Christmas school dinner themed menu
Catering Agency, our school meal provider, will be running a special themed menu on Thursday 07 December. Please contact the office, before Monday 20 November, if your child would like a school dinner on this day.
Who do you think you are? themed week 20 November
Our next whole school themed week, based around identity, diversity and community, will be taking place from Monday 20 November, which also coincides with national Road Safety Week. A variety of events and visitors are planned to help us deliver this key aspect of education.
Events during the week will include looking at our own identity including belonging, self-esteem and mindfulness, diversity of people around us including race, age, religion, disability and gender. Classes will also be getting out into the community working with local organisations such as St Gemma’s, local care homes, Moortown Community Group and taking pride in the local community by litter picking.
Road Safety Week will run alongside our themed week where children are encouraged to take a walk/scoot/bike in the community on their way to and from school, maybe even picking up a piece of litter on the way. If your child walks, scoots or bikes, they should complete the slip at the bottom of the letter sent home (spare tokens are available in class), each day, for a chance to win a £10 shopping voucher for each class. We hope you will support this initiative in helping children make a healthy start to their day and also helping towards reducing congestion at our gates. Even by parking further away from school your child could then to do the final part of their journey by foot, bike or scooter. Bike and scooter storage facilities are available beside the Year 3 and 4 classrooms.
During the themed week, children will be researching local, national and international charities and a new school charity will be chosen at the end of the week to replace our current charities, Yorkshire Air Ambulance and Mind Leeds.
Friday 24 November will be a non-uniform identity day. Children are invited to dress in clothing that represents part of their identity, for example uniform from a club they attend, a team they are part of or support or traditional dress to represent their heritage. We invite a donation for the PTA Christmas fair.
Who do you think we are?
Do you think you’d recognise some of our staff in their early years? This photo competition is back and will run throughout the week with details to follow separately. Proceeds will be given to our new school charity.
Community coffee morning Wednesday 22 November 9-10am
As part of the week, we welcome parents and carers to an informal coffee morning to meet other members of our school community including representatives from the PTA, our governing body, Moortown Community Group and Friends of Moortown Park. I will also be available to speak to parents about our new Living and Learning scheme of work. A whole school community Wake up Shake up will follow at 10am in the main playground.
Mindfulness information session for parents
Please see the separate letter to sign up for this parent workshop on Monday 20 November, 2:30pm-3:15pm.
Can you help?
Pupil feedback from our previous Who do you think you are? themed week was to ‘learn more languages that other people speak.’ Do you speak another language and you would be happy to speak to children about this? If so, please contact the office to pass on your details. Also, do you have any local community links that may support our week?
Our website and Twitter continue to keep you up to date with key community events as well as our community noticeboard with lots of information about the themed week too. It’s going to be a busy week!
Anti-bullying week All Different, All Equal
Next week is national Anti-Bullying Week and our Living and Learning statement is I know how to STOP bullying.
The theme this year is ‘All Different, All Equal‘ with the following key aim:
The idea is to help children and young people celebrate what makes them, and others, unique and help them understand why it’s important that every child feels included in school, able to be themselves, without fear of bullying.
Our school definition has recently been reviewed by the new School Council and remains unchanged.
‘Bullying is when you hurt someone, physically or emotionally, several times on purpose.’
As part of their learning this week, children will discuss these aspects of bullying:
- Our definition of bullying (above)
- Types of bullying – cyber-bullying and prejudice-based bullying related to gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and belief, special educational need and disability
- What to do if children experience or witness bullying. The key message is to tell someone (start telling other people)
STOP can stand for two key messages: the definition (Several Times On Purpose) and the solution (Start Telling Other People).
All classes have access to their class I want to say box or a whole school worry box where they can tell an adult any concerns about bullying or any other issues.
KS2 classes will also be using dance to show this learning through dance workshops arranged as part of the week.
For further support, bullying resources can be found at…
- https://www.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/tools-information/advice-parents
- https://www.kidscape.org.uk/resources/
- http://www.bullying.co.uk/advice-for-parents/
- https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/news-blogs/get-involved-in-anti-bullying-week-2017-all-different-all-equal/
- https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neglect/bullying-and-cyberbullying/keeping-children-safe/
- https://www.childline.org.uk/info-advice/bullying-abuse-safety/types-bullying/
- https://youngminds.org.uk/find-help/feelings-and-symptoms/bullying/
Explorers Art Project
This week, we’ve been linking our Explorers topic with our writing and art learning. (There’ll be more about our descriptive writing in a separate post.)
We’ve created our own version of ‘The Land of Neverbelieve‘ and have been busy creating/designing this fictional land. We started by imitating the style of the book to create the outline of our island and have been thinking about how to turn this shape into a magical, mystical island. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be completing our final, neat versions which we’ll combine with our writing learning.
Here’s a few pics of our learning so far…
An orca inspired island.
The original ‘Land of Neverbelieve’.
Ethan practises drawing the ‘head’ of the island.
Pia gets her ideas down on paper – this island involves a tribute to Pia’s hamsters.
A shark-shaped land of mystery.
An imaginative take on a ‘Land of Neverbelieve’.
A detailed sketch of the final piece.
Football Training
Football training continued this week with 20 children from Year 5 and 6 in attendance. We focussed on our ball control and shooting before playing some small sided games.
Please note: we’ll always be outside for training (even in the rain). Please make sure your child has suitable, warm (if necessary, waterproof) clothing.
Roundhegians RUFC Engagement Afternoon
During the first term, we were lucky enough to be visited by some rugby coaches who are affiliated with Roundhegians RUFC. We learnt lots about rugby union and it was great to see our skills improve each session.
As a celebration, Roundhegians organised an engagement afternoon on Monday. Some children from Year 4 and Year 5 went along to Roundhegians to play in a non-competitive, fun tournament. Well done to all those involved. The coaches were extremely impressed with your attitude and behaviour – you certainly represented Moortown Primary well!
If you’re interested in playing rugby union, please visit Roundhegians RUFC. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me before or after school.
Reading with Reception
At Moortown, we do lots to create a love of reading: read a class novel, enjoy regular library sessions, have a weekly ‘love of reading’ free read session, read a range of interesting texts, take part in the ‘Extreme Reading’ competitions, etc.
In Year 5, we also enjoy reading with our Reception friends on a Friday. Reception and Y5 both look forward to this session. Year 5 do a great job of patiently reading to the younger children, asking questions to check their understanding while YR do a great job of reminding Y5 about phonics (and showing them how to stop after ‘3, 2, 1 Stop!’).
Here are a few pics from our most recent session…
Debate – Should eSports be in the Olympics?
During our reading session on Friday, we had a debate: Should eSports be in the Olympics?
We were given some information from FirstNews and had time to think about both sides of the argument. We thought about what a ‘good’ debater looks like and used sentence stems to shape the discussion.
We’ve been practising our debating skills quite a lot this year and have made huge improvements in our ability to use information to inform our viewpoint before putting forward a concise, logical argument.
Well done, Year 5!
Promoting a Love of Reading
Today, we visited the library for our weekly love of reading session (my favourite part of the week). We had the chance to sit in the library, relax and read. When we’re reading, we have our writing books with us in case we come across any vocabulary that we’d like to ‘magpie’ for our writing. If we find a word or phrase we like, we jot it down in our personal dictionaries.
We also use this time to read with an adult in our guided reading groups. We discuss what we’ve read and if we’re enjoying it.
Help at home by encouraging your child to read regularly. Even better, read with them!
Marvellous Maths Learning
In our maths lesson today, we carried out a little investigation (LO: square numbers). We were given 36 counters and had to arrange them in as many different arrays as we could.
However, one array in particular seemed to be different to the others:
We noticed this array was shaped like a square. Without realising, we’d taught ourselves what square numbers are. We then used the counters to show other square numbers. Now that we were confident identifying square numbers, we had a go at some pretty tricky reasoning.
Some of us applied our knowledge to this super challenging challenge:
We haven’t been able to solve it (YET!) but we will do. I was super impressed by how resillient everybody was and it was great to see people working together to tackle all of the reasoning and problem solving questions.
It also made for some particularly interesting self assessments:
- ‘I enjoyed having to be resilient.’ Ripley
- I found the challenge (very) hard but I tried and tried and I know feel confident.’ Amrit
- ‘I feel proud because I was resillient.’ Ethan