After-school clubs – it’s not too late to sign up
Our Autumn term after-school clubs start next week for 8 weeks.
We do have some spaces available so please contact the office if you would like your child/children to take part.
Clubs on offer include hockey, multi-sports, multi-skills, dance, gymnastics, cookery, Lego Club and Code Club.
Reading with expression
We’re learning a number of reading skills from the same text this week and today we spent our reading lesson familiarising ourselves with it. In pairs, we took a section of the text and prepared to perform it for the rest of the class. There were some great performances!
Now we’re all ready to take on some fact finding and inference questions tomorrow and Wednesday.
School Savings Club dates for paying in
The School Savings Club paying in sessions for this year are at 3.15-3.45pm on the following dates (the penultimate Thursday of each half term).
- 12 October
- 07 December
- 01 February
- 22 March
- 17 May
- 12 July
If you’re unable to attend in person, please hand in any money to be deposited to the office in a sealed envelope addressed to Mrs Tiffany.
Information will shortly be sent home about the accounts and if your child would like to open account, please enquire at the office. There is an extra incentive for pupils in Year 3 as Leeds City Council will add £10 to your child’s account.
Investigating in Science
Each week, Year 6 are taking on a Science investigation. For the last two weeks, we’ve been discussing whether we can find out the answer to this question:
How long does it take for a 10/11 year old to run 100m?
Last week, we prepared for the investigation by finding out how far 100m would be in our playground, discussing how we would organise ourselves as a class, and preparing data recording sheets.
On Friday, we carried out the investigation which actually tired us out quite a lot.
We decided that each person should run three times which would then allow us to create an average time for that person. So that we didn’t skew our results, each person in the team ran before taking on their second go; this meant each person had the same rest time between runs.
Data was recorded for each person and all groups made very good choices in recording their data in a sensible and organised manner.
This week, we managed to calculate an average for each person. Next week, we’ll create a group average which we’ll then use to create a class average and decide whether this information can be used to answer our original question.
Practice that feels like play!
Practice that feels like play! Does this sound beneficial for your child? Have a look at IXL. It’s an online tool where you can access different activities to help your child practise basic skills.
It’s split into year groups, specifically looking at English and Maths, then each subject is broken down into sections. You can get a flavour of the activities by hovering over the title and can have a go at some of them – it looks great fun and very child friendly. The questions are all interactive and there are detailed explanations for new concepts.
There is a small monthly fee if you wish to sign up. Take a look – it might be something you want to explore.
More on algorithms
Last week, we reminded ourselves about algorithms and practised giving them verbally through drawing pictures. This week, we made it a little more complicated by writing an algorithm to get a friend through an obstacle course.
As we realised what worked and what didn’t, we had to debug our algorithms to make them successful.
Where do you want to explore?
We kicked off our Explorers Big Topic today by discussing where we’d like to go exploring. The children shared their thoughts with each other and then their partner fed back. There we re lots of interesting places mentioned: the bottom of the ocean, into space, New Zealand and many more.
Then, we used the Atlases to remind ourselves of some key geographical vocabulary: hemisphere, continent, tropics, ocean names, etc. They also prompted us to think about other places (on Earth) that we’d like to visit which we then visited – via Google Earth.
Finally, we explored some fantastic images – all of which were real places on Earth – and chose which one we’d travel to if we could and why. The Plitvici Lakes in Croatia were most popular in our class.
Hotseating
On Thursday, we wrote a diary entry as Henry from ‘The Incredible Book Eating Boy’. In order to get into character, we thought about what questions we’d like to ask Henry if he were real and then some of us took on his character, fabulously.
8Rs Creative Homework
A fabulous start to homework from Year 6. We enjoyed a wonderful presentation from both Edward and Aleena and saw a whole host of different ways we could us the 8Rs at home, at school and in extra curricular activities.
As always, we spent some time looking at each others’ before sharing a comment in everybody’s book.
Here are some we particularly liked:
Computing – with no computers?
We started a computing project this week – without computers! Y6 reminded me what an algorithm was and discussed what made successful and unsuccessful algorithms.
We practised trying to give oral algorithms by drawing a simple picture and then instructing a friend to draw the same (without seeing it first).
Here were some that actually ended up being very similar and we decided it was because the picture was simple in the first place; the instructions given were step by step; and the instructions included descriptions of where to draw things and how big to draw things.
In pairs, we then created some written instructions to try and get me (Miss Rushbrooke) from the front of the classroom to outside the fire door. I walked into walls, banged by shins, ended up in the cupboard, but – after refining their algorithms as a result of other people’s mistakes – a couple of groups managed to get me outside.