Basketball
City of Leeds Basketball, who provide our after-school basketball clubs, have a range of sessions for children of all ages.
Visit their website to book.
Tom Palmer virtual visit
Tom Palmer is an author who writes children’s books and today, Year 4 had a virtual visit with him! Some of the year 4’s recognised his name and some of his books as we have some of them in the library.
He began by talking about how he got into writing…
As a child, he didn’t enjoy reading, didn’t think he was any good at it and didn’t like it until his mum tricked him into it by using football! He began to read comics and newspapers about football and this helped him practise his reading and he started to love it! His love for reading then inspired him to become an author and his ideas for different books come mainly from football, animals and war. “Write about what you love,” said Tom. This was great to hear as we always encourage Year 4 to use what you love and know to help you write and read.
Question time!
A handful of Year 4s asked Tom a question such as;
How long does it take for you to write a book?
It depends! Some books take 6 weeks to write and some take 6 months… it depends what I’m writing about and how long the book is.
What gave you inspiration for ‘Arctic Star’?
My wife used to work on HMS Belfast so her stories about the ship inspired me to write about a war ship.
Why have you set some of your stories in Leeds?
I set some of my stories in Leeds because I’m from Leeds! Writing about somewhere that I know makes it easier as I can add more detail to it.
Help at home by researching Tom Palmer and some of his books.
Road Safety!
Hello!
Year 4 have been visited by Leeds City Council to receive a master class in road safety! The first session consisted of talking through the different ways that we can travel to school and how we can be safe on each mode of transport. For example, when travelling in a vehicle:
- Sit with a seatbelt on always!
- Don’t distract the driver.
- Be sensible.
The children learnt the Green Cross Code for when walking out and about:
- THINK
- STOP
- LOOK
- LISTEN
Each group then ventured out into Moortown to put it to good use! Here’s some of them in action…
Help at home by practising the Green Cross Code when you are out walking!
Living and Learning – I know the importance of having my ‘five a day’.
Our living and learning statement this week is ‘I know the importance of having my ‘five a day’.
As a school, we promote a happy and healthy lifestyle. In class, we have been discussing how, as individuals, we can maintain this lifestyle ourselves. This includes making sensible choices with our eating and drinking plus keeping an active body and mind. We realised that if we didn’t do these things, we might start to feel a bit low in our body and especially, in our mind.
Eating and drinking healthily doesn’t necessarily mean we can ONLY eating fruit, broccoli and peas but it means having a balanced diet. This means we can choose to eat lots of healthy things and then sometimes, we can have a treat! Aiming to have at least five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day means that our body is getting the important nutrients and vitamins that it needs. We also discussed that we should be drinking 2 litres of water a day to stay hydrated, especially as the weather is getting warmer.
In our lesson today, we discussed how our eating and drinking habits can be influenced by lots of different things such as;
- environmental issues,
- likes and dislikes,
- family and friends,
- adverts.
For example, wanting to have a cookie just because all your friends are having one doesn’t mean it’s the sensible thing to do if you’ve already had two!
The more healthy choices we make, the more our bodies will thank us for it later!
Help at home: Challenge your child and see how many different fruit and vegetables they can name!
Herd Farm 2023
Hello all!
Year 4’s residential to Herd Farm was absolutely fantastic! For some of the children, it was their first time staying away from home but they all were incredibly mature and were having too much fun to worry about much else. After we arrived, we made our beds, had dinner and went for a moon walk. The children found some geocaches, which are hidden, by GPS.
They all completed three different activities; the giant swing, the zip-wire and bushcraft. The most nerve-wracking activity was the giant swing but nearly everyone overcame their fears and had a go, even if that meant just sitting on it. Some went to the very top!
The zip-wire was great fun because they could go down in pairs. They could share the nerves and the excitement. Who could get to the bottom first?! The trickiest part was having to run back up the hill to pass the rope back!
Finally, bushcraft consisted of three activities; foraging, den-building and fire making. We foraged for different plants that we could eat such as nettles, wild garlic and ‘Jack By The Bush’. We learnt that if we can’t identify it, we can’t eat it! The children then made dens in the woods with anything they could find and finally, we used flint to build a fire and roasted marshmallows. Look who also found an antler!
All of the staff were impressed at how enthusiastic and brave our class were. At each meal time, the children helped to set the tables. They sat and ate their amazing food and some helped to tidy and clear up too!
I hope the children managed to get a good nights sleep on Friday night – I know we did!
Miss Birch, Mrs Charlesworth, Miss Gilliland and Ms Canning
What haven’t they done?
Your two days of peace and quiet may be coming to an end but rest assured that your mini humans have had an amazing day and there is more to come tomorrow.
There have been surprising daredevils (sometimes the quietest ones are the bravest!) and some amazing discoveries! Lighting fires and a bit of foraging means they can survive anywhere – well maybe not but they have certainly learnt new skills. 
There has been a flurry of photos sent tonight so I can’t post them all but here are a few and I hope that you can see why we go on residential.
A massive thank you to Miss Birch, Mrs Charlesworth and Miss Gilliland for giving up their time and making this happen – I feel the long weekend might be very welcome after the last couple of days.
Living and Learning – I know the importance of sleep
This week in Living and Learning, Year 4 have been recapping and learning more about sleep. Sleep is really important for us for so many reasons. For example:
- It helps our minds to feel ready and positive for a new day.
- It helps our body to grow and repair.
- It helps our body to feel energised.
Without enough sleep, we won’t be as able to concentrate and learn as well as we might if we did have enough sleep.
Children need 10-11 hours sleep a night on average. This sounded like a long time to Year 4 but we agreed that our bodies need it as we are growing constantly!
We also discussed the important of a sleep/night time routine. This includes all of the small things that we might do that help us to get a better sleep. Here’s what we came up with together:
- Brush your teeth,
- get into your pyjamas,
- have a glass of milk,
- read a story or book,
- have a calm conversation with someone at home,
- close the curtains/blinds
- get cosy in bed,
- listen to calm music or an audio book,
- focus on one thought rather than lots of thoughts,
- hug family and pets goodnight
- go to the toilet so you won’t need to get up in the night!
All these things, that we probably do without even thinking, are important in getting our bodies and minds ready for sleep.
Help at home: Write down your night time routine. Is there anything you could change to help you sleep better? Is there anything you could do more of to help?
Super skippers
Here are the final results from the Year 4 skipping festival this week.
The Skipping School programme (for Year 2 and Year 4) is one of the ways we invest our PE Premium so we always like to check if the investment was worthwhile for the children.
Pupil feedback
I learnt lots of new skips. Now I can do fancy footwork and at first I had no clue what to do!
I enjoyed the skipping festival because we got to have a little bit of competition and skipping is great exercise.
I couldn’t do side straddle and now I have learnt how to do it.
I learnt different skips and I had a really good time at the festival.
I really enjoyed it because of all the new things I learnt.
It was good to do skipping in PE as well as other sports.
I learnt to have fun whilst exercising and winning doesn’t matter. Taking part was important.
Parent feedback
My son thoroughly enjoyed this event. He doesn’t normally do PE competitions so it was really good for the whole class to go. He was so proud of his two certificates.
Organiser feedback
Your Year 4s did an amazing job at the festival this morning.
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.
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!
