Welcome to Malton Community Primary School

Work on our 'Right and Wrong' enquiry is complete and our newspaper reports answer the question 'Why did we vote to leave the EU?' We planned how to communicate our learning to our school community in an assembly. We chose to include an introduction, summary of our learning and a role - play of a news bulletin complete with interviews with 'David Cameron' and 'Boris Johnson'. Discussions in class have been principled as we have learnt that some people have very negative views about immigrants to our country. We have learnt that you should not judge a person according to where they come from. This enquiry has been highly topical and we will continue to watch the news with interest to learn about how our negotiations to leave the EU are progressing. We are now looking forward to enquiring about 'Overcoming Challenge'. 

Work on our 'Right and Wrong' enquiry is continuing at a pace; having answered our key questions, we are now producing a newspaper report to apply what we have learnt and communicate our findings. Class Sparkes are focusing especially on using expanded noun phrases, adverbs, the passive voice and specific vocabulary. Please help us at home by discussing relevant news stories with us. Our handwriting has improved, some of us will be beginning to use pen when writing. We are now focusing on increasing fluency, ensuring that we can write neatly and quickly. 

Reading work currently centres on character, we are learning that characters can be presented in different ways. Some characters are designed to be liked, others should be disliked by the reader. How does the author achieve these effects? Our class novel 'Out of this World' is reaching its climax - how will the different characters respond to the challenges that they face? Please help us at home by talking about the characters in our own books. 

In the run up to the holiday, Class Sparkes undertook some research to discover what our favourite Christmas song was. This formed part of our ‘Expressing Ourselves’ enquiry. The winner (by a narrow margin) was ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham. We then reflected on why we had preferences for certain pieces of music over others, deciding that the melody and lyrics were important as well as whether we were able to sing along and dance to the music. We are currently planning an assembly to share our learning.

Work on our biographies is progressing very well. We are becoming skilled in redrafting our writing – huge improvements can be seen when we look back at our first drafts. Handwriting is still a focus, we aim to practice daily. Those children who prove that they join neatly in every lesson will be able to use a special handwriting pen; we must ensure that the writing is as neat in other lessons as it is in our handwriting lessons. You could help at home by asking to see my neatest, joined handwriting.

We have been learning about angles in Numeracy, naming, ordering, measuring and drawing them. We are starting to learn about the different angles in shapes, you could help at home by talking about shapes and angles in the environment. Our focus times table is the eleven times table, we can spot the pattern up to 9 x 11 but have not all memorised the rest of the number facts.

Our new enquiry theme is ‘Expressing Ourselves’. Immersion activities were fun and included spending time with an actual artist to learn about famous artists. We used the work of Mondrian as inspiration for our own collages.

Our enquiry will involve answering the question: Why is some art or music more popular than other artworks or compositions?

So far, we have discovered that the earliest musical instrument was a flute made from mammoth ivory; this was created at the same time as cave art was being produced. In Literacy lessons, we will be writing biographies of our favourite artists or musicians. You could help at home by taking your child to visit an art gallery, listening to some music or beginning to research facts about musicians or artists.

Our ‘All About Me’ enquiry has now begun to focus on some of the earliest people to live in Britain. Now that Class Sparkes know how we evolved, we have taken the opportunity to learn about Star Carr.

Class Sparkes took part in an information hunt to discover what archaeologists excavated from this Mesolithic settlement site. We were interested to discover that our ancestors ate a wide range of plants and animals but these were only available at certain times of the year.

This world famous site is near Seamer and a new exhibition at Scarborough’s Rotunda museum is displaying some of the artefacts.