News

This week’s message (Friday 07 May 2021)

Like this week, next week is a four day week – Friday 14 May is a training day so school will be closed. Before then, of course, we’ve this Friday’s Weekly Message…

Charities

Last week, we decided our school charity for the year ahead. This began with some Talk Time homework where children discussed charities at home and then came to school with a particular charity to nominate. Then, in class, a second discussion was had to agree one charity to put forward to the newly-elected Junior Leadership Team. They then reviewed all the class suggestions and arrived at the final whole-school decision:

• St James’ CE Primary: RSPCA
• Moortown: Dogs Trust
• Scholes (Elmet) Primary: National Autistic Society

As part of the Captain Tom 100 initiative, we’ve already raised some money for the chosen charities – thanks for all your donations so far.

The importance of sleep

Our Living and Learning statement next week is I know the importance of sleep. You can help at home by making sure your child gets enough sleep, well away from tempting electronic devices. The NHS recommend that a primary school age child gets 9 – 12 hours.

Check out these sites for more information…

• The NHS Choices web-page offers a wealth of information on sleep-related problems and some ideas of where to obtain further support including healthy sleep tips for children.
• The Raising Children website is an Australian resource from The Royal children’s hospital, Melbourne, and has some really good sleep information that helps to support patients and families.
• The Sleep Council offers advice and support.
• Childline’s tips for better sleep are really good, and written in a child-friendly way.

Pupil premium

Pupil premium is additional funding for schools that depends on the number of children who are registered for free school meals.

300,000 more pupils became eligible in first seven months of Covid.

Even if your child is in Reception or Key Stage 1, where school meals are free, we need you to register for free school meals – this will lead to extra funding.

Even if your child has a packed lunch, we need you to register for free school meals – this will lead to extra funding.

Speak to our office staff about how to do this.

Sports day

Finally this week, a few of you have asked about Sports Day, which is scheduled for the week beginning 12 July.

The government’s roadmap out of lockdown sets out two dates for the further easing of restrictions if all goes well: 17 May and 21 June.

By 21 June, ‘the government hopes to be in a position to remove all legal limits on social contact’. A key word here is ‘hopes’.

We can’t guarantee that Sports Day will go ahead, but we hope that it will happen as scheduled. There may need to be restrictions in place, such as asking families to stay socially distanced or inviting just one parent/carer to attend. We’ll have to wait and see…

Have a good weekend, even if it’s a bit of a wet one.

From student to teacher

We broke the news to you last week that Mr Owen is leaving Moortown Primary at the end of the summer term. We had a lot of people applying for the vacancy and last Wednesday, we invited 11 candidates to teach in the hall (and complete a couple of other tasks)  and then we invited the strongest teachers back on Thursday for an interview – a rigorous recruitment process!

We’re delighted to share the news that Miss Needham has been offered the post from September. Miss Needham joined us in September 2018 and was a teaching assistant for two years. During the last year, she has been a School Direct student and has been teaching alongside Mr Parker in Year 2. We’ve not confirmed which class Miss Needham will be teaching but in the meantime, we’d like to say ‘Congratulations’!

Which charity?

Our newly elected Junior Leadership Team’s (JLT) first job has been a very important one. As you know, all classes have been discussing which charity they’d like to support this year. I met with the JLT on Friday morning and found out more about the charities each class had chosen: one class had chosen a charity which supports those in need at times of crisis, Akhirah Team; two classes chose World Wildlife Fund; and four classes chose Dogs Trust. It was decided, by the majority, that the charity we are going to support is Dogs Trust.

Our first fundraising event will be on Tuesday 04 May when all children will be taking part in the Captain Tom 100 challenge. There will be a bucket at the gate for donations of at least £1.

Thank you for your support with fundraising and in helping your child with choosing a charity.

This week’s message (Friday 30 April 2021)

There’s a growing sense of optimism at the moment with numbers of positive cases of Covid-19 going down and the numbers of Leeds residents who have been vaccinated going up. On 19 April, the case rate was 48.4 per 100,000. This is the lowest rate seen in Leeds since September 2020. The highest case rate is amongst young people aged 11-18 (87.6 per 100,000), so we do all need to keep following Covid restrictions.

Homework

Our Homework Policy and the accompanying Homework Guide currently sets out daily expectations (read, practise spellings, and practise times tables) and weekly expectations (Creative, Talk Time or Practice Makes Perfect).

Our assessments show that lockdown may have had an impact on some children’s reading fluency, spellings and times tables. Nationally, there’s growing evidence that the lockdown has had an impact on young children’s language skills.

For these reasons, from next week, we’re tweaking our policy a little for the rest of the school year. We’re dropping the Creative and Practice Makes Perfect tasks.

We really want you to make sure your child is meeting the daily expectations set out the Homework Guide:

• Please do make sure your child spends some time each day learning spellings and practising their times tables – going on Times Tables Rock Stars would be great for this. (Numbots for younger children would be good, too.)
• Reading is so helpful in so many ways – from reading fluency to promoting positive mental health, a good book works wonders – so please make sure your child is reading (or you read aloud to them) each day.

Each week, we’ll set a Talk Time homework. Its purpose is to promote lots of conversation and debate at home, which in turn should promote oracy and vocabulary.

Check out these five tips to boost your child’s vocabulary.

This article might also interest you – it’s about the value of more play time for your child’s mental health and social skills.

As always, you’re welcome to let us know your views. Later this term, we’ll include a question about the tweaked homework in the annual survey, too.

Computing

Children in Years 1-6 have a Computing topic this half-term. Read more about the learning that’s going on in our Curriculum Statement. Our age-related expectations for Computing are on pages 13 and 14. These are followed by Staying Safe Online expectations on pages 15 and 16.

To help at home… have chats with your child about what they’re learning. Ask them what vocabulary they’re using in the topic – it could be words like ‘de-bug’, ‘algorithm’, ‘sequence’ and ‘decomposing’. (All these words feature in the age-related expectations.)

Talking of Computing and staying safe online, over the Easter holiday, we published five news articles about staying safe online. In case you missed them, the content from all five posts comes from a Thinkuknow newsletter.

Does your child play Roblox? It’s one of the most popular video games of recent times. Read this guide for tips on a number of potential risks such as in-app purchases, online dating and chat functionality.

This weekend is a longer one – enjoy the extra day, whatever the weather!

Skip into summer

LFD testing

Following on from Mr Roundtree’s weekly message, we have received some  more information this morning about the LFD testing. Further information can be found here.

This week’s message (Friday 23 April 2021)

We hope you had a happy and healthy holiday over the Easter period. Hopefully, it helped that lockdown eased a little in the second week of the holidays.

Reading, reading, reading

Every child should be reading on a daily basis at home. Please help your child to build in a routine to make sure this happens. Your child might read a book, a website, a comic… It doesn’t matter, as long as they’re reading.

In the lockdown period, we provided two daily sessions to support reading: reading fluency and reading skills. A recent blog post from Ofsted backs up this importance: ‘The primary schools we inspected had rightly prioritised developing the teaching of reading’.

We assess reading skills in various ways. If your child is in Year 2, we measure how many words per minute they’re able to read – ideally about 90 words per minute of an age-appropriate book. If your child is in Year 2, ask us to let you know how well they’re doing.

Attendance matters

You might be reassured to read in the same Ofsted blog post that inspectors noted: ‘Keeping motivated has been a struggle for almost every child. Schools told us that even children who had been motivated at first, had ‘switched off’ completely by the end of the third lockdown.’ This means that with all the home learning provision that schools provided, there is still missed learning – and that means attendance at school is even more important.

We’re really pleased to see that our attendance so far this year (from the start of the school year up to the Thursday before Easter) is 97.8%. Thank you for supporting your child to be a happy and healthy learner!

The Big Ask

Led by the Children’s Commissioner, The Big Ask is the largest ever survey of children in England, designed to find out what their concerns and aspirations about the future are. Watch this You Tube clip with your child and then please support / encourage your child to take part. There are different versions of the survey depending on the age of the child.

The results from the survey will help identify the barriers preventing children from reaching their potential, put forward solutions and set ambitious goals for the country to achieve. The more children who respond, the stronger the results will be.

Staying safe in the sun

We’ve been really lucky since Easter period and have seen the sun on more than one occasion!

As we enter the summer term at school, we’d like to remind you about keeping your child safe in the sun.

NHS guidance makes it clear that most people do not apply enough sunscreen. If sunscreen is applied too thinly, the amount of protection is reduced. It should be applied to all exposed skin, including the face, neck and ears. The SPF should be at least 30.

It’s really important that children come to school wearing sunscreen and that this is applied just before leaving home.

If you choose an ‘all day sunscreen’, it’s important that it is used according to the manufacturer’s instructions. For sunscreen that needs to be reapplied, children can bring a named bottle into school which they will be able to reapply at lunchtime. Please teach your child how to do this independently. Staff in school will help/guide if needed but as you can imagine a vast amount of teaching and learning time could be lost if staff are applying cream to a full class.

A hat and plenty of water is essential. Please ensure that your child comes to school with a full bottle of drinking water each day. Water can be replenished throughout the day.

Staying safe online

Over the Easter holiday, we published five news articles about staying safe online. In case you missed them, the content from all five posts comes from a Thinkuknow newsletter.

Our new school charity

As you know, we want our schools to be happy and healthy places to learn. There’s link here with charities. It might be said that donating money and raising money for charities helps to create a place which is happy and healthy, and can support a sense of wellbeing.

Each year, as part of teaching and learning about democracy, we nominate a charity to support for the year ahead. The selection process is as follows:

1. Talk Time homework today: At home, your child should discuss charities in general, and specifically consider different charities and which one to support.
2. Talk Time review in class: In class, children discuss the different charities and finally vote for one, which the junior leaders for each class then take to the Junior Leadership Team.
3. The Head of School reviews the shortlist of charities: We’ll check that they’re all appropriate (eg in terms of inclusion, and that they are all registered charities).
4. Junior Leadership Team decision: Next Friday, in a Junior Leadership Team meeting, the shortlist is considered and finally councillors vote for one.

On the same Friday (30 April), or Tuesday 04 April (the day after May Day bank holiday), we invite your child to donate 100 pence to take part in some fund-raising to coincide with the Captain Tom 100 initiative – the money raised will go towards the new school charity.

And finally, just when you thought we’d got through a whole message without mentioning Covid…

Home testing

Home test kits for Covid are now widely available. Adults (18+) can now collect two packs of home test kits at a pharmacy, for example. Each pack contains seven tests. The tests have proved useful in identifying children in school who have Covid but weren’t showing symptoms. It’s a good idea to think of the tests as useful in showing a red light (a positive case). They shouldn’t be used as a green light to prove someone doesn’t have Covid.

As always, please speak with us if you’ve any questions, comments or concerns. Have a good weekend – and don’t forget to make sure your child reads daily!

Well worth the wait!

As staff came in to school this morning, the first thing they did was go to the back of school. Yes, that’s right, we have finally completed the first stage of developing the land at the back of school. The tarmac has been laid which has caused great excitement with staff and children. It is great to have more space and even better knowing that there is even more space waiting to be developed. It is so much bigger than any of us expected and has so much potential for all sorts.

It's finally happening...

…the tarmac at the back of school is about to be laid! Over the last couple of weeks, while school has been closed, there has been lots of digging and preparing and the tarmac is being laid. It has been a long journey and we’re not there yet but it is a massive step. A big thank you to Mrs O’Malley who has been the driving force in getting this first step completed. Here are some photos – just to prove it has actually happened!

Staying safe online 5: Sharing information, pictures and videos

This is the last in a series of articles. Check out Thinkuknow for more ways to promote staying safe online.

It’s harder to stay connected with our friends and family right now, so you may be sharing more images and videos of our children online via social media. But before you do, there are some important things to consider.

Read sharing pictures of your children for info on how to protect your child whilst staying social.

Using devices like phones and tablets to share pictures and videos can be a fun way for children to have fun and stay in touch with friends and family online. It’s really important your child knows what’s ok to share online and what they should check with you first.

Read younger children sharing pictures or videos online for more information on the risks and how to support safer sharing.

Personal information is any information that can be used to identify your child. Sharing personal information online is easy and sometimes children, like adults, might share more online than they would offline, which can be risky.

Read your child’s personal information and how to protect it online for information and advice.