News

Be Food Smart

Be Food Smart is the latest health campaign from Change4life. Our everyday food and drink can contain surprisingly high amounts of sugar, saturated fat and salt, meaning most of us are eating more than we realise. National Child Measurement Programme data shows that one fifth of Reception and one third of Year 6 children are overweight or obese.

Public Health England has launched a free app, which families can use together to uncover how healthy their food choices are. The Be Food Smart app allows you to easily scan the bar codes of branded products, as well as supermarket favourites, to see how much sugar, saturated fat and salt is lurking inside.

This week, on a Good to be me theme, one of our parents spoke at a whole school assembly. She talked about changes she made to her diet and physical activity levels to become healthier.

One change she made was to have a healthy breakfast. We need this to give us a good start to the day.

Breakfast can have surprising amounts of sugar, saturated fat and salt. In fact, research has shown that children are eating nearly half their maximum daily amount of sugar before they get to school. See how sugar stacks up at breakfast time.

Having read this research, one family in school have recently made a change from sugary cereals to low sugar alternatives such as porridge and shredded wheat. Interestingly, at this same time, I commented to the parent that the particular child had become more focused in lessons.

Change4life provides lots of ideas for eating well and getting active, including ideas for packed lunches. The new lunchbox section has lots of simple, tasty and healthy tips for hassle-free lunches.

E-safety - an important message from the Leeds Safeguarding Children Board

The Director of Leeds Children’s Services has encouraged us to share the following, which comes from Leeds Safeguarding Children Board:

There are reports in the media today about an e-safety incident involving primary age children from Leeds. Just to be clear, the incident did not take place in school or through an ‘app’ approved by school, but was reported to the school by concerned parents.  The incident is now being investigated by West Yorkshire Police.

This incident has highlighted a number of safeguarding issues raised recently about smartphone ‘apps’ including Live.ly, ooVoo, and music.ly amongst others.  These apps are supposed to only be able to access contacts on the user’s phone, but it appears that quite quickly unknown individuals are able to join group chats. Therefore, these apps are not safe for children to use as there is a significant risk of inappropriate contact by unknown individuals.

Our advice to parents is to ensure that their children do not have access to such apps on their phone and to check that all appropriate privacy settings are switched on, to make sure that children are protected when using any internet site. If a child experiences or expresses concerns about online activity, it must be reported to the police using 101 and CEOP. Wherever possible, a screen shot or a mobile phone picture of the concern should be taken for reporting purposes.

There is some useful information on the LSCB website about online safety with some useful tips for parents.

After-school club availability

Some of our after-school clubs, starting from next week, are now open to other year groups.

Monday

• Dance (Mr Lynch) – This club is now open to Years 1-3.

Wednesday

• Gymnastics (run by Leeds Gymnastics) – This club is now open to Years 1-3.

Thursday

• Dance (Miss Marsden) – This club is now open to Reception.

Please contact the office, by Thursday 26 January, if your child would like a place on these clubs.

Internet safety: understanding terms and conditions

Many of us, maybe even all of us, ignore what is written in the terms and conditions of the internet and software services that we use on a daily basis. We really should, but who has time to do that? And don’t we trust those companies to look after our data properly?

We tell children to be careful online, but as adults we ignore many of the rules, so why would children be any different?

The Children’s Commissioner published a report recently called ‘Growing Up Digital’. The report makes interesting reading, but one aspect particularly caught media attention…

Around half of 8 – 15 year olds use Instagram. The ‘Growing Up Digital’ report authors asked legal firm, Schillings, to look over the 17 pages of Instagram’s Terms and Conditions, written at a level that could only be understood by a graduate. Schillings’ own lawyers simplified the T&Cs to help children (and the rest of us, probably) understand what they mean.

Here are two of the reader-friendly clauses:

“Officially you own any original pictures and videos you post, but we are allowed to use them, and we can let others use them as well, anywhere around the world. Other people might pay us to use them and we will not pay you for that.” (Or, put more simply: we can sell the stuff you upload without asking you or paying you.)

“We might send you adverts connected to your interests which we are monitoring. You cannot stop us doing this and it will not always be obvious that it is an advert.” (Or, put more simply: we can send you stuff and you won’t know it’s an advert.)

In their simplest form, these clauses are really quite thought-provoking. We all have a right to know about this, and children need educating about it. It would be worth talking to your child about Instagram’s simplified Terms and Conditions, or another social networking site.

(Incidentally, it’s worth remembering that most sites have guidance around age restrictions – like most, Facebook specifies users should be 13 years old or older.)

Leeds Let's Get Active

Leeds Let’s Get Active is a programme to encourage people to do at least 30 minutes of physical activity, once a week.

Based at Leeds City Council leisure centres, the timetable for Jan to March 2017 is now available.

Cross Country finalist

Following the Leeds North East KS2 Cross Country competition, congratulations to Grace, finishing in 6th position, who has qualified to take part in the Leeds KS2 Cross Country final in March.

Good luck in the final!

Moortown International(!) Primary School #2

So… in this school year, we’ve had great feedback and thanks from Canada and, very recently, from Thailand. You don’t have to have a child attend Moortown to benefit from the learning resources in our Learn More section!

And now… Somerset! OK – maybe not international, but great feedback all the same:

I lead literacy at [a school in] Somerset. I have looked at the documents on your website and would love to have a chat with someone who coordinates writing assessments in your school.
The ARE expectations documents for parents you produced are brilliant. I would be interested to know how you came up with the exemplification for each year group and whether you use those same documents to assess writing.

Please would you be able to put me in touch with your literacy lead teacher or the head teacher for a quick chat? This would be extremely helpful when setting up new systems for our school.

The ‘ARE expectations document’ refers to the age-related expectations we created for each year group in Reading, Writing, Maths and Science and the Foundation Subjects, all to be found on the Expectations page. We created these by taking National Curriculum, which sets out what teachers need to teach and what children are expected to learn, expectations and breaking them down into more manageable year groups. They expectations can be a really useful basis to know how you might support your child at home.

Lib Fest

Leeds libraries are stamping out the shhh during February!

Moortown International(!) Primary School

You may know that our website is used in Canada (news article, Saturday, November 05, 2016).

Now, we’ve had an email to thank us all the way from Thailand!

Please forward my thanks to the author of your pdf document “Phonics and Graphemes”. I am using parts of it to teach ESL Phonetics here at Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University. It is concise, valuable and sincerely appreciated.

I of course give credit to your fine school in its dissemination.

Again, thank you.

The document in question is a guide to phonics and graphemes, or the sounds and letters that help us to read and write.

Scholes swimming pool

Way back in October (21.10.16), we invited you support the efforts of parents and carers at Scholes (Elmet) Primary, one of our Sphere Federation partner schools.

The school is very unusual in that it has its own swimming pool. It’s a small, shallow one, but is great for introducing younger children to swimming. The pool has been closed for essential maintenance and a massive fundraising campaign has taken place. We encouraged you to vote for the school to benefit from a grant.

I’m delighted to tell you that the Save Scholes Pool team has won an Aviva Community Fund grant out of the thousands of entries that were submitted. The application made it to the final stage and eventually won £10,000!

This takes the total amount raised to £45,ooo which is the core amount that the Save Scholes Pool team set out to achieve 16 months ago. They’ve now got their fingers crossed for more good news that could take the funds to the £50k total.

Thank you for supporting our Sphere partner school.