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Building a Saxon Roundhouse

On Monday morning, Year 3 and 4 took part in a great workshop where they used their maths and DT skills to build a Saxon Roundhouse. Although tricky at times, the children worked together collaboratively to solve problems and build their own section of the house.

25 October 2013

There will be no homework or spellings over the half term but if you want to do some work with your child, here are some suggestions.

• Read every day, asking questions about what is happening and how they feel about the book.
• Whenever you use numbers (cooking, shopping, temperature etc…) discuss them with your child. What do they know about that number? How much is it? How much change do I need? Is it colder or warmer?
• Encourage them to write. Maybe they could keep a diary for one day of the holidays and we can stick it into our class diary so that everybody could read it.

“We’re eating a balanced meal.”

Last week, Year 2 were introduced to some new friends who helped us know how to eating healthily. We met Donny Dairy, Colin Carbohydrate, Victor Vitamin, Peter Protein and Freddy Fats. First, we sorted different foods into the five food groups.

Then, we planned our own balanced meal by choosing

• three items of food from Victor Vitamin and Colin Carbohydrate (the food groups we should eat most of)
• two items of food from Donny dairy and Peter Protein
• one or no types of food from Freddy fat.

On Friday, we made our meal and all ate a healthy, balanced meal together.

 When asked who had enjoyed their meal, here was the response!

More phonics

We have begun phase 2 of our phonics programme, ‘Letters and Sounds’.

In this phase children will continue practising what they have learned from phase 1, including ‘sound-talk’. They will also be taught the phonemes (sounds) for a number of letters (graphemes), which phoneme is represented by which grapheme and that a phoneme can be represented by more than one letter, for example, ll as in b-e-ll. We use Jolly Phonics actions to help children remember these phonemes. Each week the children will bring a set of letters home to learn. Please practise these every day and keep them in their book bag for us to add to.

Your child will be taught how to pronounce the phonemes correctly to make blending easier.

Sounds should be sustained where possible (e.g. sss, fff, mmm) and, where this is not possible, ‘uh’ sounds after consonants should be reduced as far as possible (e.g. try to avoid saying ‘buh’, ‘cuh’).

VC and CVC words

C and V are abbreviations for ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’. VC words are words consisting of a vowel then a consonant (e.g. am, at, it) and CVC words are words consisting of a consonant then a vowel then a consonant (e.g. cat, rug, sun). Words such as tick and bell also count as CVC words – although they have four letters, they have only three sounds. For example, in the word bell, b = consonant, e = vowel, ll = consonant.

Now the children will be seeing letters and words, as well as hearing them. They will be shown how to make whole words by pushing magnetic or wooden letters together to form little words, reading words and breaking up words into individual sounds, which will help their spelling. These will be simple words made up of two phonemes, for example, am, at, it, or three phonemes, for example, cat, rug, sun, tick, bell.

How you can help at home:

Magnetic letters

Remember to make it fun!

18 October 2013

This week’s homework is creative homework.

I can show a healthy balanced diet.

Here are some ideas to get you going:

• cook something healthy and take photos
• design a healthy eating poster
• collage of favourite foods using lots of different materials or paper
• a healthy food quiz

We’re looking forward to looking at your healthy ideas – might just take some of your ideas for some healthy eating in the half-term holiday!

18 October 2013

The homework this week is practice makes perfect and is due in on Wednesday 23 October.

I can solve division problems.

We’ve been learning about division all week so the children have some problems to solve. Ask your child to show you what method they have been taught to use to solve the problems.

18 October 2013

Here are this week’s spellings.  They will be tested on Friday 25 September.

There will be no spellings to learn over the half-term holiday but don’t forget to do lots of reading.

18 October 2013

Plurals again! This time we are investigating how the spelling changes when making plurals for words that end in y. There are two options…

1. Add s if the final letter is preceded by a vowel.
2. If not preceded by a vowel, change the y to an i and add es.

18 October 2013

It’s time to get your creative juices flowing again for this week’s creative homework.

I can show a healthy balanced meal.

It’s entirely up to you how you do this, make is as creative as possible!  Maybe you could…

• Cook a meal at home that has a balanced amount of each food group.
• Take pictures of your work.
• Create a meal on a paper plate using dried food.
• Think about both sweet and savoury food.

Don’t forget about: Donny Dairy, Colin Carbohydrate, Victor Vitamin, Freddy Fat and Peter Protein.

Finnish visitors

As you know, we had visitors from Finland last week as part of an on-going project to look at each other’s schools and reflect on outstanding practice.  In their words, here are some of the key features that impressed the visitors from their time at Moortown Primary:

• warm and friendly school where all children are known by name
• consistent and positive approach to behaviour
• enthusiastic teachers
• lots of talk for learning
• a headteacher who is looking to improve practice all of the time and who gets actively involved in lessons and learning
• teachers (and the headteacher) working with groups of children and sitting on the same level as them eg on the carpet
• significant social and emotional awareness
• children know what is expected from them
• standard of maths is high from an early age
• good “learning” noise

A general comment that was made by the visitors was the fact that all five of the Leeds schools have bright displays reflecting learning.  The Finnish teachers commented that if a Finnish child were to come to a Leeds school, they might feel like they were visiting the circus – but they also described their own classrooms as being more like a hospital ward!  They questioned whether so much on display was distracting for the pupils.  We asked our children in assembly; the response from the children was that they liked the displays and that they used them for prompts.  When asked whether they were distracting they said they weren’t because it was what they were used to.

Mrs Weekes and Miss Rushbrooke will be visiting Finland in March 2014 and will be reflecting on any practice that could be successful here.