New additions to the library – thank you, school councillors
At their final meeting, our current school councillors spent time, using part of their budget, choosing new books for our library.
From sport books to science books, there’s a great selection. The books will soon be available to borrow from the library.
School Council elections
In our whole school assembly today, we launched this year’s School Council election process. Our School Council is one of the ways that children are encouraged to take an active part in pupil voice.
The election process allows children to develop an understanding of one of the British Values, democracy, with two representatives from each class, chosen democratically by their peers.
Our current school councillors spoke about their role over the last year and the qualities needed to be an effective school councillor.
These included:
- use the 8 Rs for learning
- be respectful and polite
- help others
- be a good speaker and listener (to members of your class and in the meetings)
- share and be confident with your ideas
- let others speak
- accept the views of others even if you don’t agree
- be friendly and approachable
- follow our school rules and make good choices in class and around school
Watch out for the whole school homework this week all about the election and democracy, ready for the elections next Thursday 25 October.
Bike and run at the Brownlee Centre
The Brownlee Centre is a great facility on our doorstep.
These bike and run sessions, run by the Brownlee Foundation, are open to all children, any ability, aged 8-14. Why not give it a tri?
Homework heroes
Year 5, who are brilliantly creative, submitted some fantastic homework this week.
Kirsten recreated a Roman building and drew a solider who was carrying a shield and sword.
Another submission used scratch (a computing program used for coding interactive stories).
Poppy displayed facts – ‘Did you know?’ style – alongside a Roman road.
Eve made a model of an aqueduct which is a bridge with amazing arches used to transport water.
Evie’s fact book, which was handwritten, must have taken her ages!
Lots of the submissions contained brilliant artwork! Well done, everyone!
Challenge your child!
Can you spot the examples of parentheses or relative clauses? You might see:
- ()
- – –
- ,,
Active travel winner
To mark International Walk to School month and our recent promotion of the Park and Stride site at Marks and Spencer, we are running a prize draw every week in October.
All children who make an active journey (bike, scoot, walk or park and stride) every day for each week are entered into a prize draw.
Each Friday in October, we will select a winner at random to win a £10 Love2Shop gift voucher.
Here’s our first winner. Keep up those active journeys to be in with a chance to win the next prize.
Traffic Survey into Maths
Yesterday, we thoroughly enjoyed our visit from Anne from Leeds City Council who came to take us down Shadwell Lane to conduct a traffic survey.
We recorded lots of data, including how many people were in each car, if they were wearing seatbelts and the many different types of vehicles we saw.
We also recorded whether drivers were doing anything to distract themselves such as eating, drinking or using a mobile phone which is illegal!
Using the speed camera Anne brought with her, we were able to see how fast the vehicles were travelling as they reached the 20mph zone. It was shocking to see that drivers took ages to slow down, some reaching 40mph at the 20mph cut off zone. Luckily, most slowed to under 20mph as they passed us or before.
Today in maths, we totaled up our tallies from the data we collected yesterday to produce some bar graphs. (This will refresh our statistics brains before we look at line graphs and two way tables in the coming weeks.)
We wrote conclusions about our results: “I know 69 people were wearing their seatbelt and 14 people were not,” and “I know that 4 people were using their mobile phone,” or “I know that most vehicles had only one passenger in them.”
Wheely cool art
Continuing with our Time Travel – Inventions big topic, we looked at the invention that started them all turning: the wheel!
We designed and built three different chariots out of Lego and tested them on how well they carried passengers, traversed rocky terrain and competed in a race.
Next came the evaluation: we rated each category out of five and gave it an overall score.
We’ve also done some wheely cool art this week. We explored complementary colours on a colour wheel and practised shading. Tone, which is the lightness or darkness of a colour, was something else we practised using our coloured pencils.
We decorated the colour wheel with pictures of inventions that have a lot to thank wheels for such as cars, segways, penny farthings, scooters and aeroplanes. The results were fantastic!
Can you spot the complementary colours, different tones and shading technique?
Living and Learning – Remembering a crazy journey!
This week’s Living and Learning session focused on remembering. We played a memory game where we had to watch a conveyor belt and remember as many items as we could.
It was quite tricky because they were completely random and moved quickly along. We did well, though, averaging about 7 or 8 out of 12.
Next, came the remembering trick. We discussed remembering items by thinking of a route in our heads that we knew really well. At landmarks along our imaginary journey, we placed one of the items there. Our journey looked like this:
Here comes the trick part. At your first landmark on your the journey in your head, you imagine the item there but in a silly, crazy and unforgettable way! Imagine it’s vegetarian sausages at the school gates. You could imagine the entire school gates are made out of sausages that squelch between your fingers (William), an amazing sausage smell hits you out of nowhere (Dan) or instead of Mrs Weekes at the gate, it’s a giant, dancing sausage instead (Maggie)! Whatever it is, make it ridiculous, make it funny and make it stick!
We tried the memory game again but with different items and using our imaginary journey to help us. Bananas in Pyjamas were playing tig in the hall, a palm tree had erupted through the floor of the 3/4 shared area and SpongeBob Square Pants was taking his coat and bag off in the 5/6 cloakroom! Here are some notes from our second try:
Almost everyone in the class managed 12/12, including Mrs Charlesworth! Quiz your child: can they remember the items, even now?
Bounce into basketball
School Savings Club
The School Savings Club paying in sessions for this year are at 3.15-3.45pm on the following dates (the penultimate Thursday of each half term).
- 18 October
- 13 December
- 07 February
- 21 March
- 16 May
- 11 July
If you’re unable to attend in person, please hand in any money to be deposited to the office in a sealed envelope addressed to Mrs Tiffany.
If your child would like to open an account, please ask at the office.
There is an extra incentive for pupils in Year 3 as Leeds City Council will add £10 to your child’s account.
