Philosophy Friday!
Every morning, children have a morning task as soon as they arrive at school.
This could be practising their number facts, times tables, spelling, reading skills and more! This is one reason why it’s vitally important that your child arrives at school on time.
On Fridays, our morning task is a little different. Fridays are now… Philosophy Friday! On these mornings, children are given the task to ‘think and be ready to share’ about a given statement.
These have included: We rely too much on technology; What is the meaning of a good life?; If you discover buried treasure, is it yours?; and more!
Help at home: have discussions with your child and give them the opportunity to develop their thinking skills by asking thought provoking questions!
PE: football skills
We’ve been working hard to improve our football skills this half term. We began by learning how to effectively pass a football with the side of our foot to a partner. We developed this further by looking at other ways you can pass a ball. The children recognised the importance of dribbling the ball and keeping it at a good distance so that you have good control. We created our own courses using cones and worked in pairs to develop these skills.
Living and Learning: protected characteristics – BSL
Year 5/6 have been offered a course in British Sign Language. Over the next four weeks, we will join Helen, her interpreter and a few other schools from across Leeds to learn some basic sign language.
Last week, we learned how to have a simple conversation and say the alphabet (link for left handed).
Help at home: discuss the importance of being able to communicate effectively. Help your child to recall some of the signs.
Reading Records
Wow! We are super impressed by how well presented our reading records are. Children are investing lots of their own time into creating a response to their reading. When discussing their books in class, children from 5/6C have been enthustiastic and articulate. Thank you to all the children and parents who have worked hard to ensure that a love of reading is our top priority.
At home, keep up the good work with reading:
- read aloud for at least 15 minutes a night
- discuss stories and make connections between different books/ texts
- get an adult to read to you daily (sometimes this could be through stories which are online)
- recommend books to family and friends
Author visit: Liz Pichon
On Friday, the children in year 5/6 were fortunate enough to attend a live workshop with the author of the Tom Gates series – Liz Pichon.
During the workshop, we learned how to create doodles which matched her style. It was also a great opportunity to get inspired to write our own funny stories for a competition.
At home, take a look at Pichon’s website and get writing your own funny stories.
Science: we are physicists
5,6B have continued to learn about forces this week and investigated air resistance further. The children constructed their parachutes using plastic bags, Plasticine, paperclips and string. They ensured their 3 parachutes had different surface areas. They predicted that the parachute with the smaller surface area would fall first as it has less surface area and therefore less drag.
The children dropped the parachutes multiple times and worked out an average drop time. Next week, we’ll evaluate the results and reach a conclusion about our findings.
Help at home: Ask your child about variables. What was the control, dependent and independent variable in the investigation?
Survivors Diary Entry
This week, we’ve been writing a survivors style diary entry taking inspiration from our class novel: Survivors by David Long.
Today, we edited and improved our writing in pairs. We checked that we had included:fronted adverbials, relative clauses and that our writing was in the first person.
Help at home: by asking your child to write a sentence with a fronted adverbial in it. This makes their sentence starters more varied and interesting!
Does the surface area of a parachute affect how quickly it falls?
In this week’s science learning, we conducted an enquiry to answer the following question:
Does the surface area of a parachute affect how quickly it falls?
We went to the hall to drop our parachutes and timed how long they took to drop to the floor.
What did we change? The size of the parachute
What did we keep the same? The height, the weight and the force applied
What did we measure? How long it took for the parachute to fall
Our results showed us that the bigger the surface area of the parachute, the longer it takes to fall because more air resistance is acting on it.
Help at home: Present the sentence above to your child with the bold words missing and see if they can fill in the gaps!
We are readers!
I have been hugely amazed by the reading journal tasks that I have been receiving each week in my class. It shows that the children are taking their reading seriously at home and that they are considering the effort and presentation that they put into their weekly tasks. This week, the children completed ‘Draw it’ which allows them to draw a front cover, a main character or a scene from their book.
Help at home: Children should be reading daily at home and recording this in their journals. Can you listen to your child read and sign their journal each week? Please check that your child is completing their weekly tasks and returning their journals to school every Friday.
Topic: we are geographers
We used Digimaps this week to observe how Leeds had changed over time. This online tool allows the children to look at historical and present day maps and measure the scale of the city. We looked at a map from 1890, 1950 and 2023. They used a free hand tool to draw around the city and then the measuring tool to record the scale. It was really clear to see how Leeds had expanded. This learning links to our topic vocabulary – city expansion.
Help at home: Ask your child why a city like Leeds has expanded over time.