Author: Mrs Hogarth

Welcome back everyone!

We hope you all had a lovely half term and you’ve recovered from all the Jubilee celebrations. Whilst this is the last half term of the school year, it might be worth a little reminder about learning the children can do at home. It is still really important that the children read daily at home. Each week the children will be set a task for their reading journals. This needs to be completed and returned to school each Friday. Parents, please sign the journals on a weekly basis. Those of you who are still regularly going on Times Tables Rockstars, well done! This really does help with fast recall of multiplication facts. Daily practise for those children who are wobbly on their number facts would really benefit from using this app.

Homework, including spellings will continue to be set every Friday. Don’t forget to visit our spelling strategies section of the website for some helpful tips on how to learn these.

We have been getting very excited about the KS2 Reading Champion Competition that is running across school and Leeds.  They are searching for the best young reading ambassadors in Leeds, KS2 children who advocate reading for pleasure and encourage others to find their own love of reading.

Each class voted for a Reading Champion for their class. The nominations were brought to the Junior Leadership Team and they voted for an overall winner. They chose Ella from Year 6. She will now write a letter of support for the competition and she will be up against other schools across Leeds.

Good luck, Ella!

This week, the children have been talking about body image. We began by discussing what body image is. They came up with this definition:

Body image is our idea of how our body looks and how we think it looks to others. This can include our feelings and thoughts about our height, weight, shape, skin colour, appearance or attractiveness.

We discussed how our body image is influenced by a range of different things such as TV, social media, celebrities and many more. The children recognised that it is important to consider the positive aspects about yourself and when you pay someone a compliment it should be about their personality or something they’re good at, not about appearance. We should ‘fill each others buckets’ with positivity.

The children wrote on each others buckets with their compliments. There were some very happy faces by the end of the lesson.

We are continuing with our electricity unit in science and have been investigating whether fruit can produce electricity. How would this show how a battery works?

Lemons can be used in a circuit to power an LED. The juicy part of the lemon contains electrolytes that conduct electricity – approximately 0.7 – 0.9 volts. Four lemons are needed to power an LED. The children turned the lemons into batteries by using zinc nails and copper coins. The copper acts as the positive terminal of a battery and the zinc nail becomes the negative terminal. They then added the LED, wires and a switch. The LED lit up – hooray!

What other fruits or vegetables can be used in a circuit?

The School Library Service is holding a competition to celebrate reading for key stage 2 children in Leeds.  The children have the opportunity to be shortlisted and go to an awards ceremony and be crowned Leeds School Librarian 2022.

As a class, we discussed which children are good role models when it comes to reading. Some children never have their heads out of a book, whilst others always complete their reading journals and tasks at home. We came up with a shortlist of seven candidates and as a class we took a democratic vote. This nominated person’s name will be passed to the Junior Leadership Team and their job will be to select an overall candidate to represent our school. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we have a winner among us!

 

Our new unit of learning for this half term is Electricity. The children had to recall their previous learning, including remembering the scientific symbols for the components of an electrical circuit. They were then asked to make a working circuit – some chose to use bulbs, whilst others used buzzers or motors. The children were then given images of different circuits using different components. They had to make predictions as to whether the circuit would work or not, and give reasons for their predictions. The children then constructed each circuit to test their predictions.

This week, 5/6B have continued to work on Scratch. They have developed their computing skills further by creating multiplication games, a bit like Times Table Rockstars. They needed to select the correct algorithms that would make the program ask random times tables and allow the player to see if they had the answer correct or incorrect. Quite a few children had to debug their algorithms as there were some issues once the game was in play. The children were able to add different variables such as sound and a score. Next time,  the children are going to attempt to add different levels to their games.

We have been busy enjoying our computing topic so far this term. The children are currently working hard to create their own chat bot game. This is a game in which players can answer questions and score points. The children have recalled their knowledge of Scratch really well and remembered how to select a sprite (a character) and a background – some could remember how to build some algorithms. They began by creating an algorithm that allowed them to input a question and someone to input an answer. They used selection to choose the best algorithm. Some managed to add multiple questions, a score and sounds to their game. Ask your child how their game is going

!