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West Leeds Activity Centre

West Leeds Activity Centre, who visited our recent health fair, will be running holiday camps over the summer.

Ocean Awareness Day

The whole school took to the seas on Wednesday 20 June, exploring the world’s oceans for the day and what is currently happening to them.

Reception created some fantastic art using plastic bags and some of them chose to do some writing set in the ocean. Here’s a taster of Freya’s story for you:

Once upon a time there was a whale called Shamoo. She loved being in the water especially in the sea and making friends. She loved going on adventures around the whole sea…

Year 1 and 2 investigated how salty our seas are working with our Polar Ambassador, Terry Kirk.

They also created some fantastic wave art using watercolour and wrote some lovely ocean shape poems.

Year 3 and 4 also wrote shape poems and they learnt about what lives in the deepest parts of our ocean, even creating their own weird and wonderful deep ocean creatures.

Year 3 and 4 thought about the effect of plastic on our oceans and use the bottle tops we’d collected from the milk we have every day to create their own plastic ocean art in order to raise awareness of just how much plastic we get through as a school.

In Year 5 and 6, they investigated how we explore under the sea and debugged some coding in order to make a submarine automatically photograph underwater creatures. They also learnt about what plastic does to our ocean and the creatures that live in it. Over two days, Mr Catherall and Miss Rushbrooke collected an alarming amount of plastic from school and the adult who work here. Using this, Year 5 and 6 created a collage of an ocean creature, again to raise awareness of just how much plastic we use everyday.

Year 6 also worked together to write a letter to Kirkstall market asking them to stop using plastic bags as it’s a great place for people to shop without plastic but the bags they provide make this difficult.

It was a great day which taught us a lot and got us thinking about what we could do to help look after our planet and the other creatures that live here.

Musical mood!

We’ve had a marvellous musical morning! The children listened to two different pieces of music (Morning Mood by Grieg and O Fortuna by Carl Orff). We discussed how the music made us feel and how we could represent our feelings using different colours and mark making.

Here are some comments from our discussion:

“I would use red because you go red in the face when you are sad and red is angry.”

“The song made me feel calm and made me think of whales in the ocean.”

“It made me think of erupting volcanoes!”

We had a fantastic morning filled with conversation and the arts!

Talk to your child about what colour they are feeling.

22 June 2018

We all know Roald Dahl’s wonderfully odd made up words. Create a dictionary of 8 words that we could try and use in class this half term (obviously without offending anyone). Think about the most sensible way to spell them, how their meaning might link to their root words, how you could use latin and greek roots to create them and what word class they are.

Here’s my suggestion (and how you should lay your dictionary out):

stulty – (adjective) a bit stupid

Stultus is latin for idiot which is what gave me the idea for the word and we could use it in class if somebody suggested a ‘stulty’ idea.

15 June 2018

We will be having weekly spelling tests now until the end of term. The children have been given a copy of the statutory word list for Years 3 and 4.

The class are very familiar with all of these words. However, we don’t just want the children to learn these for a test.  We want to make sure that they implement this learning into their writing.

We will test the children on a selection of these words so they need to work on the spellings that they are unsure of.

World Cup fever

This half term, our topic is the World Cup and we’ve included some geography, maths and reading learning so far.

The children have told us what they want to learn about so we will be guiding the topic to their interests.

• What does the World Cup look like?
• How many players are there on a team?
• Can we do some art from the different countries?
• What are the different flags?
• Who has won before?
• What countries are playing?
• How does football work?
• Who is going to win?
• How heavy is the World Cup?

Each child has their own country (selected at random) and we will be watching the results carefully to see who progresses through the competition.  Ask your child what country they selected and what continent it is in.  They could show you how to search for this information if they need to check.

Reception’s got visitors…

Meet the newest members of Reception! This week, we’ve been getting to know our new class pets. The children have enjoyed observing, holding and investigating these intriguing creatures – stick insects! 

Talk to your child about stick insects and other minibeasts.

15 June 2018

15 June 2018

This week’s spelling list is formed using our Must Do homophones for Year 3. Children should practise listening to a sentence read aloud and writing the correct word. For example:

“I use my ears to hear what you’re saying.”

Can you think of any fun ways to remember which word is right? Can you write some silly sentences? Can you show your words creatively?

• your/you’re
• its/it’s
• of/off
• of/have (shouldn’t have)
• which/witch

Children should learn these in preparation for a spelling test on Friday 22 June.

Y6 Residential

Having finally sieved through the many photos we took while on residential, it is finally time to share them with you!

Every single child was a credit to our school both when responding to RobinWood staff and when working with children from our federation schools, Scholes and St James. We had a great time and here are a few snippets and thoughts from the children.

Pippa: Climbing was really fun and the challenge at the end was exciting.

Elias: It was very funny when we were blindfolded because you didn’t know where to grab and you looked cringy.

Phoenix: Archery was really fun and we got to learn how to use a real bow and arrow.

Neive: The evening activities were very fun and helped us build our teamwork.

Harry: It was fun canoeing and taught us what to do if we went canoeing again.

Nishaan: The trapeze was really fun because it was like being in a circus and you could jump to the wire.

Zack: You had to put a lot of effort into completing the quests and some of the puzzles were extremely hard.

Edward: Night line was really cool because you had to use your senses to navigate around.

Aleena: It hilarious because the squirrels weed on you and tickled you.

Oliver: The canoeing football was really fun because it was funny when Elias dropped his oar in the water.

Stan: It was really funny raft building because when they put the raft on the water, ours was sinking slowly. When everyone got on, they all fell off!

Owen: The dancing challenge was fun and it was a good experience.

Brandon: It was extremely fun because it felt like you were jumping off a really high cliff.

Hibba: Caving was really fun because all the challenges we had to complete were confusing but exciting.

Pippa: The cup challenge was really fun because we got to 12 cups high and we banked it – it was frustrating when they knocked it over though.

Neive: I think piranha pool was fun because I like solving riddles and getting wet.

Aleena: It was very nerve wracking but exciting on the giant swing because when you chopped the banana, it was sudden but then it was fun.

Zack: I think crate challenge was good because it was cool to build a crate tower and not hurt yourself when it fell down.