Leeds Schools Sports Association cross country races
We have received details about the LSSA cross country races for this year. These races take place on a Saturday and children compete against pupils from other Leeds schools.
Please note, parents/carers are responsible for taking and supervising their child/children at these events. There will be a parent representative.
There are opportunities for Year 3 and 4 girls and boys to race 900m and Year 5 and 6 girls and boys to race 1500m.
Race 1 – Saturday 19th October 2024 – Woodhouse Grove School
Race 2 – Saturday 9th November 2024 – Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School
Race 3 –Saturday 14th December 2024 – Prince Henry’s Grammar School
Race 4 – Saturday 18th January 2025 – Middleton Park Subject to confirmation from LCC
More details about race 1 will follow shortly.
Here are some of our Key Stage 2 children taking part in one of the races last year.
Connect Challenge Wednesday 02 October
What is it?
The Connect Challenge is in memory of Rob Burrow CBE. It involves a rugby ball being ‘passed’ between local schools and each school taking part in a physical activity event.
When is it?
The challenge will run from Thursday 26 September, (Rob’s birthday) until Thursday 3 October. Our event is in the morning of Wednesday 2nd October.
Why are we remembering Rob?
Rob Burrow CBE sadly died on 2 June 2024, four and a half years after he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Throughout that time, Rob and his family bravely chose to publicly share their MND journey to raise awareness of the disease.
What is our Connect Challenge?
We will complete seven (Rob’s rugby shirt number) laps of the green and the back playground by travelling in different ways – walking, jogging or skipping. Children should come to school in outdoor PE kit on the day.
We will be raising money at the event, to be split between the Rob Burrow Centre for Motor Neurone Disease Appeal and our school charity, The Children’s Heart Surgery Fund.
We request a donation of at least £1. This can be paid online via school gateway.
Help at home: discuss this challenge at home and the reasons why we are remembering Rob. This challenge is also about friendship. Rob’s ex team mate and friend Kevin Sinfield has now raised over £8 million for MND charities. Ask your child how can they be a better friend?
Writing – What is a recount?
In our writing lessons, we have begun our first writing unit! We’re going to write a recount as a warrior arriving back home to Athens.
What is a recount?
A recount re-tells events and describes what has happened.
What makes a good recount?
- past tense
- description
- feelings
- adverbs
So far, we’ve read a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) and we’ve decided that the best recounts include lots of detail and their sentences start in many different ways. One way to do these two things is to use adverbs!
What is an adverb?
An adverb is a word that adds information to the verb. It might tell us how, where or when something is happening.
For example:
Miss Birch danced elegantly.
The boat floated into the harbour early.
I love chocolate ice-cream the best.
Help at home: Use adverbs to describe your everyday tasks. I am walking up the stairs carefully. I woke up eventually.
We’ve identified adverbs in our writing and our next step is to use them in our writing. Check back here soon to see how we’ve been getting on!
Maths – flexible partitioning
Year 3 have been getting to know 3 digit numbers and how to represent them. We now have three digits that represent hundreds, tens and ones.
What does the 3 represent in each number?
We began partitioning these numbers into the three columns:
Then we had a go at partitioning these numbers flexibly with exchanging.
We know:
10 ones = 1 ten
10 tens = 1 hundred
Here’s how we did it! We used place value counters and base 10 to help us with our number sentences.
Help at home: How many different ways can you partition the number 789?What does each digit represent? Can you a part part whole model or a place value chart?
Virtual author event with Tom Vaughan – Hercules!
This afternoon, Year 3 attended their first virtual author event with Tom Vaughan who is releasing his second book in his series of Hercules: Hercules – A Hero’s Journey (On A School Trip).
These books are all based on Greek Myths and Greek gods which is linked to our Topic learning this half term! He told us a little bit about the new book and then read us an extract which was full of toilet humour!
At the end of the event, Tom did a quiz where we had to guess the Greek god and their name. Lots of us got Zeus, Athena, Ares and Poseidon. The book is full of the same illustrations.
Help at home: Visit Scholastic to see what other author and illustrator events there are coming up!
Autumn term clubs
Living and Learning – I follow the school rules.
The first week back to school brings lots of new routines and ways of doing things but there are something that haven’t changed!
Our three school rules:
1. We’re respectful.
2. We’re ready.
3. We’re safe.
We reminded ourselves of these rules in Year 3 and what these rules might look like across school. Here’s what we came up with:
How can we be respectful?
- We can listen to each other.
- We treat each other fairly.
- We look after the school and its belongings.
- We use kind words.
How can we show that we’re ready?
- We can have eyes on the speaker.
- We can have empty hands.
- We can have silent voices when someone is speaking.
How can we be safe in school?
- We can walk inside and outside when moving from one place to another.
- We can have kind hands and feet by keeping them to ourselves.
- We can stay where an adult can see us.
These three school rules are really important for everyone in school, not just the children. They make school a happy and healthy place to be.
Help at home: How can be safe at home or while out somewhere? Discuss what you could do to stay safe and what can be done if you ever feel unsafe!
Reading Records
Reading Records
This week, Year 3 will be sent home with their new and exciting reading records! These records are to help me (Miss Birch) keep track of the children’s reading progress.
The new reading records key info:
- Each time one of the children signs out a new book to read from the library, they can make note of these in the book and rate them out of 5 stars.
- I’ll choose an activity for the whole class to complete on their chosen book each Friday. More information on these activities are inside the record.
- The children will need to bring in these reading records every Friday for our Book Club lesson where we’ll discuss their books and develop their love of reading.
- The children’s grown-ups will also need to write a short comment sharing with us the lovely reading their child has been doing at home.
- It gives the children ownership and responsibility of their reading!
I hope this is all clear and I’m really looking forward to seeing their progress.
Any questions, please ask!
Y3/4 Spelling list for half term 1
In Key Stage 2, instead of asking you to learn a short list of spellings each week, you will be given a longer list (roughly 40 words) that we will focus on in that half-term. Don’t worry, we’re not asking you to learn them all in one week. Instead, we’ll ask you to focus on learning these words over the course of the entire half-term. There’s a few reasons for this:
- We want you take responsibility for your own learning and start to figure out how you learn best (there’s some ideas below). Even if that means making some mistakes along the way.
- Lots of research suggests that learning more spellings over a longer time leads to better remembering how to spell them in the long-term.
- Similarly, lots of research suggests that if you learn something for a week and don’t come back to it you’ll likely forget it anyway
- We won’t have a ‘formal’ test each week. Instead, we’ll mix it up. We might ask you to test each other on the words you’ve been learning. We might test the words at random and then you’ll know which words you need to practise more and which words you’re confident with. We might just think about some of the words and share ideas for how we’re going about learning them.
- Ultimately, we want this to be about learning – and not just getting them right in a test.
How you decide to do this is up to you. You might decide to focus on the trickiest words first. Or, you might decide to learn 8 words a week and really focus on these whilst still practising the others, too. For some of you, you might already feel confident with some of the words so might choose to not practise these at all. However you decide to do it is up to you. The important thing is that you’re learning them and learning how you like to learn them best.
Every Friday, we’ll spend time practising or testing (informally) or discussing all things spelling so be ready (one of our 8 Rs for learning) to join in!
If you need some ideas for practical things to do, check out the Super Spelling Strategies Guide on the school website.
Half-term 1
This half-term, our spellings are linked to the rules and strategies we’ll be learning in class:
- alternative ways for writing the ‘ay’ sound
- alternative ways for writing the ‘ee’ sound
- ‘double up for a short vowel sound’
- ‘drop the e for ing’
- ‘drop the y for an i’
- adding the suffixes ed, ing
- homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently)
Each Friday, you’ll be tested on 8 of the words from the list below.
| famous | believe | accident | breathe | answer |
| library | passion | notice | were | possess |
| century | address | favourite | appear | here |
| their | weight | complete | ordinary | wear |
| straight | they’re | surprise | busy | increase |
| session | possible | there | hear | where |
| suppose | mission | eighth | extreme | occasion |
| fraction | different | attention | learn | possession |
School Games Mark Platinum award
We are delighted to announce that we have achieved the School Games Platinum Mark Award for the 2023/24 academic year.
The School Games Mark is a Government-led award scheme launched in 2012, facilitated by the Youth Sport Trust, to reward schools for their commitment to the development of competition across their school and into the community, and we are delighted to have been recognised for our success.
As part of our application, we were asked to fulfil criteria in the areas of participation, competition, workforce and clubs, and we are pleased that the hard work of everyone at our school has been rewarded this year.
Thank you to all the children who have represented school at different inter school events and competitions, parents for their support and staff for accompanying the children. We look forward to more events this year.
We are very proud of our children for engaging with these physical activities both in and out of school to support our ethos of being a happy and healthy school.
