This half term we have been thinking all about ‘how have we grown’ and of course, we started to notice things growing in the natural world all around us! As a class we have been planting potatoes, sunflowers and peas to help us notice the growing process!

Through the story ‘Little Seed’ we have travelled with a sunflower seed on a journey from the head of the sunflower, through the cold winter and into germination and growth. We loved the beautiful illustrations and the amazing flaps in this story!

As we reached the end of our Talk for Writing unit on Red Riding Hood it was so exciting to invite our story heroes in to hear our tiny story books! We took great care this morning adding lots of detail to our drawings and labelling the pages or writing bits of the story! We finished the day by reading an alternative version ‘Little Red’!

What a beautiful day for a walk to St John’s church! Unlike our trip to the library in the sleet it was a beautiful day for a stroll down the road. On our way we spotted different modes of transport in our local area; making a tally to record our findings. When we reached the church we went on a hunt to find specific items like the ‘altar’ and ‘organ’. Reverend Sharon played us the bells and spoke to us about her church and her job.

As we move into the second half of the school year we start to formalise some of our Maths recording; beginning to capture our ideas in digits and number sentences. We’ve been loving Mrs Connolly’s 5 Green Bottles area this week and many of us have been singing along independently. We’ve been working in our odds and evens and looking at pairs and friends within numbers to help us understand this concept.

As we look forward to Lunar New Year at the end of next week we were learning and acting out the story of the Great Race in RTH. We loved being the different animals of the Zodiac Calendar and making our own way across the river!

It has been an exciting week in Reception with some emergency visitors popping in to school. We knew the police were coming in as we had arranged them but this morning when a fire engine arrived on the playground we couldn’t believe our luck! Although the firefighters were here to talk to Year 5 when we popped out to say hello they kindly showed us some of their uniform and some bits of the engine – what an exciting day!

Our Friday afternoons are always given over to storytelling and last week was our first week with the story heroes. We loved telling our stories to our Year 6 buddies and some of them even read them out loud like a performance.

We finished our Autumn term with our beautiful Christingle service – we loved making our Christingle and learning all about the symbolism of each part. We sang our carols in the peaceful, candlelit hall with our friends.

To celebrate anti-bullying week this week we have been talking all about friends and kindness. We listened to some schools radio about this, read some stories and shared in circle time. We wrote our ideas onto Spring bulbs and planted these outside ready to flower in the Spring. We can’t wait to see our kindness bloom!