‘Power for good’
Next week is national Anti-Bullying Week.
The theme this year is ‘Power for Good‘ with the following key aims:
- To support children and young people to use their Power for Good – by understanding the ways in which they are powerful and encouraging individual and collective action to stop bullying and create the best world possible.
- To help parents and carers to use their Power for Good – through supporting children with issues relating to bullying and working together with schools to stop bullying.
- To encourage all teachers, school support staff and youth workers to use their Power for Good– by valuing the difference they can make in a child’s life, and taking individual and collective action to prevent bullying and create safe environments where children can thrive.
Our school definition has recently been reviewed by the School Council and remains unchanged.
‘Bullying is when you hurt someone, physically or emotionally, several times on purpose.’
We also encourage children to use their ‘Power for Good’, if they were to experience or witness bullying, by using another STOP message, start telling other people.
In class, children will discuss these aspects of bullying:
- Our definition of bullying (above)
- Types of bullying – cyber-bullying and prejudice-based bullying related to gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and belief, special educational need and disability
- What to do if children experience bullying. The key message is to tell someone (start telling other people)
Recently the School Council responded to this question, ‘What would you do if you were bullied‘?
- ‘Start telling other people – tell someone who I trust and who I can talk to.’
- ‘I would tell someone I trust (family member, member of staff or friend).’
- ‘If I were bullied, I’d tell my parents, a friend, a teacher and if nothing changed I would phone ChildLine (08001111).’
- ‘I’d tell a teacher, maybe a friend and put in a worry in the ‘worry box’. Also, I’d tell a parent.’
- ‘I would tell anyone I trust: my friends, my mum or dad or a member of staff. They could sort it straight away.’
- ‘I’d tell my mummy and daddy.’
All classes have access to their class SEAL box or a whole school worry box where they can tell an adult any concerns about bullying or any other issues.
For further support, bullying resources can be found at…
- http://www.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/resources/disablist-bullying/resources-for-parents/
- http://www.childline.org.uk/explore/bullying/pages/bullying.aspx
- http://www.bullying.co.uk/advice-for-parents/
- http://www.youngminds.org.uk/for_parents/worried_about_your_child/bullying
Our noses are often in the paper
Year 6 enjoy a range of reading opportunities and one of our favourites is our weekly fix of First News.
We’re always keen to share interesting articles with each other and this brilliant paper never fails to disappoint. This week there was a man who’s best friend was a bear; a heart-warming story about a little girl who’s life had been improved by the efforts of WaterAid; and a funny little snippet on a ‘Petmiere’ – cinema for dogs!
We always read FirstNews on a Monday so ask your child at home what interesting articles (s)he’s read each week.
What are the 8Rs?
Year 6 have had a good start to this half term. We’re working on the 8Rs (resilience, safe risk-taking, responsibility, resourcefulness, responding, remembering, reflecting, readiness) to improve our learning behaviour, and therefore our learning, in class. These Rs are easy to apply at home, too:
- Resilience – try a new skill and keep at it if it’s hard
- safe Risk-taking – cook with an adult, using knives and other equipment
- Responsibility – be in charge of getting your own things ready for school or getting yourself up in the morning
- Responding – if an adult praises you for an action, make sure you do it again (or don’t do something again if you’ve been told about it before)
- Readiness – be ready to go if you’re heading out for the day with everything you might need
It’d be great to hear of any particularly good examples of children practising the 8Rs at home.
Moortown’s artists
We’d love to see you next Tuesday to share our learning from our Katie and…topic. Art gallery open 2:45-3:30pm.
How much do parents really matter?
A new book, Do Parents Matter? by Robert LeVine and Sarah LeVine, will be published in the UK next year. It was previewed in The Times last week (29 October 2016, summarised below), and it sounds really interesting. After almost five decades of research, the authors, both acclaimed anthropologists, say parents have far less influence than we think, but they do stress two things parents can do to ensure their child is happy and healthy.
The book’s purpose, arguably, is to reassure. Parents these days are bombarded with advice on what they should and shouldn’t do to raise healthy and well-adjusted children. They are often made to feel they are falling short in some way – being a parent can be a role filled with anxiety.
So, Do Parents Matter? The authors conclude that yes, parents do matter, but not as much as we would think.
The couple have spent their working lives looking at parenting practices across the globe. Children can be happy in a variety of conditions, ‘not just the effort-intensive, cautious environments so many British and American parents drive themselves crazy trying to create’ they say in their book.
In other societies, parenting practices that we in the west would regard as neglectful or even cruel can still result in happy and healthy adults. For instance, many western working mums feel guilty about leaving their children in nurseries or with childminders. Yet communal childcare is the norm in other parts of the world; in some places, toddlers are routinely sent away by their mothers after weaning and taken care of by their grandmothers and other women.
In the UK and America, parents engage toddlers in discussions about what food they would like to eat or what clothes they would like to wear. Elsewhere in the world, parents teach their youngsters to follow commands without talking back, the first step in learning about obedience and respect.
Whilst western parents tend to cosset toddlers and try to shield them from the nasty parts of life, in other parts of the world parents believe children’s development can be helped by these things. The authors tell the story of a three-year-old Inuit girl living in the Canadian Arctic. Although the girl was loved and well taken care of by her parents, they constantly challenged the child with extreme, adult questions like ‘Why don’t you die so I can have your nice new shirt?’ This is seen as an Inuit strategy to get children to realise that life is uncertain and capricious, and that they will have to work through a lot of conundrums. The authors don’t suggest anyone does this, but include the example to show that there is a huge variety of ways to teach children about moral relationships.
Another contrast is around responsibility. Modern western parents don’t give children a lot of responsibility, believing that early childhood should be play-based. In Africa and Latin America, however, children aged five or six might be expected to care for a baby or herd animals; in the Pacific islands, three-year-olds are given scaled-down machetes and at five carry heavy loads of firewood.
The LeVines’ message is that children usually turn out fine, whatever the expectations placed on them and the contexts they grow up in. They do, nevertheless, identify two behaviours they see as essential for raising well-adjusted children:
- physical affection, whether from a parent or other responsible adult, and
- confidence to know that they are the grown-ups and whilst they may not always know best, they do know better than a child.
04 November 2016
The homework this week is practice makes perfect and is due in on Thursday 10 November.
I can show what I have learned about the 2 times table.
In maths lessons this half-term, we’re learning about multiplication and division. We’ll be looking at the 2, 5 and 10 times table. This week, we’ve focussed on the two times table. Children should complete the worksheet in the book.
They could also do something creative to show their understanding of the two times table.
Finally, remember that Mathletics is a good way for children to practise their maths at home.
04 November 2016
Here are the spellings for this week. They will be tested on Friday 11 November.
‘sat’ or ‘sitting’…?
Yesterday, we received this email from Elle Wild, author:
I am home schooling my child, who is in Year 4 in Canada, and have been following your very useful notes for Moortown school to keep my son on track with the UK curriculum, as he was schooled there for the last 4 years.
I just wanted to give you a heads up that you’ve included a grammar error in your homework for Nov 4th.
The sentence should read, “My cat is seated on the sofa”, not “is sat”. The cat sits, the cat is seated, the cat sat, but the cat should never “be sat”. It’s a confusion of present and past tense.
I hope you won’t mind the comment terribly, and please permit me to say that I am very impressed by the careful planning evident in your weekly reports.
We’ve replied with the following:
Thank you for your email. In particular, thank you for using our site to support the home education of your son. The grammatical issue to which you refer is quite a tricky one, in that it is becoming more and more wide-spread, and I’m sure you’ll know that language is an ever-changing thing!
Part of the cause here is that Moortown Primary and most of the staff are from the north of England (Moortown is in Leeds), as raised here. To exacerbate this, the teacher in question – who’s a fantastic teacher, and one who is passionate about grammar, providing professional development for staff in other schools – is from the north east (not quite Geordie, but heading in that direction), a point raised here. And it may also relate to the deeply embedded class system, ‘sat’ being more working class, as noted here.
That’s not to say you weren’t right in highlighting this to us because of course you’re completely correct here. We do like to be accurate and this will certainly provide food for thought!
Grammar can be tricky, but the internet is a great way to clarify confusion! One of our favourite sites is Grammar Monster.
Find out more about Elle Wild’s new book, Strange Things Done.
PS We’ve corrected the homework article!
04 November 2016
This week’s homework is creative and is due Thursday 10 November:
Design a new front cover for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Make sure it represents the story but doesn’t give too much away!
04 November 2016
