It has been a great first week of the new academic year and lovely to welcome back the children from the summer break. There have been some familiar and not so familiar faces in the classroom and it has been so good to see most of them with smiles on. The classroom has returned back to normality and I have not missed the seats in rows! I have been very impressed with the attitude that the children have shown and they have already produced some fantastic work (see photos below). 

Our learning this week has been focussed around the book, 'What We'll Build' by Oliver Jeffers. We have really enjoyed reading through the story and looking closely at the drawings. In English the children have been considering what they consider to be their home and what makes it their home. We have discussed how a home doesn't have to be a house but could be a place or person. The children drew what their idea of home is and wrote some descriptions linked to the drawing. We also have talked about which people we would want to invite to our home for a dinner party. There was a whole manner of celebrities from the worlds of sport, television, film and music along with lots of relatives. In art we designed our own version of one of the pages from the book. Working in pairs the children painted two 'swooshes' which met. In the swooshes they put their own interests and hobbies and where the swooshes met they considered what they and their partner had in common. We have since taken these and turned them into a class display. In maths the children have been looking at place value, negative numbers and Roman numerals. It was good to see lots of the children drawing on what they had learnt in previous years when tackling the questions. Finally in PE we had a fantastic game of rounders, it was a competitive game with a close score-line with Team B just pipping Team A by 2 rounders. 

We have also been doing lots of Thrive activities this week which have been designed to help the children get to know each other more and also to give them the opportunity to work with others. What has quickly become clear is that the children are a competitive bunch and love building a tower. 

Finally, those children and parents who were with me for the last academic year will know each Friday morning I play a song for the children. This became quite a popular addition to the school week and culminated in a playlist at the end of the year which the children enjoyed listening to. Below is my first song choice, 'Float On' by Modest Mouse. 

Thanks, 

Mr H