More things for Health Week
Health week has been in full swing today. We started the day with a bit of judo, learning about the need to be respectful as well as handy tips for keeping each other pinned (safely and comfortably) to the floor.
In Key Stage 2, we’ve also completed half of our carousel activities and, in Year 5, we were learning all about the sugar in our snacks and drinks compared with how much we should be eating each day.
Can you name all the sports?
As an alternative to our daily Wake Up Shake Up today, Year 2 attempted all the actions from this Olympic sport themed action video.
Some sports were familiar but there were lots of new ones we tried out.
Why not try this routine at home?
Healthy eating
Food nutritionists from Catering Leeds, our school dinner provider, visited us today as part of health week. Using the eat well plate, we sorted ingredients from some of our school dinner meals. We also learnt about the importance of eating the right amount of different types of foods and looked at some healthy snack alternatives.
It was great to hear the visitors were impressed by the children’s prior knowledge of 5 a day and the eat well plate.
Why not try this at home? Ask your child to tell you which part of your meal goes in the different sections of the eat well plate (look out for copies of the eat well plate to be sent home this week).
How far can germs travel when someone sneezes?
Do you know how many food groups there are on the eat well plate or how many hours sleep a school aged child needs?
These were some of the health facts that Year 2 discussed today.
Health Week visitors
It’s been a great start to Health Week. We’ve looked at different types of exercise so far, playing basketball and learning about the benefits of Pilates on our posture and long term health.
Perfect Posture
Brilliant Basketball
We’ve also worked with d:side on the dangers of drug abuse and are looking forward to starting our health carousel tomorrow where we’ll work with all of the KS2 staff on a range of different aspects of health.
AstroPi
This week’s topic is all about technology. We’ve learnt how to write in HTML to create a webpage and we’ve then styled it using a programming language called CSS.
We’ve then been launching and programming our own Raspberry Pi which is a tiny computer that can be plugged into a monitor and controlled by a mouse and keyboard.
We had to work together to build our computer and this required quite a bit of problem-solving.
Finally, we had our computers made and ready to programme.
All that we had left was tackling the tricky language of Python to programme a message for Tim Peake to send home from the ISS on Christmas Day.
Tim is actually taking two Raspberry Pi into space so we also looked at how ‘sensor hats’ can collect data in space for us to compare to conditions down here on Earth.
Basketball
This afternoon, in our PE session, we’ve been learning basketball skills with Carnegie coaches.
Supporting your child
Learning workshops are a chance for you to find out more about the best ways to support your child’s learning at home. The last of these workshops took place last night – a Maths one.
Once again, parents and carers who came were very positive:
- ‘Discovering the Maths videos on the website and knowing the expectations for times tables for different year groups was good.’
- ‘Very useful session and well-delivered. Will help reinforce learning at home.’
- ‘I’ve now got a better understanding of the on-line resources and the language to use at home. I’ve a clearer understanding of what [my Reception daughter] will be doing now. It was well-structured and delivered.’
Thank you to Mr Owen and Miss Rushbrooke for running these sessions – much of the feedback chose to praise them:
‘I enjoyed listening to both teachers highlighting the teaching and ideas in school and how to support at home. Thank you for offering your time.’
Whilst this was the last learning workshop, we have other events coming up to support your child at home:
- Homework open afternoon, 2.40pm on Wednesday 02 December – parents/carers of children in Years 1 – 6 are invited into the classroom to help you to be aware of the standards of homework in your child’s class; it will also give you an insight into how we give feedback to your child even if the homework does not appear to be marked.
- Core skills open morning, 9.00am-10.30am on Tuesday 08 December – we invite all parents/carers into school to see some Maths and English teaching and learning taking place, and then to review what was observed with Mr Roundtree and/or Mrs Weekes (those who came last year found it helped to know what was happening so they could talk more with their child about their learning, and it raised some expectations, too!).
- Reception phonics teaching, 9.00am-9.30am on 20 / 21 / 22 January – the second chance to see how your child is learning these essential skills to support reading and writing; over the course of the three mornings, all Reception parents/carers are expected to attend.
- Core skills open morning, 9.00am-10.30am on Wednesday 27 January – a second invitation for parents/carers to see some Maths and English teaching and learning taking place.
- Topic open afternoon, 2.30pm on Thursday 17 March – you’ll get a chance to share in the review of the Big Topic on Life which will be coming to its end (parents/carers are welcome, too, although Reception children will not necessarily have joined in on this whole-school topic).
- Reception phonics teaching, 9.00am-9.30am on 27 / 28 / 29 April – the third chance to see how your child is learning phonics; again, all Reception parents/carers are expected to attend on one of the mornings.
5-a-day
This morning, we worked with children from Y1 and Reception class thinking about what foods count toward your daily target of 5 portions of fruit and vegetables. We then tasted had time to taste some!
Read some good guidance about this.
Self-image
This morning we’ve been looking at ourselves and talking about the ways that we are different and the same.
We talked about how boring it would be if we all looked the same.
