Year 6 Class News

Living and Learning: Staying Safe week begins

Our Staying Safe themed week started today with a launch assembly by Leeds City Council’s road safety team.  This included some key active travel and safety messages.

The trainers worked with a number of classes throughout the day.

• Year 3 pedestrian training
• Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 scooter training
• Year 6 Speed Indication Device – checking vehicle speeds in the 20mph zone on Shadwell Lane

Another visitor, Richard from One Day Creative, has worked with three classes today to deliver e-safety themed drama workshops. Other classes will take part in this learning tomorrow.

Ask your child what they have learnt so far based on our four main objectives for the week:

• Staying safe online
• Staying safe at home
• Staying safe at school
• Staying safe in the environment

Thank you to those parents and carers who attended the e-safety session at the end of the day.  We hope you found it useful to learn more about your child’s e-safety learning.  To help with practical support with devices at home, O2 in partnership with NSPCC offer a free service over the phone, 0808 800 5002, or in one of their stores.

Tomorrow is Safer Internet Day so there will be lots of in class learning on this subject.  Have a look at our e-safety end of year expectations for your child’s year group.

An awesome author in Year 6

We’ve got some great writers at Moortown Primary. It’s brilliant to read about one of them, Thomas in Y6, being recognised for this. The writing below was done at home. Thomas was inspired by listening to an audio book of a Sherlock Holmes story read by Stephen Fry – and what great results just from listening to the story and soaking up the language!

The writing was shared on Twitter and a top literacy advisor, Pie Corbett, was impressed.

In some tweets to Thomas’s mum, Pie Corbett comments that it’s a good example of how children imitate their reading: ‘It’s a marvellous example of a child capturing the right tone through listening carefully to the book being read.’ It just shows that audio books – not just written books – can inspire impressive vocabulary and description! Pie Corbett goes on: ‘It’s interesting that he ‘heard’ it which also makes the point about the value of being read to…’

Well done, Thomas – we’re all very proud of you!

Follow Pie Corbett on Twitter.

Living and Learning – Let’s be more active

Across the nation, school’s are working towards providing a more active environment to learn in. Here at Moortown, we all Wake Up and Shake Up everyday to increase our heart rates which benefits our physical, emotional and mental health as well as improving our brain function.

In Year 6, we went on a bike ride in the class room for around 10 minutes which was great fun and got all of our hearts racing.

Living and Learning: Parent/carer workshops Staying Safe themed week

Thank you to all the parents/carers who have signed up to the workshops on offer next week during our Staying Safe themed week.

There are a few places left if you would like to come along.

Benchball

Some of our KS2 children took part in a come and try benchball event at Roundhay School tonight.

Competing against other local schools, they showed great teamwork and PE skills.

Benchball uses a lot of the same skills as netball and we hope that some of the players come and join the netball after-school club on a Monday – we have a few places left!

Impressive writing

This half term, Year 6 are learning how to use colons, semi-colons and dashes.

Here’s some great writing from Martha about a mythical beast where she’s used these skills independently.

Martha will now use the feedback to help her to improve her writing and aim to write just as well and with fewer mistakes in her next piece.

At home, read this together and ask your child what they wrote about. Can they show you how to use colons and semi-colons correctly?

A-maze-ing computing

As part of our Fighting Fantasy topic, we’re working towards creating our own maze-based games on a computer programme called Kodu. Last week we learnt about algorithms, decomposition and debugging.

Today, we’ve continued our learning about debugging by creating our mazes offline.

When we realised our maze didn’t work or wasn’t complicated enough or was too complicated, we had to debug in order to improve it.

Using blocks, Lego or Kapla helped us to make sure we kept the lines of our mazes straight and allowed to be symmetrical with our designs.

Once we were happy with the shape of the maze, we started to think about what the aim  of the game would be, adding points or obstacles in our way.

Next week, we’ll move our learning onto the computers and create our maze in Kodu.

At home, ask us how our learning is developing and see whether we can tell you how the game we’re creating will work. Here’s an explanation for how to play this maze.

Living Streets new badge design competition

We are proud to work with Living Streets to support our aim for active and safe travel to and from school.

WOW is Living Streets’ year-round walk to school challenge and every day our pupils log their daily journeys to school on the WOW Travel Tracker. Those that make an active (walk, bike, scoot or park and stride) journey to school at least once a week for a month earn a WOW badge. There are 11 to collect across the year all of which have been designed by pupils in their annual badge design competition.

Living and Learning: I can make things better

Year 6’s Creative homework was really impressive this week. They were asked to show how we can make things better and there were all sorts of creative responses with all sorts of different contexts: friendship, the environment, school, home life – the list goes on.

We always enjoy looking at each other’s homework and we write comments in homework books to tell each what we think.

Lots of children liked Sachpreet’s homework – and not just for the great photo of the class back in Reception. They liked how she’d gone through the whole class saying what she felt each person had changed for the better.

Let’s let the dice decide

Year 6 turned their day into a Fighting Fantasy quest on Friday. They let the dice decide.

The dice decided which line came into the classroom first.

The dice decided when we did what lessons.

The dice decided what we ate for lunch.

The dice decided who we played with at breaktime.

It was an interesting day and, although they could choose not to, most children allowed the dice to make all of their decisions.