Big Topic Review
A big thank you to those parents that were able to attend our open afternoon on Wednesday. We hope you enjoyed finding out about all the great learning that’s happened in Y6 during our ‘Life’ topic.
For those that didn’t attend, we reflected on each piece of learning we have done by writing down on big sheets something we remembered.
Then, we created a ‘diamond 9’ of the skills we have learnt/practised and some of the knowledge we have gained. It was interesting how everyone had different ideas of what they’d learnt most about.
Finally, we sat down to review our big topic book. It works as a diary of all the great topic-related learning we do!
If you’d like to find out more about our brilliant ‘Life’ topic, ask your child how they’ve found it.
18 March 2016
The homework this week is Practice Makes Perfect and is due in on Wednesday 23 March.
I can find real life arrays.
Arrays are pictorial representations to help children understand multiplication. They are an arrangement of items in rows and columns, for example:
We have a neat arrangement of 5 rows and 3 columns. We can see here that there are 3 groups of 5, which is 3×5. This is how arrays can help children with multiplication.
At this stage, we are just focusing on identifying arrays. We have been looking for arrays around our classroom and in the playground. Here are some examples of real life arrays to get you started! When you find some, you could draw them or take a photograph to stick in your book.
18 March 2016
This week’s creative homework is due on Wednesday 23 March.
To be able to use speech punctuation.
Using the tips provided, the children need to show that they are able to punctuate speech accurately or create an activity or example that would help others to punctuate speech accurately. There are lots of ways you could do this:
- Write a story (or section of) that includes dialogue
- Create a top tips sheet that would teach someone how to use them
- Make a game that would help us to practise.
- Write a section of text with punctuation missing to be corrected (but have an answer sheet ready).
How are you feeling?
Across school, we’ve been trialling the use of colours to represent children’s emotions. Children are then encouraged to think whether this is a blocker or driver for their learning.
- ‘I feel blue because I am calm.’
- ‘I feel red because I had a fall out at lunchtime.’
- ‘I feel orange because I am excited to celebrate my brother’s birthday.’
Here is a new website to support young people’s emotional wellbeing in Leeds.
‘If you’re a young person, MindMate can help you understand the way you’re feeling and find the right advice and support. If you’re a parent, carer or professional, MindMate can help you support a young person you know.’
Children are also encouraged to speak with an adult, friend or use our class SEAL boxes to share any worries.
Leeds Youth Council
All young people aged 10-18 in Leeds can now join the Leeds Youth Council (LYC).
This week’s maths learning
This week, in maths, we’ve been learning all about measures.
After exploring mass through weighing items using different methods, we moved on to capacity. We spent time measuring, estimating and converting between units. (Remarkably, we didn’t make much mess!)
You can help at home by:
- Encouraging your child to find examples of measures in every day life
- Encouraging your child to estimate the mass/capacity of things you find in the house (eg what do you think is the capacity of that glass? What do you think is the mass of the laptop? What do you think is the capacity of our bath? Hint: benchmarking helps – ask you child about this!)
- Practising converting between units (eg ml to litres, g to kg)
- Using the revision books handed out last week
We’ll continue our learning by solving problems involving different measures.
Marvellous Mathematicians
We’ve been learning about multiplication this week. We began by looking at groups of objects. Here, one marvellous mathematician has shown us that 10 groups of 10 is 100! After drawing 10 groups and placing 10 items in each group, she counted in 10s to find the answer. Wow!
This marvellous mathematician really wanted to try out her new skills with some large numbers! 2 groups of 100 is 200!
5 groups of 6 is 30. What a great way to show that calculation using a picture! Notice the repeated addition: 6+6+6+6+6+6=30. In lessons, we are mainly working with groups of 2, 5 and 10 as we can count in multiples of these numbers. This marvellous mathematician did this work independently and chose to do groups of 6 and 7, however, Year 1 are only expected to count in 2s 5s and 10s. Keep practising this at home!
I wonder
In the library today, we have been researching our own “I wonders”.
Why not ask your child what they wondered today!
Board game fun!
We all really enjoyed learning about different types of punctuation through a board game last week. Sometimes we landed on a ‘tricky tester’ and had to answer a test question. On our next go we could land on ‘dastardly dictation’ where we had to listen to a sentence and write it with the correct punctuation.
Everybody had fun while making sure they were checking their answers and learning from it, too.
Fab feedback!
Moortown Primary has a long history of supporting teachers, headteachers and schools across Leeds. This morning, five new headteachers visited us to learn more about self-evaluating (where a school evaluates its own provision and works out how it can improve – look at our self-evaluation summary) and improvement planning. They also took the opportunity of looking around school. Here’s some feedback following their visit:
What a wonderful experience and privilege to be invited to look behind the doors of your fabulous school; engaged learners; friendly, happy, smiley children; clearly dedicated staff and an enticing learning environment for everyone to grow and learn.
It was also lovely to have a look around your school which must be the living embodiment of ‘great things in small packages’. The school feels like a well run ship with everyone buying into the principles and practices you want. The pupils were also a credit in that they didn’t even look up from their learning when we all walked in.
A wonderful school you have there – I will work extremely hard to have somewhere that shines as a beacon for its community like your school does for Moortown.