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Staffing update

Here’s a short update with regard staffing at Moortown Primary.

Miss Hewson, who is taking up a leadership role in a York school after almost five very successful years at Moortown, will leave at the end of this half-term.  We haven’t yet confirmed who will take Year 2 for the last few weeks of the year, but we will let you know as soon as we can.  In the meantime, we’ve had over a hundred applications for the teaching vacancy for which we are interviewing on Wednesday 01 May.

Miss Maver also leaves us, this time at the end of the school year to take on the role of Deputy Headteacher in another Leeds school. Mrs Maver’s role will not be directly replaced.  As you know, Mrs Weekes will move up to Acting Deputy Headteacher.  In addition, we have added to the leadership team.  Following successful internal recruitment, I’m delighted to announce that Mr Owen and Mr Wilks are now part of the senior leadership team at Moortown:

• Mr Owen will lead on achievement (looking at assessment data, monitoring marking, etc)
• Mr Wilks will lead on enrichment (ensuring our curriculum and planning remains the best it can be by monitoring and supporting planning, themed weeks and other events).

Their appointments were made last Friday.  To ensure a fair, robust process, a headteacher from a local school was present at the interviews and made a recommendation to two governors who also attended the interviews; the headteacher was most impressed by the quality of the applicants.

I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating Mr Owen and Mr Wilks.

19 April 2013

The spellings this week all have words which contain a silent h or k. Many of these words have been spelled incorrectly in recent pieces of writing.

1. when
2. what
3. whine
4. ghost
5. which
6. honest
7. knock
8. know
9. kneel
10. knight

Children will be tested on eight out of the ten words on Friday 26 April.

New SEAL theme – Good to be me

Our new SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) theme for this half-term, Good to be me, focuses on three main areas of learning:

• Self-awareness – feeling good about yourself, taking risks.
• Managing Feelings – understanding feelings, and why and how they lead us to behave the way we do – particularly the feelings of being excited, proud, surprised, hopeful, disappointed, worried and anxious and standing up for yourself –assertiveness skills, standing up for your views.
• Empathy

This theme explores feelings in the context of the child as an individual, developing self-awareness and helping the child to realise that it really is ‘Good to be me’. The theme is about understanding our feelings as well as considering our strengths and weaknesses as learners.

The key ideas and concepts behind this theme are:

Building emotional resilience

Children need to become resilient if they are to be healthy and effective life-long learners.

Coping with anxiety and worrying

Worry and anxiety are major features in many children’s lives. Many children have good reasons to be anxious. Exploring worries is important.

Calming down

Although getting stressed, anxious or angry are important and useful emotions, sometimes these feelings can be overwhelming.

Assertiveness

The theme encourages children to become assertive – that is, able to recognise and stand up for their rights while recognising and respecting the rights of others.

Understanding feelings and how they influence behaviour

The theme explores the relationship between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and the way each impacts on our behaviour. It looks at Flight or Fight rapid response to situations of threat and our responses to feeling threatened /under stress.

‘I can do something that makes me feel proud‘ is the first SEAL statement for the theme of Good to be me.

Topic

We begin this half term with a mini-topic all about nocturnal animals. We will learn what it means to be nocturnal and some examples of nocturnal animals.

Our big topic for this term is all about farms. We will learn about animals and their habitats, compare farms in different countries and study how farms have changed over time. We will even visit a farm later in the term!

SEAL

This theme is the first of two focusing specifically on feelings. It explores feelings in the context of the child as an individual, developing self-awareness and helping the child to realise that it really is ‘Good to be me’. The theme is about understanding our feelings as well as considering our strengths and weaknesses as learners. It aims to develop knowledge, understanding and skills in three key social and emotional aspects of learning: self-awareness, managing feelings and empathy.

New beginnings

Sadly, this half term will be my last here at Moortown. I have a new role as a class teacher in York (much closer to home) which will begin in June. My new job has extra leadership responsibilities so I am looking forward to sharing all of the good and outstanding practice that I have learnt during my time here.

I am currently writing the children’s reports so you will receive them as normal before the end of the school year. SATs will be completed and marked in the next few weeks too.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all parents for being supportive as it has really helped the children to make very good progress so far this year. The class have been an absolute delight to teach and I will miss each and every one them.

19 April 2013

We’re learning to spell words with y at the end.

Ending a word with ‘y’ can sometimes make a very short ‘e’ or ‘i’ sound, such as ‘party’ and ‘lady’.  However, the words in this list are all single-syllable words where the ‘y’ makes a long ‘i’ sound.

These will be tested on Friday 26 April.

19 April 2013

Over the next few weeks, our spellings are going to focus on a familiar set of letters (eg ough, ight) that are pronounced differently depending on which word they feature in (eg cough, through).

This week, the set of letters are ough.

Encourage your child to think about the different sounds they hear when they say the words, and encourage them to think of others, too.

Is there a new teacher in Y1?

You could be mistaken in thinking there is a new teacher in Y1! However, if you look carefully you will see that one of the children has let me have a rest. Lots of Y1 have brought books in this week to read to each other. It’s great to see how confident they have become.

Incidentally, can you see the questions on the interactive whiteboard?  These questions are about our forthcoming Big Topic – the questions are from the pupils – they help us to plan what to teach during the topic!

19 April 2013

This week’s spellings are homophones. These are words that sound the same but have a different spelling and meaning. Your child will be tested on Friday 26 April 2013.

• meet
• meat
• deer
• dear
• see
• sea
• flee
• flea
• bare
• bear

We’ll be thinking about other homophones during the week too.