Help at home: spelling
When you’re helping your child at home with their spellings this week, use our spelling display to help. It has the learning points we’ve discussed in class and some examples of the kinds of questions we use to challenge pupils understanding.
Spelling is really important and we must ensure that children are learning and applying spelling conventions/rules instead of just remembering spellings for the test on a Friday.
Class Assembly – Weds 25 January 2.40pm
Please join us this Wednesday, at 2.40pm, for our class assembly.
We’ll be sharing our recent learning and would love for family and friends to come along and watch. For this assembly, the children have written the whole of it themselves so it will be great fun to watch.
See you Wednesday, if not before.
Netballers
Well done to children who participated in the Leeds North East High 5 Netball Come and Try Festival tonight at Carr Manor School. They played a few games against local schools in a friendly, relaxed setting with some coaching as they played.
Half term pop-up sports
Cross Country finalist
Following the Leeds North East KS2 Cross Country competition, congratulations to Grace, finishing in 6th position, who has qualified to take part in the Leeds KS2 Cross Country final in March.
Good luck in the final!
New themed menus
Catering Leeds, our school meal provider, will be running a special Australia Day themed menu on Tuesday 24 January. This themed menu has recently been selected by our school councillors.
Please contact the office, by 12 January, if your child would like a school dinner on this day.
Another themed menu selected by our school councillors is for Shrove Tuesday, 28 February.
Please contact the office, by 09 February, if your child would like a school dinner on this day.
What’s the matter?
We have started our new mini-topic: What’s the matter? In this chemistry based topic we will focus on materials and their properties. We’ll also ask ‘What’s the matter?‘ as part of our current SEAL theme: Good to be me.
Today, we revised some prior learning about the states of matter (ask your child what these are) and learnt about some examples of reversible changes (ask your child to give you an example of a reversible change). We focused on water as it can be a liquid at room temperature, a solid and a gas (ask your child how water becomes a gas).
Later in the week, we’ll focus on irreversible changes like burning – safety goggles at the ready!
New SEAL theme…Good to be me
Our new SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) theme for this half-term, Good to be me, focuses on three main areas of learning:
- Self-awareness: feeling good about yourself, taking risks.
- Managing feelings: understanding feelings, and why and how they lead us to behave the way we do – particularly the feelings of being excited, proud, surprised, hopeful, disappointed, worried and anxious and standing up for yourself.
- Empathy
This theme explores feelings in the context of the child as an individual, developing self-awareness and helping the child to realise that it really is ‘Good to be me’. The theme is about understanding our feelings as well as considering our strengths and weaknesses as learners.
As part of our current science mini topic, What’s the matter?, children will also ask ‘What’s the matter?’ from a social and emotional point of view, understanding feelings and thinking about how they can solve problems.
The theme also links with Moortown’s Got Talent, our upcoming annual talent show.
The key ideas and concepts behind the theme of Good to be me are:
Building emotional resilience
Children need to become resilient if they are to be healthy and effective life-long learners.
Coping with anxiety and worrying
Worry and anxiety are major features in many children’s lives. Many children have good reasons to be anxious. Exploring worries is important.
Calming down
Although getting stressed, anxious or angry are important and useful emotions, sometimes these feelings can be overwhelming.
Assertiveness
The theme encourages children to become assertive – that is, able to recognise and stand up for their rights while recognising and respecting the rights of others.
Understanding feelings and how they influence behaviour
The theme explores the relationship between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and the way each impacts on our behaviour. It looks at Flight or Fight rapid response to situations of threat and our responses to feeling threatened / under stress.
‘I respond to difficult situations in a positive way’ is the first SEAL statement for this theme.
School Meals
Our school dinner menu is usually changed on a termly basis but this is now changing to half yearly. Our new menu will therefore be from February 2017.
When we return from the Christmas holiday, we will start on Week 3 of our current menu until the new menu is introduced.
PE – Dance
Yesterday, in PE, Y5 became urban freestyle dancers.
We had a great time choreographing and performing an urban-style dance -off. We started by performing a section of the routine that we were given before creating our own short dance sequences in groups.
I was particularly impressed with the fantastic attitude shown by all of Y5 throughout the lesson. Despite dance not being everyone’s favourite PE subject, they all got involved, gave it a go and, most importantly, had fun. It’s important that we challenge ourselves to do things we might not always do on a regular basis – taking a ‘safe risk’, you could say.
Here’s a collage of pictures from the lesson. You might not recognise some of us as our urban dancer alter-egos!
