Reception: Reindeer Food
Santa and his elves left Reception class a very important job. He asked the class to make some reindeer food. The children had to listen to instructions and follow them step by step to make sure they could all make magic food to help the reindeer fly. How exciting!
Year 3’s Young Authors levelling up their writing
We’ve just finished our class version of The Last Bear, and the writing is looking fantastic. The Year 3 authors have been busy "levelling up" their sentences by using expanded noun phrases to describe the icy Arctic and adding fronted adverbials to make their story openings really exciting. They’ve also included subordinate clauses to add extra detail and making sure their speech punctuation is great to help the characters' voices come through. They writers have used their purple pens to edit and improve every sentence. It’s been brilliant to see their work become so much more descriptive and exciting!
Year 6 - Mary Poppins
As part of our English unit on Mary Poppins, the children created their own chalk-art pieces, taking inspiration from the Match Man’s illustration style. Using descriptive language, setting features and visual imagery, the children designed imaginative playground scenes filled with detail and creativity. These visuals will now act as a stimulus for writing, helping the children develop a new narrative episode that imagines an exciting day out for Mary Poppins.
Author Visit to KS1 and Year 3: Janek Puzon
We had a special visit from an author this morning, Janek Puzon. He read his new book “Dean the Baked Bean and his Karaoke Machine”. It was about a baked bean who loves singing on karaoke. The children sat amazingly whilst listening to him read the story and enjoyed it. They also asked some fantastic questions such as: How many books have you written? Do you enjoy being an author? Where do you write the books? How do you write a book? Which is your favourite book that you have written? We are very excited for our delivery of his books to our school library!
Year 1 English: Ordering a Recount
In English, we have started to plan to write a recount on the events of the Great Fire of London. We have learnt lots of new terms such as chronological order, time conjunctions and past tense. Today, we stuck in the pictures for our recount in chronological order and wrote the correct time conjunctions next to them.
Year 3 Meet Author Janek Puzon
Today, the children had the pleasure of meeting an Janek Puzon an author. He read out loud the story Dean the Baked Bean and His Karaoke Machine. This picture book tells the story of Dean, a small but mighty baked bean who doesn't quite fit in with the rest of his tin. While all the other beans are content to sit quietly in the sauce, Dean has a big dream and an even bigger voice. The central themes are: Embracing individuality: Learning that it's okay to be different from everyone else in your "tin." Following the reading, the children engaged in a Q&A session, by asking about the author's journey, his creative process for generating new ideas, and the role of his illustrators. He concluded by mentioning that his works are available on various platforms, including on Amazon. The children are super excited about getting hold of one of his books which will be available at our school library soon. They were particularly fascinated to learn about the editing and proofreading process (which they recognise from using their purple pens), understanding how crucial it is to polish a book before it's published.
Year 4 - English: Roman Vocabulary
To start our new diary unit in English we explored a range of primary and secondary sources in order to build a bank of Roman vocabulary. The children will be writing in role as a Roman soldier describing a typical day at the start of the Roman invasion of Britain.
Library Skills in Year 4
Today we all went to the library to look at all of the wonderful new books that we have to choose from. We discussed key library skills such as putting books back in the correct place according to both author and colour band. We also shared important things to look at when choosing new books such as reading the blurb or looking at the suggestions that are on posters. Our Library is a super resource because it really promotes literacy and a love for reading through a wide range of books. A huge thanks to our English Leader, Miss Flynn, for reorganising the library and purchasing lots of new books.
.png)
Year 3 Presents their learning to Year 4
This morning, Year 3 confidently presented their learning all about the classical poem, 'The Spider and the Fly,' to Year 4. The children did a brilliant job, having memorised key parts of the original poem and then sharing the exciting ending of their own innovated version. The entire class then proudly said the poem's moral: 'Do not be fooled by flattery and compliments'. A huge well done to Year 3!
Year 1 English: The Gruffalo Sensory Story
In Year 1, we have started looking at the story of The Gruffalo. I read the story as a sensory story so that the children were immersed. We had forest sounds in the background and a picture of the deep, dark woods from the story. As we met the characters, we took turns to pass around the characters on lolly sticks. We also had some food to pass around as we read the story, for example “owl ice cream”. The children can now act out the story in the Investigation Area.
.png)
Year 3- English- Capturing Interest: Language Features in The Last Bear
This week in English, we have started exploring our new class book, The Last Bear. The children began by examining the cover and blurb closely and used these clues to make thoughtful predictions about what the story might be about. We also spent some time researching Bear Island, and the children were excited to discover that it is a real island in the Arctic Circle. Today, we began reading Chapter 1 and collected some interesting phrases that captured our interest. Some examples the children noticed included a rather odd kind of normality, the wild, unkempt bramble bush and pure, untouched wilderness. The children have really engaged with the story so far, and we are looking forward to discovering what happens next as we continue reading.
Year 4 English - Escape From Pompeii
Our new class novel is Escape From Pompeii by Christina Balit. In today’s sessions we have continued to use sentence stacking to develop and construct better sentences. We started by adding a fronted adverbial by watching the main character Tranio and recording how he feels about living in Pompeii at the start of the story. We then moved into a modelled sentence and then an independent one with a different fronted adverbial. In our next sentence, we referred back to our experience day and described the size of Mount Vesuvius using words such as colossal and humongous. Finally we used the same modelling to construct a sentence thinking about how Tranio feels about living in such a beautiful part of the world. The children produced some very effective sentences, using the success criteria to ensure they added all of the key parts.