Save the date – Wednesday 21st June
Wednesday 21st June is the date for our Year 2 skipping festival. It will take place at Leeds Trinity University and more details will be sent out shortly.
We are doing lots of practising at school and ropes are still available to buy (£3 at the office) to keep improving those skills at home.
History – Heroes (Nelson Mandela and Leonora Cohen)
We have started out new history topic all about real life heroes. The first important person we’re learning about it Nelson Mandela. You can find more about him here. He believed that everyone should be treated the same. We will be learning about equality, apartheid and the suffragettes.
Skipping Festival!
Hello!
Year 4 had their skipping festival today at Leeds Trinity University and they did an absolutely amazing job! The teamwork and support they showed between one another was outstanding and they cheered each other on when some were feeling a bit nervous.
Overall, we won a mixture of bronze, silver and gold awards on the individual skills and we did an amazing job on the group skips too!
In between the skills, the children had the chance to skip, dance and sing along to the music.
A big well done to all of the Year 4s for trying their best and representing Moortown so well.
Rounders!
This week in PE, Year 3 welcomed in the summer term with their first PE lesson playing rounders!
We practised our batting and fielding skills whilst getting to grips with the rules of the game.
Year 3 loved the PE lesson and we look forward to developing our rounders skills as the summer term progresses!
History: Carnival
Welcome back Year 3!
This half term, we are historians. In this topic, we will be learning about some different carnivals around the world, including Leeds West Indian carnival. We’ll find out about its links to The West Indies and slavery in the past.
Here is our vocabulary for our topic this half term:
Help at home by asking your child what vocabulary they have learnt in class during the week. See if they can remember what word vocabulary means!
PE with Foot-Tech Academy
This half term we are very lucky to have Foot-Tech Academy come into Moortown to help us with our PE learning. We will be practising three different skills: run, jump and throw. This week we learnt how to control our speed and movements when running. We each picked up a cone and pretended it was a steering wheel and we were driving a car. We had to change gears depending on how fast we were going! Hula hoops were roundabouts and we needed to make sure we slowed right down in order to go around the roundabout. There were even bridges to jump over.
We had a brilliant time and we can’t wait to continue our learning for the rest of the half term.
Dissecting Alstroemerias
In this week’s science learning, we expanded our understanding of the anatomy and reproductive cycle of a plant.
We did this by dissecting alstroemerias and labelling the different parts.
After this, we created a cartoon comic strip to illustrate how alstroemerias (and similar plants) reproduce.
Help at Home: See if your child can remember the different parts of a plant. Even better if: they could draw a labelled diagram to illustrate their understanding!
Summer 1: Week 1
Welcome back! We hope you all had a happy and healthy break. Thanks to everyone who sent an email about your child’s half-term holiday. We had lots of fun sharing these on Monday.
This half-term our topic is called Life on Earth. We’ve kicked off our topic by going on bug hunts. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be learning more about life cycles. We’ll closely observe caterpillars and tadpoles to help us understand the different stages of a life cycle. A big thanks to Huey (and Mum) for bringing in some tadpoles!
Help at home: Find out about your favourite insect. Draw a picture of it and write one or two facts about it. Bring it to school next week for us to share.
DT
This week, the creative area turned into a woodwork bench. The children worked in small groups to create bug hotels. They used hand drills, screwdrivers and hammers to create their bug hotels.
Our finished bug hotels…
Next week, we’ll be finding natural objects to put inside our bug hotels.
Help at home: Can you help collect natural objects to put inside our bug hotels?
PE
Yesterday, we really enjoyed our first session with the Foot-Tech coaches. This half-term, we’ll be learning three key skills: push, kick and throw.
Phonics
This week, we’ve started Phase 4. In this phase children will use the phonemes learnt in Phase 2 and Phase 3 to read and spell words with four or more phonemes and words ending in suffixes:
–ing, –ed /t/, –ed /id/ /ed/, –est
Here are some examples:
CVCC words: tent, damp, toast
For example, in the word ‘damp’, d = consonant, a = vowel, m = consonant, p = consonant
CCVC words: swim, plum, spoon
For example, in the word ‘plum’, p = consonant, l = consonant, u = vowel, m = consonant
CCVCC words: stamp, crept, twist
For example, in the word ‘stamp’, s = consonant, t = consonant, a = vowel, m = consonant, p = consonant
CCCVC words: strap scrub strong
For example, in the word, ‘strap’, s = consonant, t = consonant, r = consonant, a = vowel, p = consonant
CCCVCC words: strand strict sprint
For example, in the word, ‘sprint’, s = consonant, p = consonant, r = consonant, i = vowel, n = consonant, t = consonant
They’ll also learn to read and write 18 new tricky words.
Help at home: Practise reading and writing this week’s tricky words:
said, so, have and like.
Poetry Picnic
This week’s poem was called Pitter Patter.
Help at home: When it rains this weekend, have fun saying this week’s poem together at home.
Have a lovely weekend.
Latin: Acting and Adverbs
In Latin, we read, translated and acted out a comic strip (see below) about life before the Romans conquered Britain. We also discussed adverbs in both English and Latin. Take a look at our great work:
Help at home: Identify the adverbs in the story, what three letters do they end in?
Chocolate cake!
Our first week back has been all about chocolate cake! What’s not to love?
We have focused our Writing and Reading learning around a poem – Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen. This children’s poem is about how much a young boy (Michael) loved chocolate cake and how one time, he ate an entire cake in the middle of the night. What is the meaning of the chocolate cake? We decided as a class that it’s all about temptation and that when it comes to things you love, it can be tricky or impossible to control one’s impulses.
Click here to read the poem: https://www.uv.mx/personal/jomartinez/files/2011/08/Chocolate-Cake.pdf
In the next two weeks, Year 4 will be writing a narrative about leaving the classroom, sneaking up to the staffroom and eating the teachers chocolate cake! It’s made us hungry just thinking about it.
Just like the poem, the purpose of our narrative will be to entertain and interest the reader by telling a story. The features we’ll use are: descriptions, direct speech and adverbial phrases to add detail.
In Reading, we have put ourselves into Michael’s shoes and performed part of the poem by adding actions and expressions to the words. Here’s some of us in action!
We’ve also picked the poem a part to answer retrieval questions, where the answer is in the text and inference questions, where we’ve needed to use clues to find the answer.
Help at home by thinking of lots of adjectives (describing words) to describe this chocolate cake. We’ll use them in our writing!
