Walk to School Week winners
Lots of families joined in with Walk to School Week last week. The Buffers and St Phillips car parks were busy with people walking some of the way, if they couldn’t walk all the way from home. Thank you for joining in and helping to make our school and community an even happier and healthier place to be. Here are some of our lucky winners!
Reading champion
We have been getting very excited about the KS2 Reading Champion Competition that is running across school and Leeds. They are searching for the best young reading ambassadors in Leeds, KS2 children who advocate reading for pleasure and encourage others to find their own love of reading.
Each class voted for a Reading Champion for their class. The nominations were brought to the Junior Leadership Team and they voted for an overall winner. They chose Ella from Year 6. She will now write a letter of support for the competition and she will be up against other schools across Leeds.
Good luck, Ella!
Living and learning: I know what consent is.
This week, the children have been talking about body image. We began by discussing what body image is. They came up with this definition:
Body image is our idea of how our body looks and how we think it looks to others. This can include our feelings and thoughts about our height, weight, shape, skin colour, appearance or attractiveness.
We discussed how our body image is influenced by a range of different things such as TV, social media, celebrities and many more. The children recognised that it is important to consider the positive aspects about yourself and when you pay someone a compliment it should be about their personality or something they’re good at, not about appearance. We should ‘fill each others buckets’ with positivity.
The children wrote on each others buckets with their compliments. There were some very happy faces by the end of the lesson.
Living and Learning: Reading Champions
Year 5/6 C have taken part in a demorcratic decision to nominate one person from our class to be a Reading Champion.
After a lengthy discussion about what makes a suitable Reading Champion, we agreed that it was someone who was passionate about reading. We were looking for someone to be a leader – a role model, and inspiration.
After two very close rounds of voting, we decided that Lenny was our clear winner.
Lenny’s enthusiastic nature and pure joy when discussing all books is a joy to see.
Walk to School Week 16-20 May 2022
Next week is Walk to School Week (or scoot or ride).
We hope you’ll all try to take part in this, even if you can’t walk from home. The Buffers Pub and St Phillip’s Church have agreed for us to use their car parks so everyone has the opportunity to walk part of the way.
Remember to bring your raffle tickets each day you walk to put in your class boxes to be in with a chance of winning a prize!
Let’s get active!
Can fruit produce electricity?
We are continuing with our electricity unit in science and have been investigating whether fruit can produce electricity. How would this show how a battery works?
Lemons can be used in a circuit to power an LED. The juicy part of the lemon contains electrolytes that conduct electricity – approximately 0.7 – 0.9 volts. Four lemons are needed to power an LED. The children turned the lemons into batteries by using zinc nails and copper coins. The copper acts as the positive terminal of a battery and the zinc nail becomes the negative terminal. They then added the LED, wires and a switch. The LED lit up – hooray!
What other fruits or vegetables can be used in a circuit?
Living and learning: I take part in democratic decisions.
The School Library Service is holding a competition to celebrate reading for key stage 2 children in Leeds. The children have the opportunity to be shortlisted and go to an awards ceremony and be crowned Leeds School Librarian 2022.
As a class, we discussed which children are good role models when it comes to reading. Some children never have their heads out of a book, whilst others always complete their reading journals and tasks at home. We came up with a shortlist of seven candidates and as a class we took a democratic vote. This nominated person’s name will be passed to the Junior Leadership Team and their job will be to select an overall candidate to represent our school. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we have a winner among us!
Science
Our new unit of learning for this half term is Electricity. The children had to recall their previous learning, including remembering the scientific symbols for the components of an electrical circuit. They were then asked to make a working circuit – some chose to use bulbs, whilst others used buzzers or motors. The children were then given images of different circuits using different components. They had to make predictions as to whether the circuit would work or not, and give reasons for their predictions. The children then constructed each circuit to test their predictions.
Computing topic
This week, 5/6B have continued to work on Scratch. They have developed their computing skills further by creating multiplication games, a bit like Times Table Rockstars. They needed to select the correct algorithms that would make the program ask random times tables and allow the player to see if they had the answer correct or incorrect. Quite a few children had to debug their algorithms as there were some issues once the game was in play. The children were able to add different variables such as sound and a score. Next time, the children are going to attempt to add different levels to their games.
Computing topic
We have been busy enjoying our computing topic so far this term. The children are currently working hard to create their own chat bot game. This is a game in which players can answer questions and score points. The children have recalled their knowledge of Scratch really well and remembered how to select a sprite (a character) and a background – some could remember how to build some algorithms. They began by creating an algorithm that allowed them to input a question and someone to input an answer. They used selection to choose the best algorithm. Some managed to add multiple questions, a score and sounds to their game. Ask your child how their game is going
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