Fire Talk
Year 5 had a visit from West Yorkshire Fire Service. They talked about how to stay safe at home in the event of a fire. They explained the importance of smoke alarms and having a fire plan to get you and your family out of the house if a fire occurred. Do you have a fire plan for your house? This could be a good activity to do at home as a family.
Watch Us While We Work
Thank you to the parents who came to visit our classes on Tuesday – we fully appreciate that many parents would have been unable to attend due to work, etc. It was great to see so many faces and hopefully you found the session useful.
For those that couldn’t make it, here’s a few tips for helping your child at home.
Maths
Make sure you child is confident with their x tables up to 12 x 12. Rapid recall means being able to reply to a question accurately in just a few seconds. Once we’re confident with our tables, we can start to use this information to help us tackle trickier questions. At home, practise like this…
If we know that 3 x 4 = 12
we also know that…
30 x 4 = 120 0.3 x 4 = 1.2
30 x 40 = 1,200 0.3 x 0.4 = 0.12
300 x 40 = 1,200 0.03 x 0.4 = 0.012
300 x 40 = 12, 000
Here we are using the fact but making it 10, 100, 1000 times bigger or smaller.
Make it even harder by asking your child questions that involve using this skill:
7 x 90 =
600 x 3 =
12, 000 x 2 =
Reading
Here’s a few top tips for reading at home:
- give opportunities for your child to read in their head
- give opportunities for your child to read aloud
- model reading aloud with expression to your child
- ask your child to tell you things they know (facts), think (inferences) and wonder (inferences)
- challenge your child to come up with their own fact finding questions
- pretend to be two characters from the book they are reading and have a conversation (use things you’ve learnt about the character to get across their personality
It would be great if children were reading daily. If they’re a reluctant reader, let them read whatever they enjoy – reading is reading after all. If they love reading, try and encourage them to read a broader range of things.
Finally, it really helps our discussions as a class if your child has read to their target page – this is set every Friday.
If you have any questions or concerns about helping your child at home, please do not hesitate to come and speak to your child’s class teacher.
Light investigation
Year 5/6 S have been investigating the idea that light travels in straight lines and thinking about how shadows are made. They predicted what would happen to the size of a shadow if the light source was brought closer or further away from an object. The children measured changes in shadow size and recorded the data in a table and in graph form. At home, ask your child what they found out.
I can use OS maps
Today, year 5/6 studied OS maps. We learned about how the scale of the map can help us to find out the distances between places. The scale on OS explorer maps is 1:25000. This means every 4cm on the map is worth 1km on the ground. At home you could explore scales on different maps: Google maps or Earth, OS maps or even What3words from last week’s Learning.
Boccia club
Living and learning: self-esteem workshop
Many thanks to the volunteers from Dove, who ran our self-esteem workshops in year 5 and 6 today. All the children were able to talk maturely about body image and learnt about the difference between professional and personal media.
Living and Learning: Democracy
At Scholes, we democratically voted for our school councillors during the last week of term.
Here are our new school council representatives.
We look forward to their enthusiasm and leadership qualities.
3, 2, 1 DODGEBALL!
Well done to the Year 5 dodgeball team, managed by Mr Gledhill, who came third in the East Leeds heats this week. They were fiercely competitive and showed a real team work spirit. Lots of the photos are blurred because they were running around so fast!
Harvest assembly
We were amazed at how much food and toiletries we managed to collect for St George’s Crypt. Thank you for your contribution.
Year 5 reading – Plastic Problem
This week, Year 5 have been reading about plastic and its effect on the ocean. We practised our retrieval skills by picking out some key information (see the underlined bits in the image below) and answering questions.
We thought about plastic and the wider problem and made posters using the information we’d found.
Then, we had a debate: ‘Should plastic be banned?’
Even though we all know there are lots of concerns with plastic at the moment, we were all able to put forward some arguments about how plastic can be used positively. Ask you child their thoughts. Do they think it should be banned or not? Can they give reasons for both sides of the argument?
Reading is all about enjoyment and engagement. It was great to hear stories of people discussing their learning in the playground and at home. One of us even went home and made a poster to encourage others to think about their use of plastic:
