Living and Learning (Staying Safe Week) : Road Safety
Living and Learning: Safety Week – Road Safety
We had a great morning (although chilly) with Harriet, our visitor from Leeds City Council’s road safety team, learning all about keeping safe while crossing the road. We learned lots of new skills about how to cross the road.
Ask your child about their new skills.
We crossed near the school; we crossed at a T-junction; we crossed behind parked cars; we crossed as a whole group, and then in partners. By the end of the session, the children were confident in crossing the road super safely.
Living and Learning: Safer Internet Day
Children spent the day thinking about topics such as consent, digital footprints, secure passwords, phishing and age restrictions.
Children were shocked to discover that Whatsapp now has an age restriction of 16 years old. At home, talk about why this has changed from 13 and why most social media apps and websites have an age restriction of 13 years old.
Children took a quiz to find out how big their digital footprint was. From incognito to big foot, year 5/6 had it all. Whether it’s posting online or sending messages to friends, this all counts as part of your digital footprint.
Living and Learning (Staying Safe Week) : Safer Internet Day
Today is Safer Internet Day. We have talked about how we ‘go online’ and what is fun and what we like about it. We then talked about what can go wrong and what we can do about it.
Living and learning: I make safe choices, including online.
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.
Living and learning : assessing risk
This week, we have been discussing risks in our living and learning lessons. We put different activities on a ‘risk ladder’, deciding whether it was high or low risk. We decided that it depends on other factors too – and what you do to minimise risk. For example, climbing the stairs would become higher risk if you ran or went up carrying lots of toys. Help at home : talk to your child about where they put the activities on the risk ladder.
Chinese New Year
It was been a wonderful week of fun and learning in reception.
We have explored celebrations from other cultures – Chinese New Year.
We started by reading The Magic Paintbrush.
Here are things we would like to draw if we had a magic paintbrush…
I would paint a cat for my mummy. Penny
A rainbow because they have all my favourite colours in. Poppy
A tiger. Clara
A puppy. Leo
I would paint loads of food to share with the people who can’t afford food. Norah
I want to paint lots of money so people can afford food. Stanley
Using our knowledge of the story, we were able to sort true or false statements and retell main events.
The children enjoyed creating their own Chinese lanterns. After following instructions, the children were then able to help and teach others.
Using tissue paper and paper chains, we created a class Chinese dragon.
In maths, we have continued to develop our number knowledge. We have explored the composition of numbers six and seven.
Take a look at our other learning around the classroom…
We also had a Superhero photoshoot.
Home Link
What celebrations/traditions do you celebrate?
You may choose to discuss
- the meaning of the celebration/tradition
- food
- decorations
- clothes
Happy New Year!
This week, we’ve enjoyed learning about the Chinese and Lunar New Year. We used non-fiction books to learn more about how some people like to celebrate across the world and we also watched these ‘Let’s celebrate‘ videos to find out about how some families in England prepare for the celebrations.
Children created their own ‘good luck’ banners by painting patterns on to red paper and during group time, we made paper lanterns. There was a lot of interest in our New Year topic table, with children enjoying looking at the paper dragons, fortune cookies and chop sticks. In the sensory area, we explored the texture of dry noodles and found out what happened when we added hot water. Our fingers also got a good work out as we tried to use the chopsticks to pick the noodles up.
We found out that some people like to give good luck cards and red envelopes containing money to their friends and family during the festival. In our maths area, we practised our subitising and counting skills as we counted out the correct number of coins to match the number/dots on each envelope. Some children really enjoyed this and went on to make their own coins and envelopes in the creative area.
One of the favourite activities from this week, had to be creating our own dragon dance. At the beginning of the week, we watched some dragon dancing and afterwards, children began to experiment using fabric and instruments to create their own interpretation of the dance. We practised walking together in a line and then introduced moving our bodies higher and lower in time to the music.
By the end of the week, we’d created our own dragon head and had perfected our dragon dance!
Finally, we also talked about the recent very windy weather. We listened to songs about the wind and waved ribbons using large arm movements to create shapes and watch the ribbons dancing in the wind.
Living and Learning Year 3,4
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been learning about our identity and celebrating the similarities and differences between us all.
We have discussed the meaning of the word community and have shared the communities that we are part of, including the school community. We have looked at the role of different members of the community from health care professionals to firefighters.
Year 5 maths
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!