Author: Mrs Hogarth

This week in living and learning, we discussed the importance of keeping our hands clean – this has been particularly important over the last couple of years. We talked about what being healthy means and how to we keep ourselves as healthy as possible. Who is responsible for us being healthy? Ourselves? Parents? Doctors?

How do we know when we are ill? The class contributed to a Jamboard and listed ways in which we can tell if we are ill. We noticed that the symptoms we suffered, were out of the ordinary.

We continued the lesson by learning about allergies and vaccinations and how these can make us feel unwell and also fight against illness.

What an interesting day! I don’t think I have ever taught Spider-Man or Gangsta Granny before. The children in 5/6 B didn’t disappoint with their fabulous costumes for World Book Day – they all looked great. During the reading lesson today, the children explored different texts and talked about their favourite authors. They created new book covers for their favourite books and rewrote blurbs, including some quotes. Some children created some excellent character profiles. We also enjoyed listening to an audio book.

 

We were visited today by Harriet from Leeds City Council Road Safety Team. She talked to us about how the council are working hard to improve the safety of our roads in Leeds in order to reduce the number of accidents. We began by discussing how to make ourselves more visible to vehicles and finding safe places to cross roads. The children then worked in teams to plot their route to school and other local places, on a map of the area. They had to consider which areas on their route would benefit from traffic calming measures to improve safety. The children were given the costings of different measures such as double yellow lines and crossings, and they had to choose which ones would be best suited and which ones were within their £100,000 budget. They had to achieve the best value for money. Some children were excellent at budgeting, whilst others found this a little more challenging. It was an engaging and informative session that we all enjoyed.

Year 5 have been learning about area and scale this week. They began the week by distinguishing the difference between area and perimeter and why knowing these would be useful in everyday life. The children are able to calculate the area of shapes by counting squares and recording this using centimetre squares. The children worked in pairs to draw shapes with different areas. Their partner had to guess which shape had the largest area and then calculate it to see if they were correct. Some children drew some really challenging shapes to try to confuse their partners!

We were all very excited this week to get out the large apparatus in the hall. Parents, you might remember this as the best PE lesson when you were young! We had the climbing apparatus out, the ropes, the ladders and much more. The children had to practise their gymnastic skills such as balancing, jumping and landing safely. The children discovered different ways to move across the apparatus. Children took safe risks and climbed higher than they thought they would. There was a lot of peer encouragement and praise.

The children have been learning about dance this half term. They have been learning a very tricky routine that involves different moves to the beat of a song. The song was very fast and it was hard to keep up, however they have blown me away with how fabulous they are. They were then given ‘creative lead’ and began to put together their own routing, bringing together moves they had learnt and their own ideas. Some children were brave enough to allow me to post their dance on here! Well done everyone.

Group 1

Group 2

We had a fun science lesson today in which we discussed traits that you could inherit from your parents or grandparents. We began by seeing if we could match celebrities with their offspring. Some of these we found easy, others were a bit trickier. We discussed how we knew offspring belonged to certain adults. We identified that they had inherited skin colour, hair colour, face shape and eye colour. We then had great fun using Mr Men and Little Miss characters to create offspring and described their inherited characteristics.

The vocabulary we focused on this week was:

• inherited: the way that a trait or characteristic is passed to offspring from parents
• trait: a quality or characteristic belonging to something

Here are some examples of the offspring that we created.

We have finally begun to make our sculptures. Following inspiration from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, we have designed and sketched out or own ideas for sculptures that are similar to the Family of Man by Barbara Hepworth. Each child is creating a different section of their teams sculpture – it is based on a member of their family. They had to use cardboard boxes (thanks to everyone who sent these in) and manipulate them into their desired shape. They are at the initial stage of the creating process whereby they are creating a maquette. Ask your child what this means. There was a lot of discussions, a lot of cutting and I think we used the worlds supply of masking tape, but we are ready to move on to the next stage now.