Longton Primary School: Year 6: The Meerkats: Blog items

Takeover Day: Letter To Parents, by Mr Coxhead

Date: 5th Jul 2017 @ 11:38am

Below is a letter from Daniel and Matthew (our Year 6 pupils who have taken on the roles of Headteacher and Deputy Headteacher for the day):

Dear Parents,

Today Year 6 pupils have taken over teaching for the day as a reward they have earned. There are around 4 pupils teaching each class and have been given a timetable for the day.

Reception has been doing some amazing phonics work, music lessons too and all the teachers are doing a good job. Year 1 have enjoyed doing PE involving throwing and catching and for a treat, football. They also did guided reading work with the teachers helping each child. Year 2 have done some great science work finding out about bugs and have looked all over the bog garden to find some. Year 3 have started off today by doing some fantastic singing. They then did science, learning about flowers and purposes of them. Year 4 have been doing some math problem solving involving multiplication work, after that they work on GPS. Year 5 were doing spelling on suffixes and play rehearsal for their big performance night ahead of them.

Yours Sincerely, Mr Holmes (Deputy Head)

Mr Stillings (Head Teacher)

Signs in the village, by Miss Adamson

Date: 4th Jul 2017 @ 5:44pm

Following our pedestrian training last week the children made some road signs for our mini village!

The Week Ahead - Monday 3rd July 2017, by Miss Adamson

Date: 2nd Jul 2017 @ 8:46am

Good morning :)

I hope that you will enjoy the sunshine today!

This is what we are doing this week:

English	We are reading Back to Earth With a Bump. It is about a little boy called Hal who travels into space on his bed! We will retell the story and write our own space postcards. We are also finding out about a day in the life of an astronaut. We will write our own space diaries.
Maths	We are working on division this week. We are learning about division as sharing and division as grouping.
GPS	We are learning about verbs in the past tense. We will review verbs, learn that regular verbs in the past tense end in -ed and look at some irregular verbs in the past tense.
PE	We are using tactics to trick our opponents in games involving catching balls.

I look forward to seeing you all in the morning,

Miss Adamson

Pedestrian Training, by Miss Adamson

Date: 30th Jun 2017 @ 8:24pm

We enjoyed pedestrian training this week and had a visit from Tom the lollipop man today. Thank you ever so much to our helpers!

Elite Sports, by Miss Adamson

Date: 30th Jun 2017 @ 8:22pm

We had good fun with Tom on Tuesday morning. The parachute was a real treat!

Deepdale Duck visited school, by Mrs Hothersall

Date: 29th Jun 2017 @ 1:24pm

The Week Ahead - Monday 26th June 2017, by Miss Adamson

Date: 25th Jun 2017 @ 8:37pm

I hope that you have all had a lovely weekend! If you went to the summer fair, I hope that you had fun!

This is what we are doing this week:

Maths	We are learning about multiplication as repeated addition and division by sharing and grouping.
English	We are reading Celebration on Planet Zox and writing about how Cosmic Clive is feelling.
GPS	We are learning about adjectives and noun phrases to describe pictures, in our reading and in our writing.
Science	We are continuing to learn about the human body on Monday and Tuesday.
PE	We have the Elite coaches for a fundamental skills session on Tuesday.
RE	We are learning about Islam.
Pedestrian Training	We will be doing our pedestrian training in groups of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoon.

I look forward to seeing you in the morning,

Miss Adamson

Computing with our buddies, by Miss Adamson

Date: 24th Jun 2017 @ 9:01am

Computing with our buddies is always a treat! We learned to make a simple programme.

Taking turns, by Miss Adamson

Date: 24th Jun 2017 @ 8:58am

The children played this days of the week board game really nicely. They worked out the rules on their own. It looks pretty complicated to me!

A Very Lucky Ducky, by Miss Adamson

Date: 24th Jun 2017 @ 8:56am

Here is the duck that I rescued from the garden. I think he loved all the attention!

Enterprise, by Miss Adamson

Date: 24th Jun 2017 @ 8:51am

Thank you for supporting our enterprise! I think we needed some more butterflies!

The Week Ahead - Monday 19th June 2017, by Miss Adamson

Date: 18th Jun 2017 @ 10:20am

It's an exciting week for the Penguins because we are doing our class enterprise on Wednesday. We thought of some different names and voted for our favourite. Emily's idea, 'Penguin Pop Shop', was the most popular. It has a great ring to it! Look out for a parentmail with all the details.

English	We are reading the No-Bot, the story of a robot who loses his bottom! We will be using different conjunctions in our writing.
Maths	We are practising finding fractions of shapes, groups and numbers. We are looking for halves and quarters.
GPS	We are working on writing sentences with conjunctions and checking that they make sense. This is to complement our work in English.
Handwriting	We are checking that our letters start and finish in the correct place - especially n, h and m.
Reading	We are back to normal guided reading sessions on Wednesday morning and reading in the afternoons.
ICT	We are working on programming with our Year 6 buddies.
PE	We are practising our continuing our work on bouncing balls from last week. We will apply what we have learned about bouncing a ball to a hand dribble technique.
Enterprise	We are making sweetie butterflies to sell on Wednesday!
Science	We are learning about parts of the human body.

I hope that you enjoy the remainder of your weekend and look forward to seeing you tomorrow!

Miss Adamson

A busy week!, by Miss Adamson

Date: 18th Jun 2017 @ 9:14am

The Penguins got straight back to work on Monday preparing for the phonics challenge on Tuesday and Wednesday! I hope everyone is so proud of themselves! Thank you for practising at home, it makes such a difference!

After the screening we prepared for our enterprise on Wednesday. We will sell sweetie butterflies. Look out for the parent mail! On Friday we were visited from the Dance from the Heart team. We saw dancing storm troopers and paw patrol!

The Week Ahead - Monday 12th June 2017, by Miss Adamson

Date: 10th Jun 2017 @ 4:38pm

Hello all :)

I hope that you have had a wonderful break and are looking forward to coming back to school!

This week is a little different than usual as we have our phonics screening check. I've written out an overview by day as I think it will be simpler for this week!

Monday	Today is 'Phonics Funday'. We will be doing phonics games and activities all day as a little refresher following the two week break.
Tuesday	Today most children will complete their phonics screening check with Miss Adamson. The check usually lasts between four and nine minutes per child. While children are not doing their phonics check they will do some more fun phonics activities in the classroom.
Wednesday	Any children who have not yet completed the check will do theirs this morning. Reading will go ahead as normal so please bring books in. In the afternoon the children will have music with Mrs Bolton.
Thursday	We are learning about telling the time to the hour and the half hour in maths. In English, we are reading a story called Tommy and the Frog and deciding whether the sentences should end in full stops, question marks or exclamation marks. In the afternoon we will be doing throwing and catching skills in PE.
Friday	We are continuing our work on telling the time in maths. We will have a look at quarter hours. In English we will write our own Tommy and the Frog sentences using question marks, exclamation marks and full stops. During the afternoon we have the Dance from the Heart Roadshow. This is where we will perform the dance that we have been practising and watch a shhort performance.

Further information about the coming half-term can be found in the topic letter which will be in book bags this week. I have also uploaded a copy to the Penguins class page.

I look forward to seeing you all on Monday!

Warm regards,

Miss Adamson

Arts Week photo montage, by Mr Coxhead

Date: 26th May 2017 @ 10:16am

Making a Collagraph Print, by Miss Adamson

Date: 25th May 2017 @ 3:40pm

We created our own tiles for a Collagraph print in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Here are some pictures from the making process.

Change over day - Year 3, by Mrs Catterall

Date: 24th May 2017 @ 10:49pm

Today was change over day. Children from years 1,2 and 3 worked together, moving around the different classrooms.

While in year 3, they learnt about the Eiffel Tower. It is painted every 7 years and takes 1 and 1/2 years to paint. It is painted in 3 shades of brown!

The challenge set in the year 3 classroom was to work collaboratively to build an Eiffel Tower using art straws. We also tried to create one with spaghetti and marshmallows, it was very sticky! How high could we get them without falling over?

There was fantastic team work, sharing ideas and helping each other. Each team needed someone to take on the very important role of 'find the end of the sellotape!'

Changeover Day in Year One, by Miss Adamson

Date: 24th May 2017 @ 8:58pm

During changeover day in the Year One classroom we studied three French paintings. Monet's picture of the Japanese garden, Signac's painting of Venice and Derain's painting of a little village on the outskirts of Marseille. We all drew a little part of the pictures and glued them together to make three giant pictures. The children worked so hard - a fantastic team effort!

Arts Week Day 3, by Mrs Fletcher

Date: 24th May 2017 @ 6:11pm

Today has been change over day. The children in Year1, 2 and 3 mixed together in 3 groups and have taken part in 3 different French themed activities. In the year 2 classroom the children had fun learning about France. They also learnt some classroom instructions, how to say hello, goodbye and my name is. In addition the children learnt to count forwards and backwards to 10, colours and to sing the rainbow song in French.

Snakes and water lilies! , by Miss Adamson

Date: 23rd May 2017 @ 9:30pm

We have had another fun day working on a couple of projects. Local artist, Jac Balmer visited to teach us a little about Rousseau and helped us to make colourful snakes to go in his jungle. It was very messy but we enjoyed ourselves! Later on we worked on our close up picture of Monet's pond using oil pastels.

Arts Week Day 1, by Mr Coxhead

Date: 23rd May 2017 @ 8:01am

We had a wonderful start to Arts Week.

Year 1 enjoyed a visit from poet Ash Dickinson in the morning. We also made our own sketchbooks to use outside during the week!

In the afternoon, we enjoyed a dance workshop with Amanda Rogers and visited the outdoor art area!

There will be blog posts throughout the week so you can see what has been happening. There will also be more regular updates during Arts Week on the school twitter page:

https://twitter.com/longtonprimary

Sports Day 2017, by Mrs Fletcher

Date: 21st May 2017 @ 11:46am

Sports Day was a great success. The children had lots of fun and displayed amazing teamwork and behaviour throughout every activity.

Thank you to everyone who came along to support the afternoon.

The Week Ahead - Arts Week!, by Miss Adamson

Date: 20th May 2017 @ 4:31pm

This week is our whole school Arts Week. Our usual timetable is suspended while we have one whole week of art! This is what we will be doing:

Monday	We have a visit from Ash Dickinson (poet) for an assembly then workshop. We are making our sketchbooks. We have a dance session with Amanda Rogers. We are beginning work on our Monet project.
Tuesday	We have a visit from Jac Balmer (artist) who will be teaching us about Rousseau and help us create a piece of work based on his artwork. We will complete our Monet project.
Wednesday	This is our changeover day. We will be in a mixed class of Year Ones, Twos and Threes. We will do French based arts activities with Mrs Catterall, Mrs Fletcher and Miss Adamson.
Thursday	We are learning about Charles Rennie Mackintosh and beginning our Mackintosh project. We will be visited by two French teachers for a special assembly about French language and culture.
Friday	We will complete our Mackintosh project. We will have a visit from Mrs Bradley to do some artwork with glass. We will make some fairy houses.
Dance from the Heart	We will begin practising for Dance from the Heart after the holidays.

I hope that you will have great fun this week!

Thank you for helping me with the twigs. Remember your cardboard pieces on Monday morning. A4 size is ideal but a little bigger or smaller won't hurt!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Miss Adamson

ICT with Year Six, by Miss Adamson

Date: 20th May 2017 @ 1:40pm

Year 6 planned ICT lessons for our class. We learned about algorithms!