Wonderful homework!
Year 5/6S produced some amazing homework this week based on our Living and Learning statement: I can show different ways to stay safe, including online. We enjoyed looking at colourful posters, comic strips and even some quizzes. I have thoroughly enjoyed looking at all these creative ideas- keep it up!
Pride in progress awards
Well done to the children who were awarded our Pride in Progress awards this half term. The teachers chose children who have shown great improvements this academic year. They will get to choose a book as their prize. Well done!
Golden star
Well done to our most recent Golden Star.
Non-chronological report writing.
Year 5/6 have used their computing topic as a stimulus for their current piece of writing. The have written non-chronological reports to explain all the different elements of their Scratch games. They included sections such as ‘Meet the team’ and ‘Testimonials.’ They had to structure their reports well and include varied sentences, dashes, semi-colons and commas. They were very keen to promote their games and their vocabulary choices were effective and persuasive.
Is your child in Year 4?
The government is introducing a new assessment for Year 4 pupils. In June, each child in Year 4 is set to complete an online multiplication tables check (MTC). Read more about this new assessment.
There will be 25 questions covering the full range of facts children are expected to know, which means questions going up to 12 x 12. However, there’s slightly more weighting towards multiplication facts involving 6, 7, 8, 9 and 12 due to these being the most difficult to learn. For example, there will be between 2 and 4 questions involving multiplying by 6.
For each question, children are presented with a multiplication fact and an empty box. This may be written as __ x 6 or as 6 x __ .
If you’d like to practise at home, our own website has lots of spreadsheets you can download.
There are also lots of websites that you can use. This one is very similar to the MTC. It’s possible to alter the settings on this website to focus on particular times tables.
Another exciting way to practise times tables is through the ‘Times Tables Rockstars’ website. Every child has their own individual login details that enables them to access their account at school and at home. Feedback so far is that this is proving an enjoyable way to practise times tables facts at home!
Safer Internet Day
Today is National Safer Internet Day. To celebrate this, and as part of our current topic (computing), Year 5 and 6 have spent some time thinking about how we can stay safe online.
We focused specifically on online persuasion: the idea that much of what we see online is designed to persuade us to act in a certain way.
We started off by searching ‘Plumber Leeds’ on Bing. You can Help at home by searching this with your child and seeing if they can explain to you what we noticed about the top results (hint: sponsorship).
Then, we learnt about cookies and how they store information about our digital footprint. As part of our learning about cookies, we learnt about what pop ups are, why they can be a bad thing and, most importantly, what we should do if we come across one online.
We learnt about how online games persuade us to stay on them for longer and spend money – and what’s in it for the games companies (who, despite the fact that one game earnt a whopping £1.38bn last year in revenue, advertise as being free for all).
Finally, we reflected on our learning and made pledges for how we can stay safe, happy and healthy online.
Help at home by asking your child what they pledged. Or, you could also help at home by asking your child the questions below.
Sport Relief – The Big Summit Sofa Challenge Friday 06 March
We are very excited to announce that Scholes (Elmet) Primary School will be the starting point of the BBC’s Big Summit Sofa Challenge on Friday 06 March.
Harry Gration, Amy Garcia and Paul Hudson from BBC Look North will join in with Wake Up Shake Up as their warm-up before they set off at 10am. They will then head towards Barwick, pulling and pushing their red sofa 100 miles, incorporating some of Yorkshire’s biggest climbs. We will be making banners, flags and as much noise as we can to create an amazing send off for the celebrity team.
It would be amazing if we were able to start this challenge off with a generous donation and so we are inviting the children to come to school in their sports kit, in exchange for a £1 contribution.
The BBC television cameras will also be in school to film us and talk to as many people as they can – some may even feature on the news that night.
They have asked that we encourage as many parents, family and friends to stay after they have dropped children off in the morning, so please feel free to show your support and join in with the fun!
Thank you in anticipation of your support.
PE – gymnastics
This week, in our PE session, 56OB finished off a unit of gymnastics learning by getting out the equipment in the hall. We had a great time using our balance, coordination and strength to tackle a range of tricky equipment – lots of us were super resilient, too!
Here’s a few action shots…
Ask your child what they’ve been learning about in PE recently. Challenge them to explain what impact this has had on their physical and mental health.
Computer Coding!
As part of our computing topic, we’ve been programming our own games on Scratch. We used to decomposition to break down making a game into smaller, more manageable chunks.
We’ve written algorithms using sequence and selection to tell the computer what to do and when. It’s been very tricky though. We’ve constantly had to debug our code for errors – it’s really hard so we’ve made plenty of mistakes. But we’ve all enjoyed the process and the children this week commented that they felt proud of their learning.
Here’s a few pictures of our games. They’re not finished yet but you should be able to see that they’re super impressive.
Challenge your child by asking them to explain the algorithms to you. For a further challenge, can they talk about their own games using some of our topic vocabulary: sequence & selection, decomposition, algorithm, variable.
Home Link – More or fewer?
During some of our maths activities and during day to day play in Nursery, we have been comparing quantities of objects. Many children understood the concept of who had ‘more’ or the ‘most’ but children were less familiar with the word ‘fewer’.
Try to use this language at home as you play and during everyday tasks. You could make a game to play by gathering a handful of objects e.g Lego bricks, coins, buttons, beads or anything small that can be counted. Put them into a bag or box and take turns to put your hands in and pull out a handful of objects. Who has more? Who has fewer?
To encourage your child to think even more, try asking questions, such as:
- What can you tell me about the number of objects?
- I think I have more than you – how could we check?
- What makes you think you collected more?
- Who do you think collected more objects?
- Who collected fewer objects?
- Have a go at taking handfuls of different sizes. For example,
sometimes take a big handful of items and the next time only take
a small handful of items.
Handy hint – we have been learning to use the word ‘fewer’ to describe
a smaller number of countable objects, such as coins, buttons, people or
pencils. ‘Less’ would be used to describe smaller amount of something
that cannot be individually counted, such as money, water or time.