Red Nose Day
A huge thank you to everyone that donated money last Friday for Comic Relief. The Junior Leadership Team stood at the gate and shook their buckets and collected any donations. You are such a generous bunch of people and we managed to raise £337.97. Thank you again for your support.
Bikeability
Year 5 have been working hard over the last couple of weeks to improve their cycling skills in school. They began on the playground working on being able to stop safely, going around obstacles and learning hand signals. When they were ready, they were let lose on the roads of Scholes. On the road they were learning to get on and off a bike safely, checking it was safe to stop and set off, and being aware of parked vehicles. They battled poor weather – freezing temperatures and torrential rain – but they thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
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Class 5/6A News
Well, that was a week with a difference! The weather has been up to all sorts of mischief this week, but thankfully it hasn’t disrupted Class 5/6A’s learning. Let’s see what they have been getting up to.
In Maths, Year 5 have been exploring fractions represented as decimals, focusing in particular on tenths and hundredths. To help us make the connections, we have visualised objects or numbers being split into ten and one hundred equal parts respectively to identify the fraction, and then representing this in decimal form, via the use of a place value chart.
Topic has seen us continue our Computing learning with the microbit devices. This week we have turned our devices into a Magic 8 ball-style fortune teller, and also a counter. The pupils have worked hard in understanding the various coding block which form an algorithm and using an emulator to trial their code before downloading it onto the microbit.
Writing this week has concentrated on understanding the rules around the punctuation of direct speech. Help at home: Parents, when you read at home with your child, get them to identify examples of direct speech in their books and have them explain why they are punctuated correctly.
In Living and Learning, we have discussed the importance of friends and family and maintaining happy and healthy relationships with these individuals. We have particularly looked at ourselves and he role we play in these relationships, identifying what qualities we look for a in a friend, and why might people choose to be friends or spend time with ourselves.
Finally, a huge thank you to those pupils and parents who managed to make it into school on Friday despite the wintry conditions. Ensuring regular attendance at school will really help with your child’s development and learning.
Have a great weekend!
Mr. Robson
Living and learning: I know we’re all the same and we’re all different.
Our circle time has been all about being the same and recognising differences in each other. The children linked up with someone in the class who they felt they didn’t know much about. They spent a few minutes swapping fun facts about each other. They then had to report back what they’d found out. We found out some brilliant facts – who was scared of spiders, who had brothers and sisters, favourite foods and favourite sports. Even I learnt a few things that I didn’t know!
We then discussed how these differences between us are really important and they make us who we are. Wouldn’t it be boring if we were all the same?
At the end of each circle time, we have an open forum in which the children can discuss, in confidence, any worries that might be bothering them. We listen without judgement and offer advice using the sentence stems ‘Would it help if you…’ or ‘Would it help if I…’ The class feel really comfortable in discussing any issues and are brilliantly empathetic towards each other – a really mature group of children.
Help at home by asking your child about circle time. Do they enjoy it? Does it help them?
World Book Day!
Yesterday we celebrated World Book Day by visiting the younger classes to enjoy a good book. Year 5 headed to Mrs Latham’s class where we were met by some very enthusiastic readers. Some year 5’s read to the younger children, whilst some of Mrs Latham’s class showed off their amazing fluent reading to their older peers. I even enjoyed Mahli reading ‘Funnybones’ to me – my favourite book when I was little. What an awesome reader she was!
World Book Day
This morning, year 6 children took a trip over to nursery. They read stories and talked about their favourite characters.
Science: We are chemists
We have continued to be chemists in our science learning and conducted an experiment that produced a chemical reaction. The children mixed two liquids – vinegar and warm milk. The vinegar altered the acidity in the milk and made it curdle. The children sieved the liquid to retrieve the curdled mixture and then moulded and dried it. This chemical reaction had created a type of plastic. The children recognised that this was an irreversible change as it could not be returned to its original state. We were quite amazed by the whole process and also quite overwhelmed by the weird smell that the mixture made!
Help at home: Could you recreate this experiment at home so your child can talk you through the process? Can they use any scientific vocabulary in their explanation?
Reading: book club
This half term, the children will be bringing home a group reader book. They were given the opportunity to look at a range of books and read the blurbs. They discussed which books they liked and which they disliked. They then grouped together according to the book they’d selected. The children will still be set a target page each week and they will be choosing their weekly task – this will still be recorded in their journals. The team that reach their target page and complete their tasks well, stand a chance of being our weekly trophy winners. Who will it be this week?
Help at home: continue to read daily with your child. This will improve understanding and fluency. Reading to an adult can also increase a child’s enjoyment of a book.
Class 5/6A News
A big welcome back to all of our pupils following the half-term break. I hope you are all relaxed and refreshed and ready for the new half-term. Already a jam packed week of learning is behind us. Let’s catch up with what Class 5/6A have been up to.
In Maths we are revisiting fractions, looking at multiplying an integer by a unit and non-unit fraction. Using our existing fractions and times table knowledge, our Year 5 pupils have made an excellent start to the half-term. How to help: continue to support your child’s maths learning at home by encouraging daily use of Times Table Rockstars.
In Writing, we are working towards writing a spooky narrative and setting description. This week we have watched an animation of Whitby Abbey to help us generate some vocabulary which we can use in our piece. We have also brainstormed figurative language to describe a number of spooky scenes such as darkened forests, lightning and moonlight skies. Our pupils have come up with some excellent description, and I can’t wait to see the pieces they produced.
The spooky theme has also appeared in our Reading work. We have been reading passages from Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ and using descriptive language from them to recreate drawings of the lead character and his surroundings.
Also in Reading we have our Friday Book Club. This half-term pupils have been given a selection of texts to choose from, which they can take home to read alongside their classmates. On Fridays we will get together to share our thoughts on what we have read so far, identify similarities between texts, and share our opinions.
We are Chemists this half-term in Science. Our work this week has seen us mixing bicarbonate of soda with vinegar and using balloons to test how much carbon dioxide can be created to inflate a balloon. Once a test experiment had been established, pupils then changed some of the variables of the experiment to see how this would affect the outcome.
Being able to recognise both positive and negative feelings and understand how to deal with them has been focus in Living and Learning. Our circle time discussion has seen us look at a wider range of vocabulary to describe feelings we experience every day, how we can express these, and what to do if we experience a feeling we are not sure of. Pupils discussed how they would support a peer who was struggling to deal with a particular scenario, and turn it into a positive.
Science: we are chemists
The children have been focusing on scientific enquiry this week – looking at fair and comparative tests. They got the opportunity to see that when you mix baking powder with vinegar, it causes a chemical reaction. This reaction produces carbon dioxide. The children created this chemical reaction within a plastic bottle with a balloon attached to the top. The carbon dioxide caused the balloon to inflate. The children were able to alter the variables in the experiment and compare results. For example, some children increased the amount of baking powder, whilst others increased the amount of vinegar. We had great fun observing the results. They were able to recognise that this chemical reaction was irreversible. They also applied some previously learnt vocabulary to their explanations, such as solute and solution.
Luckily, we all survived the experiment without any big explosions!
Help at home: Can yo help your child learn the science vocabulary for this half term?
