highest national (20th) and Northern England (3rd) ranking out of those schools in Leeds taking part.
With a total of 1655 active journeys across the two weeks, this is a great achievement and we want to thank families for supporting this challenge.
Help at home: By walking, cycling and scooting to school, you are helping us make a positive change to the school run. With less cars close to the school gates, this is a safer and healthier way to start the day.