Children’s Heart Surgery Fund
This week, Lauren from Children’s Heart Surgery Fund came to visit.
Children’s Heart Surgery Fund is our new school charity, voted for by the Junior Leadership Team, and we learnt all about their work and how our donations will support the charity over the next year.
Here are some of our Junior Leaders with Lauren.
Reading and music – Sounds Like A Story
Today, we had the pleasure of welcoming Liz from the British Library to do another workshop with us.
This time, we linked together reading and music. It started by us listening to The Phoenix of Persia by Sally Pomme Clayton.
In groups, we practised with some instruments…
…and then analysed the story to match the characters to the desired sound.
It was a unique experience to think about the characters of a story compared to music in this way – describing music is called timbre.
Finally, it was time to create the rest of the story using our compositions. What a performance we gave!
Our final pieces
Behold… our final sculptures!
Help at home by asking your child to explain how we created ‘patina’ on our artwork.
We think Barbara Hepworth would have been proud.
Carols in Moortown
Today, Y5 and Y6 ventured into Moortown to bring some festive cheer to our community!
We blasted out some Christmas classics such as Frosty the Snowman and fan-favourite Feliz Navidad!
Oracy skills certainly played their part – we projected our voices loud and clear (and our adults did too!).
Can you spot Rudolph anywhere?
Thank you to all who came to watch us and support. We hope you enjoyed it.
Have a lovely, happy and healthy break and we’re excited to welcome you back in the new year.
Miss Goswami, Miss Wilson and all the 5,6 staff
Sculpture Progress
This week, our sculptures have really been taking shape.
First, we created some negative space…
…before adding texture.
Next, we had to add colour using some effective mixing to keep it consistent across the group piece.
Here we are in action!
Basketball new year camp
City of Leeds Basketball Club, who run our basketball after-school clubs, are running a new year camp. Details can be found below.
Gymnastics
Today, we had an even more exciting PE lesson than normal!
As we’ve been gymnasts, we’ve been practising skills such as balance, movement and control – including when mounting and dismounting apparatus.
In this lesson, we put it all to the test by using the equipment shown below. At times, we had to see how high we could go (which was hard for Miss Wilson on the rope) or how we could travel across the bars from one side to the other.
As always, we were safe and worked fantastically as a team.
It was a lot of fun!
Help at home by discussing the ways we kept safe in today’s lesson.
Sketches, Sculptures & Maquettes
In Art, this week and last week, we have moved away from Art History and turned our attention to our own art projects.
We sketched a maquette which is the first stage in our sculpture process.
Next, we came together as a group to create a joint maquette which is the final stage of our planning process.
Help at home by discussing the visual and tactile elements of art that they’ve used in their maquette such as line, shape and composition.
Living and Learning: mental health
For the past three weeks, we have been focussing on mental health in our Living and Learning lessons. This week, we discussed how to identify worry and actions that a person can take if they feel worried.
Year 6 identified how our bodies might feel if they are worried: a strange feeling in someone’s stomach, chest, head or throat; a faster heartbeat; dry mouth; sweaty palms; fidgeting; or difficulty concentrating.
We then focussed on different things that can be done to help relieve the worry:
- taking deep breaths
- talking to friends or family
- reading a book
- mindfulness activities
- playing a sport
- writing it down
Last week, we discussed different self-care techniques surrounding grief, which is the name given to the feeling of pain when experiencing a loss. There can be lots of different types: a family member moving away, a breakdown in friendship, or loved one dying.
Similar to how worry can affect us, grief can impact us in a wide variety of ways.
We decided that one of the best self-care techniques was to talk to someone and explain what’s happening.
Help at home by discussing what else would be useful, immediately after and a longer time after experiencing a loss.
Reading – to summarise
This week’s reading skills lessons have been about summarising.
Help at home by discussing the R2s for summaries!
We’ve been thoroughly enjoying our class novel: Holes by Louis Sachar. Today’s task was a little different to normal – we had to summarise the main points of the chapter using small key pictures.
Take a look how we got on!
Challenge your child to retell the chapter to you using the summaries above!