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.
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!
Gymnastics in 5/6B
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.
Rugby – taster session
Want to get involved in rugby? A local rugby team are recruiting girls and boys in Year 5. Go along to the taster session if you’re interested!
Living and Learning: Identity Week
This week’s living and learning statement is…
‘I respect myself and others.’
Year 5 and 6 have been discussing what identity can mean and the similarities and differences we all have to one another. We have been working really hard to show off our identity and uniqueness by producing identity maps. The aim of an identity map is to record as much about yourself as possible, such as your likes, hobbies, appearance, favourite foods and so on. We have also made sure that we present our maps in a unique, individual way, as this also adds to our own identity. Here are some fantastic examples of the identity maps we have created. What can you find out about their identity by looking at their maps?
5/6B Dance
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.
Barwick Maypole celebration – dancers wanted
The Barwick Maypole Committee (barwickmaypolecommittee@hotmail.com) are looking for primary school aged children to dance at the maypole celebration this year. Please contact the committee on the email address above and they will let you know about rehearsals and how to join in the fun!
Evolution and inheritance
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.
Welcome back!
Happy 2022!
We hope you all had a very restful and healthy Christmas. It’s lovely to have all the children back in school again.
Year 5 and 6 have started a new science unit this half term all about evolution and inheritance. They have a new set of vocabulary that they will be getting their heads around!
- evolution: change in living things over time
- inherited: the way that a trait or characteristic is passed to offspring from parents
- trait: a quality or characteristic belonging to something
- adaptation: a small change that a living thing goes through
- natural selection: a process in which living things adapt themselves in order to survive, that they don’t have any control over
- prehistoric: the time classed is ‘before history’ as it was so long ago it hasn’t been recorded or written
- variety: differences between things as part of a whole group
- fossil: the prehistoric remains of a plant or animal
Could you help your child learn these words at home? You could create some flashcards with images on that might help jog their memory, you could create a poster of the words. Could you describe one of the words and your child has to guess which word from the list it is? Be creative and have fun!
Living and Learning: Physical Health and Fitness
5/6A are very excited to show off our brand new WUSU dance!
Wake Up, Shake Up is a very important and exciting part of our school routine. To ensure we are keeping physically active and healthy for 60 minutes every day, children participate in 10 minutes of dancing and movement to music.
A few were slightly apprehensive about learning a new routine, but their dance moves have sent shockwaves of positivity through school – even the teachers are wanting to join in!
Take a look at our brand new WUSU video here – we hope you enjoy it!