Living and Learning – a body image guide for parents and carers
This term, our Living and Learning theme is Being me. Part of this learning is all about body image. This parent and carer guide has been designed to give practical ideas to support your child in building their emotional resilience in this area.
Dodgeball winners
Congratulations to the Year 5 dodgeball team who won the PE Partner North Leeds cup heat and have successfully gone through to the Leeds dodgeball final.
Living and learning – body image
This afternoon, we continued to think about ‘Being Me’. In particular, we focussed on body image. After defining what body image is, we discussed how some people (according to some research as much as 50% of young people) have a negative view of their body image.
We learnt that this could be influenced by a range of external factors: the media, our friends, our family, our culture, our religion, our role models, advertisements, the TV and famous people. Then, we created a ‘diamond nine’ of how these things affect us.
Focusing on how the media may affect how we view ourselves, we watched this video and discussed the impact changing the way someone looks could have on others.
We then thought about someone who is special to us and wrote down all the things that make them special. We noticed that hardly any of them were related to the way they looked.
After this, we thought about what makes us special and celebrated how good it is to be us. Finally, we summarised our learning in one sentence:
- Albert: ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like – it matters about your actions.’
- Josh: ‘It’s good to be me.’
- Isaac: ‘It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, just be you!’
- Theo: ‘It doesn’t matter what you look like, we’re all the same.’
- Martha: ‘I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter what we look like. I don’t care what people think – THIS IS ME!’
- Sachpreet: ‘No matter who you are, just be yourself.’
- Grace: ‘I can be myself and I don’t care what other people think – it matters what I think!’
- Kai: ‘Don’t be afraid of who you are!’
World Book Day themed menu
Catering Agency, our school meal provider, will be running a special themed menu on Thursday 01 March.
Amazing animals!
Today, we were fortunate to be joined by ‘Meet a Creature‘. During this hands-on workshop, we learnt all about evolution and inheritance (part of the science National Curriculum for Year 5) whilst handling some interesting, rare animals.
We all had the opportunity (which some of us declined) to hold each animal and learnt lots of facts about how it has evolved over time – we learnt other fun facts, too!
Here’s a few images of us holding some of the animals:
(Warning: look away now if you’re scared of snakes, tarantulas, bearded-dragons, geckos, chinchillas or children!)
Living and Learning this half term
- I cover my mouth (when I yawn, cough, sneeze). Get your child to demonstrate the ‘vampire’ method to family members at home.
- I can say something good about myself. It’s important that your child can confidently talk about themselves in a positive way.
- I pay compliments in a sensible way. Try paying compliments each day to each other!
- I receive compliments in a sensible way. Some children struggle to hear positive words about themselves, but this is important for self-esteem. Try paying (and listening) to praise and compliments.
- I know the difference between being proud and showing off. We encourage compliments to be paid – but encourage your children to know the balance between being having self-esteem and showing off.
- I recognise my talents. Talk to your child about talents, whether academic, physical, social or emotional.
Change4Life healthier snacking
Have you see the recent Change4Life campaign encouraging children to have no more than two packaged snacks per day to reduce their sugar intake? Remember fruit and veg are always the best snack and count towards your child’s 5 A Day.
The campaign is launched as Public Health England reveals half the sugar children consume comes from unhealthy snacks and sugary drinks. Children in England are eating nearly three times the recommended amount of sugar. Too much sugar can lead to harmful fat building up inside and serious health problems, and also painful tooth decay.
Recently children brought home the Family Snack Challenge. Can your family complete the 7-day healthier snack challenge? Change4Life provides lots of hints and tips for healthier snacking.
Supermovers
The BBC and Premier League have launched a campaign called Super Movers to encourage children to become more active while learning. Teachers will be using the video resources to get children moving in lessons throughout the day. This physical activity can contribute to the 30 active minutes children should be doing at school.
Why not use the Super Movers video resources to support your child’s learning at home. Activities range from learning times tables to apostrophes.
Living and Learning – D:Side Internet Safety
Last week, we were joined by Dave from D:Side who came in to teach us all about staying safe online. We had a great time learning about how to be safer online and, in general, Y5 were pretty savvy when it came to spotting risks online.
During the course of the session, many things stood out to me that I’d like to share with you as parents:
- 25/30 children in the class claimed to be using social media on a regular basis, using phones, iPads and home PCs (mainly, children are using Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp). The recommended minimum age for these sites is 13.
- Children who use Snapchat admitted that they follow lots of people that they don’t know.
- Similarly, on Snapchat, most children were unaware that Snapchat introduced a new technology called Snapmaps which allows other users to pinpoint your exact location. On the app, you must opt-out of this feature.
- Most children in the class thought that if you upload a picture online and then delete it, it’s deleted from the internet for good and nobody could ever see it again – this is not the case.
- When faced with a fictional scenario where someone has received four follower requests from complete strangers, only two children in the class said they would not accept any of them. That means 28/30 children were happy to become online friends with someone they did not know. The main reason children were happy to accept the requests were because these people were a similar age or had similar interests – if your child can lie about their age to set up their account, so can others.
- Many children are playing games online against people they don’t know and are striking up conversations with these people over headsets.
- There was a particular quote that stood out which many children agreed with: ‘The more followers you have, the cooler you look!’. Please do all you can to change this perception.
All of the above points apply to adults as well as children – please stress this to your child! It’s important that children are aware of this so that they don’t think they only need to be careful because they’re a child.
Living and Learning – staying safe online
On Tuesday, we learnt all about staying safe and being responsible online as part of National Internet Safety Day.
We were joined by a visitor from Splats who helped us create a short play about the evil Meanies and the robots. In the play, the Meanies were making the robots (or the people using the internet) say and do mean things. Eventually, the robots were able to pass on some kindness and defeat the Meanies. This scenario replicated being online and the negative things that could happen when we are using the internet.
In class, we watched a Newsround video about three people and the choices they made online. We discussed the importance of keeping passwords safe, not playing online too much and making sure we know who we are communicating with online.
Ask your child what they learnt during the day.
Here are some questions to consider during your discussion…
- Are they being responsible online?
- How do they know?
- How do you know?
- What should they do if they are ever unsure of something that happens when online?
- When/how often are they online?
- When online, what apps/games are they using? And, how safe are these?
