Hello everyone,

A very warm welcome back and here's to a very  happy(and hopefully uninterrupted!) new year!

We have all loved having the children back and hearing about their adventures over the Christmas break.  It seems Santa was very kind and it was lovely to see the children reading some of their Christmas books and utilising their art materials-we have some very talented artists in our class.  From the level of chatter it's clear the children  had fun but also were very happy to be back with their friends.

On behalf of us all can I also just say a huge thank you for all of our beautiful and thoughtful Christmas presents and cards.  It really was most kind of you all.

 Wednesday morning was very much focussed on THRIVE activities with time spent thinking about what we like about ourselves and how to make sure that we look after our mental health. The children put together an A-Z all about themselves and the children really began to enjoy the task and think about their qualities. The children then put together a design inspired by the book 'A is For Awesome' thinking about their achievements and using their A-Z to design posters of themselves.  We have uploaded some as they are really too good not to share.

 In shared reading we started by reading the first chapter of our book for the half term 'The Executioner's Daughter.' We made predictions as to what we thought the book would be about based on the first chapter and whether the main character would face more challenges than Jim in our last book Street Child. We all agreed that none of us would want the role of  'basket girl'.

We then used skim reading to find information about the Tower of London. In English we looked at using figurative language to improve sentences and then looked at how to describe a visual prompt again using figurative language. In maths we had fun investigating Magic Squares and learning that they were invented before Victorian and Tudor times. In history we started our topic (The Tudors) by looking at the function of castles and in particular all the functions that the Tower of London has held. We thought about the ones tudors may consider important, whether the Victorians would feel the same and then thought about the Tower today. thankfully the children decided today it was better used as a tourist destination rather than a place of execution or zoo for dangerous animals.

Have a lovely weekend.  

Mrs Williams and Mrs Young