Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year begins on 08 February 2016 and this year it is the Year of the Monkey.
Year 1 found lots of similarities to celebrations that we may experience including spending time with family and friends, enjoying special food, wearing new clothes and sending cards and presents.
- ‘I wear new clothes for Diwali.’
- ‘We give presents for birthdays.’
- ‘We decorate our home when it is Christmas.’
- ‘We have special food when it is Eid.’
The Chinese zodiac follows a twelve year cycle, each of the years being named after an animal. The Chinese believe that people born in a particular year take on the characteristics of the animal associated with that year.
We watched the story of how the order of the animals was decided and the children were encouraged to find out what animal they are.
For Chinese New Year, there are lots of events happening in Leeds if you want to get involved.
Gong Hey Fat Choy!
Animal Antics
Mags, from Animals Intuition, came into school this morning to show us and teach us about her animals. Here are some pictures:
School Council elections 11 February
Our current school councillors held their final meeting today as we prepare to elect our new school council. This year’s election date is Thursday 11 February.
Children from every class, including Reception, are encouraged to prepare a speech to present to their class as part of the election process. Our whole school homework before the election date (05 February) will give children the chance to plan their speech.
Thank you to our existing school council who have been involved with many decisions and discussions throughout the year. On today’s agenda, there have been discussions around the new school dinner menu, classroom reading areas, e-safety and general suggestions put forward by children in each class. It appears they have enjoyed the role as they all intend to stand again at the elections.
22 January 2016
The homework this week is creative and is due in on Wednesday 27 January.
What is your favourite animal and why?
Leeds City Museum visit
We enjoyed our visit to Leeds City Museum on Friday morning. In three groups, we each focussed on one animal: polar bear, gorilla and sea turtle.
We started by visiting one of the museum exhibitions in order to find our animal and sketch it, noting what features it had and what it might use these for.
Then, once we’d had a chance to take a look around at all of the other interesting things inside the exhibition, we decided to take a closer look at some animals, exploring skulls and taxidermy.
We thought about how these animals were adapted to live in their environment before working as a team to create a 3D collage of our animal.
We had a great time and returned very excited to continue learning through our Life topic.
22 January 2016
For our Practice Makes Perfect homework this week, we’re working on skills we’ve been developing in Maths.
To be able to find missing lengths and work out perimeter and area.
The children need to use the information they already have to work out the size of the missing lengths. They can then use this information to work out perimeter and area.
This homework is due on Wednesday 27 January.
22 January 2016
This week’s Talk Time homework is linked to our Life topic and is due on Wednesday 27 January.
Debate: Choose an animal and prepare to argue that it is the ‘best’ animal.
You’ll need to think about the positive points about that animal and have evidence to back it up. Don’t forget to consider what negatives it might have so that you can counter argue any negative points brought up by any other debater.
Creative homework
Here are this week’s favourite creative homeworks, as chosen by the children:
Museum trip
This week, we went to the Leeds City Museum to research animals as part of our Life topic. Have a look at a few pictures from our trip. Why not ask your child if they can explain what is happening/can be seen in the pictures below?
We had a really good time in the museum so why not visit yourself? You could even get some ideas for this week’s homework.
22 January 2016
This week’s homework is practice makes perfect. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at using conjunctions. Conjunctions are joining words that we use to join sentences, clauses, phrases and words together. Your child will need to write five sentences that include conjunctions about their favourite animal.
In class, we’ve been looking at writing reports so this homework is an excellent opportunity to practise writing a paragraph. I’ve written a short paragraph below which your child may want to use as a model for their own writing.
Alpacas look like camels but they don’t have humps. In the wild, alpacas live in packs so they don’t like living alone. Interestingly, alpacas come from Peru and feature in many Peruvian folk tales. Sometimes, alpacas spit when they feel threatened. Adult alpacas usually grow to be 99 cm tall while llamas, which look similar to alpacas, are usually 1.7m tall.