What is our new school charity?
Part of our Who do you think you are? themed week was to learn about charities and how we can support them.
Our previous school charities, Leeds Mind and Yorkshire Air Ambulance Money, will benefit from £309.97 and £508.88 respectively as a result of fundraising and donations. Thank you.
It is now time to change our school charity. Each class discussed a range of charities, researched by the children for their homework, and voted on one charity they wanted to put forward for the school councillors to decide on.
Here were the class choices:
- Year 1 Plastic Oceans Foundation
- Year 2 Barnado’s
- Year 3 RSPCA
- Year 4 St Gemma’s Hospice
- Year 5 Make a wish
- Year 6 Diabetes UK
The final decision was a vote by the school council and the winning charity for 2017-2018 was Make A Wish. We will support this charity for one year.
We look forward to welcoming representatives from the charity in January for an assembly where we will hear more about their valuable work.
More Curry Cooking!
Once again, the other half of Year 6 came back to the kitchen to cook the curry. We used the same skills as last time as you would expect: chopping, mixing, frying, blending, washing up and – most importantly – eating!
Written by Pippa.
What materials conduct electricity?
As part of our mini topic, Forces: Electricity, we investigated which materials conduct electricity and which don’t today.
We recapped what a circuit was first by creating a human-sized version:
Then, we worked in groups to test different materials by inserting objects made out of them into the circuit. If the bulb lit, the material was conductive.
More cooking
Following the success of our veggie burgers, half of Year 6 returned to the kitchen today for a new recipe. This time, we cooked paneer tikka masala which every single child said was delicious!
First, we needed to create a marinade for the paneer.
Then we created the base of our sauce.
Once that was done we blended all of these ingredients together (minus the cinnamon stick) and put it back in the pan. Miss Rushbrooke cooked the paneer once it had marinated for half an hour as it can be quite spitty.
A small amount of cream and butter were then added to create a smooth texture and we added garam masala and fresh coriander at the end along with the cooked paneer.
Everybody had a taste, using poppadoms as spoons and then we each got a box to take home with us. Another great session of cooking with Year 6 and another successful recipe.
Who do you think you are?
Our themed week is in full swing with many highlights so far.
- Mindfulness workshops for Year 1, 2, 3 and Reception.
- Dove self esteem sessions for Year 5 and 6 (Visitor feedback – ‘We really enjoyed running the sessions and the classes we had were great and very engaged!’)
- Visits from RNIB, BID sensory services and the Leeds deaf and hearing impairment team for all classes
- West Yorkshire Police Hate Crime session for Year 5 and 6
- Some Year 5 and 6 children attended the Moor Allerton Elderly Care ‘Old & New Games’ afternoon (Visitor feedback – ‘They were brilliant and a pleasure to have.’)
- Whole school assembly about charities by Val from the Salvation Army charity shop in Meanwood
- Year 4 visit to St Gemma’s Hospice
- Year 5 visit to Marjorie and Arnold Ziff centre
- Year 2 visit to Donisthorpe Hall
Thank you to parents who have attended our mindfulness workshop on Monday and our community coffee morning and wake up shake up today.
There is still more to come.
- PCSO visit to talk about community safety, road safety and monitor speed outside school in 20mph zone for Reception, Year 1 and 3
- Mindfulness workshops for Year 3, 4 and 5
- Learn languages in our community for Year 3 and 4
- Two more chances to walk, bike or scoot to school (Road Safety Week) to be in with a chance to win prizes on Friday
- New school charity will be chosen
- Have a go at the Who do you think we are? competition
Take a look at the class news pages to find out more about your child’s learning this themed week.
Today’s visitors
Today, visitors came to speak to us about sign language. Everyone learnt how to say ‘How are you?’, ‘I’m fine thank you’, ‘What’s your name?’, My name is____’, ‘How old are you?’ , ‘I am ______ years old’ and how to spell their names in sign language.
We were learning about this because our themed week is community and there are a few deaf people who live in Leeds.
Also, we were visited by members of the police who split the class in half, treating one half very nicely and the other half not so nicely: they gave one half Ribena and the other water; gave one half more talking time than the other; told one half they were cool; and gave tokens to them. This was to show that it would be unfair to treat people differently for no real reason. Hate crime is when people discriminate against others because of their race, gender, religion/belief, disability or sexual orientation.
We learnt that we are all the same and all different and we should treat others how we want to be treated.
Written by Pippa and Neive.
Our very own islands
As mentioned in the news post about our topic review last week, one of the things the children have enjoyed the most throughout Explorers is designing their own islands.
Our writing was inspired by a fantastic book, The Land of Neverbelieve, which resulted in some brilliant descriptive pieces about exploring this fantastical land. It is an island in the shape of a dragon (although many children believed it to be a wolf) with weird and wonderful areas dotted around: The Dark and Spooky Mountains, The Flowering Meadow, Book Mountain and many more. We decided to create our own islands which have demonstrated incredible imagination and more amazing writing from the children.
Mindfulness
As part of our community week and today’s focus on identity, Y6 worked on mindfulness this morning. This is something we’ve spoken about before but today’s learning helped us to realise how there were lots of different ways we could be mindful of ourselves and mindful of others.
We also learnt about lots of techniques we could take away and use if we were struggling with situations or if we just wanted to become more mindful.
Year 6 really enjoyed this session and we discussed which things they’d like to use in class. Ask your child about what they learnt and see whether there’s anything they could use at home, too.
Topic Review
Alas! We have come to the end of our Explorers Topic – one which we’ve all really enjoyed. We always take a look back on topic learning by reflecting on the work in our topic books, looking at news posts, recalling our favourite learning and discussing the skills we’ve developed along the way.
Year 6 came up with loads of learning we’ve done throughout this eight week topic:
In pairs we then thought about what our favourite learning had been and we created a diamond nine to show this:
Then, we rearranged our thoughts to reflect on which activities helped us to learn the most:
Finally, we thought about how our learning related to the real world and ordered it in terms of which has been most important:
Year 3 came to visit us today as well so that we could share our topic learning with each other. First, Year 3 took the Year 6s on a tour of their topic book, explaining their learning as they went and then Year 6 took the role of tour guide.
We finished off by looking at each other’s diamond nines and the Year 6s guessed how Year 3 would have ordered their learning from favourite to least favourite.
Dance Workshop
All of Key Stage 2 took part in a dance workshop today, dancing to songs sung by artists who had experienced bullying. Year 6 dance to Justin Bieber and had a great time with quite a complicated routine.
Here we are preparing for our big performance.
At the end of the day, we performed our routine to the school and enjoyed watching what the other classes had prepared too. This is all part of anti-bullying week which has involved us discussing what bullying is in class too: different types of bullying; suggestions for it you are bullied; suggestions for if you see bullying; and why a bully might be making those choices. Ask us about the discussions we’ve had at home and see what we remember.
