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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.

Thanks d:Side – we learnt lots!

Today, Catherine, from d:Side, came to visit to give us lots of information about our body and keeping it healthy.  Judging by the responses, the class have learnt lots so far in our Doctor Doctor topic.  We also managed to learn about what makes a healthy lunchbox and the safe use of medicines.

• “I learnt all about bodies, bones and muscles.”
• “I learnt that we grow when we are asleep.”
• “There are veins to take our blood around.”

Gymnastics

We’re continuing to learn new gymnastic skills on Thursday afternoons.  This week, we’ve been practising different jumps and travelling along the benches in different ways.

Dance at Allerton Grange

Recently, we went to Allerton Grange to hone our dancing skills. The session was led by a group of pupils from Allerton Grange who taught us a dance to a song from the Lion King. Check out our lion faces…

Talk time homework

The discussion we had about the talk time homework this week was fantastic. The children had loads of really interesting things to talk about and to show. Thank you for your support. It is much appreciated!

Topic baking

Last week, children baked and then decorated their own house-shaped biscuits. The children first designed their houses on the new laptops in The Space and then made the biscuits. The following day, they decorated their biscuits and used their design as a guide.

We also made a big gingerbread house which we gave as a gift to our visitors from Finland!

11 October 2013

We are revisiting one of our key spelling rules this week: double up for short vowel sounds. This week’s spellings are all in the past tense so have ed endings as well (but be careful – sometimes ed sounds like a t!).