Author: Mr Roundtree

10 March 2023

This week’s Talk Time poses a moral dilemma and links to internet safety

Is using the internet is bad for your health? 

You could start by listing reasons why you would use the internet (playing games, social media, watching videos). Are your reasons the same as other members of your family?

We suggest approaching this Talk Time with an open mind. You may already have strong views on this but it’s important to consider both sides of an argument before reaching your conclusions.

Check out these R2s to help you with your discussions at home:

  • What are the health benefits of using the internet?
    • Remember that mental health is crucial to being a healthy person.
  • How could using the internet negatively impact on your health?
    • How could this impact on your physical health?
    • Is using the internet always an enjoyable experience?
  • Decide which argument is the
    • This might be the side with the most points to back it up.
    • You might consider some points to be more important than others.
    • You may not agree with people you speak to – that’s okay!

After the discussion with friends and family, what conclusion do you reach? Do others around you agree?

Additionally, or alternatively, you might like your child to consider our current Christian value…

At St James’ CE Primary School, we learn about Christian values that help us to become well-rounded citizens in society. The values are woven into our everyday school life. Each half term, we have a new Christian value that will be embedded into our collective worship and our reflection areas.

This half term, our Christian Value is forgiveness.

Throughout the Bible, God is described as slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin (Numbers 14:18) and Jesus is shown to be uncompromising in his command to forgive. ‘Forgive’, he said, ‘seventy times seven’ (Matthew 18:21), meaning forgive and keep on forgiving without limit.

Sometimes, we accidentally break things that belong to ourselves or others. Sometimes, we use something so much it wears out. Some things that are broken cannot be mended, but it’s often possible to mend things that we’ve broken.

Help at home!

When you fall out with one of your friends, you can’t mend that friendship with a needle and thread, or some Sellotape, or glue or a puncture kit or a sticking plaster. Forgiving people, or yourself, can be hard. Take a moment to think about why it can help to forgive and how you can do it.

Draw around your hand.

  • Think about why it can important to forgive someone and write in on the palm of your hand.
  • On each finger or thumb, write a way we can forgive someone.
  • Colour and decorate your forgiving fingers, if you wish.

5,4,3,2,1 blast off!

Our focus story this week has been ‘The Hundred Decker Rocket’ by Mike Smith. This is a fantastic story based on looking after the places we live and creating a huge rocket for everyone to travel on.

In Reception we began thinking about how we could look after the places we live. We had a great discussion about litter and decided to do a litter pick in our school grounds. This also allowed us to go and see if we could spot any signs of Spring!

In maths this week we have been working on our counting skills and spotting patterns when counting. Did you know when we add 1 more to towers they look like stairs! We had great fun taking part in a bean bag challenge.

We created maps of our school to help others find their way around school and even created maps for the Beebots to follow. It was tricky to program the Beebots at first but we soon got used to what we needed to do.

Our poem this week had lots of fun actions! please check it out on the link.

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World Book Day

On Thursday we had a wonderful day celebrating reading! Parents and carers joined us for bedtime stories in class and then we had special visitors from year 3 and Mrs Valentine.

 

Living & Learning: I know we’re all the same and we’re all different

In this week’s Living and Learning lesson, we thought carefully about how we’re different yet all the same.

We explored what’s meant by discrimination and alongside that, discussed what the term ‘stereotype’ means:

It was fantastic to listen to and see how mature Year 4 are about topics such as discrimination. Everyone was incredibly respectful, mature and knew that to discriminate is not a good thing.

Going forwards, it’s great to know that this class knows how to be great members of our community outside of school! Nice one, Year 4!

This week’s message (Friday 03 March 2023)

This week’s message is all about our current topic…

What do we mean by topics?

Topics are the way we teach much of the learning in the foundation subjects (eg history, art, geography, DT). Each half-term topic has a driving subject – the main focus for teaching pupils the knowledge and skills they need. The driver changes with each topic to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum.

Although the learning in each topic comes from the driving subject, there are opportunities for enrichment through other subjects.

Read more about the intent, implementation and impact of our topics.

What is this half-term’s topic?

This half-term, it’s Computing. We’ll be developing our knowledge of computers and computer programming.

Computer programming is super. Creating games, animations and solving real world problems is fun, encourages creativity and is challenging! Importantly, the skills the children will use and develop are easily transferable to other subjects and areas of life. For example, the concept of decomposition in programming is concerned with breaking down a large task into smaller chunks. This concept could be used when writing a story, solving a maths problem or tidying a particularly messy bedroom! Debugging is the skill of identifying and fixing an error in a program. It requires systematic, objective thinking and plenty of resilience.

Each phase has age-related specific knowledge, skills and vocabulary that they’ll learn, use and apply across the topic. See page 13 and 14 of the curriculum statement document.

Years 1 and 2

Children will learn about how technology is used beyond school in our homes and all around us. They’ll begin to consider what a computer is and isn’t.

In programming lessons they’ll create animations in Scratch Jr by creating and debugging algorithms. They’ll then continue to use Scratch Jr to create an interactive quizzes.

Years 3 and 4

Children will reason about what exactly makes a computer a computer. Is a games console a computer? Is a TV a computer? Is a bedside lamp a computer? Next, they’ll learn about inputs and outputs and identify different examples of them in everyday technology.

They’ll then be introduced to Scratch and will learn how they can add or change sprites and backdrops and then begin to experiment with making their sprites move. They’ll look at programs created on Scratch and use logical reasoning to explain what will happen when these programs are run. They’ll learn about the importance of sequencing in programming when they recreate a well-known melody. Finally, they’ll create their own ‘band’ on Scratch by programming different instrument sprites to play sounds. 

Years 5 and 6

Children will learn about what a computer network is and that the Internet is an enormous computer network. They’ll learn about the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. In programming lessons, they’ll  be introduced to BBC Microbits – pocket sized computers which they’ll program to do lots of different things. This will allow children to gain a deeper understanding of concepts like sequence, selection and variables. Some of this vocabulary may sound alien to you. However, before the end of the topic your child will be able to tell you what they mean and give examples of how they’ve used them in their projects. Some of the projects your children will be making are:

  • a magic 8-ball style program which will give you an answer to all your questions!
  • a compass so you can confidently find your way to school in foggy conditions!
  • a pedometer to count the number of steps they’re making

How can you help?

Talk to your child about what they’ve been learning in class. The Class News page is a good place to find out more about what your child is doing.

The school library and local libraries have lots of books about coding and computer games which your child will be able to borrow and develop both their reading skills and computing knowledge.

Finally, try programming with your child. There are loads of programming apps and software available to download, often for free…

Key Stage 1

  • Daisy the Dinosaur (Apple only)
  • Beebot
  • Tynker Junior
  • Scratch Jr5

Key Stage 2

  • Lightbot
  • Tynker
  • Scratch Jr
  • Scratch

Finally, and importantly, talk to your child about our Being Online: Acceptable Use Agreement. (Page 8 is the one for early Years and Key Stage 1 children and page 9 is for older children). Discuss whether the points that are listed apply to being online at home as well as at school.

03 March 2023

This week’s Talk Time is linked to our current topic Computing and has a social theme. There are lots of different types of technology that we can see in the world around us. Take a look at the photos below. What can you see? Have you used any of these things before? Have you seen other people using these things? What other types of technology do you use at school or at home?

This week we’d like you to set yourself a challenge and see how long you can go without using technology.

Can you think of some different ways to approach tasks that would usually involve using technology? For example, using the stairs instead of an escalator or lift. Or playing a board game or reading a book instead of playing on your games console, mobile phone or watching television.

Got Talent?

It’s time to celebrate all the weird and wonderful talents of the children of St James’!

St James’ Got Talent 2023 is here! 

Be sure to encourage your child to brush up on their football skills, work on those dance moves or rehearse those jokes! Any talent goes for St James’ Got Talent!

From singing or hula hooping to impressions or footy tricks – be ready to audition for the only talent contest around..! Children can perform as a group or go solo – anything goes!

Auditions from 12:30 in the Y4 classroom

Key Stage 1

Tuesday 28th Feb

Thursday 2nd March

Year 3/4

Tuesday 7th March

Thursday 9th March

Year 5/6

Tuesday 14th March

Thursday 16th March

Successful acts will perform at the Live show on the evening of Wednesday 29th March 2023 where we’ll celebrate the best talent at St James’!

All aboard for a new term

I hope you all had a fantastic half term break and are ready to enjoy our new topic ‘let’s go’. This week our focus story was ‘The train ride’ we had lots of different transport activities in our provision areas. We really enjoyed learning more about what trains were like long ago and what they are like today.

 

We are very excited as we think we have started to spot the first signs of Spring. We have been looking carefully on our journeys and Arthur painted a beautiful daffodil that he had seen on his way to school.

We have been using our phonics skills to build words and sentences. We really enjoyed finding the sound balls and making a word.

Poetry Picnic

We have been popping crazy with our poem this week. We hope you enjoy it too.

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On Thursday 2 March it is World Book Day. This year we are not dressing up however we would like invite all families into class to share a story together. Please could you bring a favourite story and teddy with you on Thursday morning.

Mrs Payne