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05 December 2014

The whole school homework this week is creative: children are invited to respond to something from either a cultural or spiritual perspective.

I can show what I know and think about something cultural.

We’d like children to present their responses about a recent book they’ve read, film they’ve watched, piece of art they’ve looked at, piece of music they’ve listened to – anything cultural in fact. We’re interested to read some sort of description (a summary, for example) and then your child’s opinions. This review might include pictures, an interview (your child could write a fictional script between himself/herself and the artist, for example), a letter (eg to or from a character, or perhaps even the author) – anything which might include your child’s responses!

However, your child might prefer to do the following:

I can show what I know about a festival.

Over the course of this term, some children in school will have celebrated a religious festival of some sort. This might have been

• the Muslim festival of Eid ul Adha, this year in October
• the Sikh and Hindu festival Diwali, also in October
• the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, coming up in December
• the Christian festival (of course, celebrated by many non-Christians, too) of Christmas
• the Chinese New Year festival which next year will be in February

There are lots of other festivals and celebrations which you and your child together might want to reflect on, from the anniversary of the crowning of Selassie (a festival which might be celebrated by Rastafarians) to the Winter Solstice (a Pagan festival). You can also research more festivals.

We invite children to respond to the sentence above – they might include a recount (like a diary entry), pictures, an interview (perhaps in a script). Your child might also choose to research a completely unknown festival, or they might even think about creating a brand new festival, one that everyone will celebrate.

Whether inspired culturally or spiritually, your child’s homework is due on Wednesday 10 December.

05 December 2014

Here are this week’s spellings.  There will be a spelling test on Friday 12 December.

Please note that this will be the last spelling test of this term.

Show Racism the Red Card

Here’s some more great feedback following our recent Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds themed week, this time coming from the team who lead Show Racism the Red Card workshops in schools.

The over-riding message that we are trying to instill is the understanding of equality for all regardless of appearance, differences and pre-conceived perceptions. The school children’s understanding of the subject matter was of a standard so high (prior to input) that it was a two-way educational process and a pleasure to deliver. A pleasure to attend and I thank you on behalf of ‘Show Racism the Red Card Team’ for giving us the opportunity. (Staff are amazing, too.)

Attendance matters

Despite a lot of illnesses last week, our average attendance so far this year (up to 28 November) is great: 97.1%.  This year’s Reception class attendance is the highest ever for this period, compared with any previous Reception class – a magnificent achievement!

• Reception: 97.6%
• Year 1: 97.1%
• Year 2: 97.7%
• Year 3: 98.6%
• Year 4: 96.0%
• Year 5: 96.8%
• Year 6: 96.1%

Phonics

We’re coming to the end of Phase 2 of our phonics programme, ‘Letters and Sounds’. Next week, your child will begin Phase 3 with the last of the single letter phonemes. The purpose of this phase is to:

• teach more graphemes, most of which are made of two letters, for example: ‘oa’ as in boat
• practise blending and segmenting a wider set of CVC words, for example: fizz, chip, sheep, light
• learn all letter names and begin to form them correctly (so please help your child to learn these: talk about letters using their correct name as well as the sounds they make)
• read more tricky words and begin to spell some of them
• read and write words in phrases and sentences.

CVC words containing graphemes made of two or more letters

Here are some examples of words your child will be reading: tail, week, right, soap, food, park, burn, cord, town, soil.

During Phase 3, your child will learn more ‘Tricky Words’. These are the words we’ll learn in Phase 3: he, she, we, me, be, was, my, you, her, they, all, said.

28 November 2014

This week, the Practice Makes Perfect homework are a couple of Mathletics activities about time.

The Creative homework is also maths based: I can show what I know about time.

We’re learning about time in our maths lessons next week so this homework will help prepare children for the learning.

28 November 2014

This week, it’s a Spell-athon!

We’ve all been given 40 words to learn and the child who gets the most right on Friday 05 December will be be presented with a certificate in assembly! Ties will be decided by a spell-off and the child who scores the highest proportion correctly overall in the whole school will win a prize and be crowned Spell-athon Champion!

Don’t forget this is a sponsored event: the more words spelled correctly, the more money your child will earn for Cancer Research UK.

28 November 2014

This week’s spellings are slightly different – there are 30 of them for each group! – none of these spellings are new; they have all been learnt before.  As you know we are holding a sponsored spellathon next week as part of our “remembering” focus and we would like children to correctly spell as many words as possible from the following lists.

28 November 2014

This week’s homework is talk time – children need to be ready to talk about their homework by Wednesday 03 December.

Our topic, “What’s the matter?”, has made us think about our feelings.  There has been “an emotion” discussed every day including ways to deal with different feelings.  We would like you to discuss the following:

What should we do if we are worried about something?

Some great feedback…

At Moortown Primary, we don’t like to rest on our laurels. This morning, a headteacher visited our school in order to carry out, alongside me, lesson observations to evaluate the quality of teaching and learning. This is useful for one main reason: to check my judgements about the quality of our provision, so we can be confident that our ‘self-evaluation’ is an honest and accurate assessment of our strengths and areas to get even better.

The headteacher (from another outstanding school in Leeds) visited all the classes, spending around 15-20 minutes in each class. This may not seem a lot, but you can get a ‘snapshot’ of standards in a class quite easily in this amount of time. (Any judgements need to then be backed up with pupil progress at the end of the term/year – this is the crucial.)

From the whole-school point of view, the headteacher was impressed by:

• the displays
• the Class Novel Big Topic which has just ended
• the high quality teacher – teaching assistant interactions
• the children’s learning behaviour
• the consistencies around school

In each class, she was impressed by various things; here I list just a couple of examples from each classroom:

• YR: very calm children in a purposeful environment; loads of great shape learning in many of the areas
• Y1: reading on iPads; the support of the teaching assistants
• Y2: encouraging pupils to check and help each other; the extremely purposeful, calm learning
• Y3: confident, clear support for learning; checking pupils’ responses
• Y4: good mix of teaching and pupil activity; the active role of the teaching assistant
• Y5: quality small group work; all children could talk about their writing, and the focus on ‘implicit mood’
• Y6: exciting, vibrant learning environment; the teacher closely checking that pupils are learning and feel comfortable about their learning

There are always ‘next steps’ to try out new or different teaching strategies, but the overall conclusion from the headteacher is that teaching is good and outstanding.

Well done to all staff – what a great team.