Year 1 Update
What a fantastic first week back it’s been for Year 1! We are so proud of how hard the children have worked and how brilliantly they have settled back into school life. This week, they began reading Room on the Broom and had lots of fun making their own puppets of the story’s characters — including the witch, the dog, the frog and the cat. They then used their puppets to act out scenes from the story, showing great creativity and confidence.
In Maths, the children started learning about part-whole models and have done an amazing job understanding how numbers can be split and combined. For History, they explored Guy Fawkes Night and created stunning firework posters using colourful chalk on black paper. What a bright and creative end to a wonderful first week back — well done, Year 1!
Year 2 Update
Welcome back! We hope you all had a wonderful and restful half-term break. The children have returned full of energy and enthusiasm, ready to dive into an exciting new half-term of learning and discovery.
In Maths, we are continuing to build on our work with addition and subtraction, exploring a variety of strategies to help us solve problems with confidence. The children are developing their reasoning skills and enjoying the challenge of finding different ways to reach the same answer. In English, we have started our beautiful new book, Ocean Meets Sky by The Fan Brothers. The children are already captivated by the stunning illustrations and are eager to see how the story unfolds. We’ll be using the book as inspiration for our own creative writing, as well as for discussions about imagination and adventure. Our Science topic continues with Materials and Their Properties. The children are enjoying hands-on investigations, exploring why certain materials are chosen for specific purposes and testing their properties through fun experiments.
Finally, we were treated to a wonderful performance of The Reluctant Dragon by The Wizard Theatre this week. The children were absolutely enthralled and loved every moment of the show — a fantastic way to bring stories and characters to life!
A quick reminder about our upcoming trip to see Dick Whittington at the Harrow Arts CentreArbor If you haven’t yet made payment, please do so via Arbor as soon as possible. It promises to be a magical and memorable experience for the children!
Next week is Anti-Bullying Week, and we’ll be kicking it off with Odd Socks Day on Monday — a fun way to celebrate individuality and remind everyone that being different is something to be proud of.
We’re looking forward to another busy, creative and joyful few weeks ahead in Year 2!
Year 3 Update
Year 3 has had an excellent start to the Autumn 2 term!
English:
This week, Year 3 read the book ‘ The Lost Happy Endings’ and reminded ourselves of all the fairy tales we know. We talked about the main features of fairy tales and shared ideas for alternative ‘unhappy endings’ to some of our favourites. Then, we planned our own unhappy endings and brought them to life through role play. It was a fun and creative way to explore storytelling and imagination!
Maths:
In Maths this week, we carried on our learning on Addition and Subtraction. We continued focusing on adding and subtracting 1s, 10s and 100s and using known facts to help us add and subtract. We also began to explore use of the column method which is a more formal written method to add two three digit-numbers together.
Reading:
In our Reading lessons, we began reading ‘The Hodgeheg’ by Dick King-Smith – a delightful story about a little hedgehog named Max! We have continued to build on our development of key reading skills such as: retrieval of information, understanding of vocabulary and predicting. In order to experience a wide range of text types, we are also reading and exploring several non-fiction texts which include an information text on hedgehogs.
Geography:
Year 3 have begun their exciting new Geography topic all about Volcanoes and Earthquakes!
In the first lesson of our Volcanoes and Earthquakes topic, , we learned about the different layers of the Earth — from the crust to the core — and discovered how each layer plays an important part in shaping our planet. We also began to explore what the word tectonic The children are already full of curiosity and can’t wait to find out more about these powerful natural events in the weeks ahead!
Science
This week, we began their new Science topic on Forces. We began by exploring how objects move on different surfaces , and contact and non-contact forces. We will soon be discovering the magic of magnets — how they attract, repel, and act at a distance. It’s an exciting, hands-on topic full of fun investigations!
Year 5 Update
The first week back in Y5 has been a busy one. We were fortunate to have a talk about Space from a scientist, Chris Joly, who shared his knowledge about galaxies and the planets. The children learnt a lot and were able to ask questions about space to him and he was able to answer most of them! Chris Joly is an engineer and STEM ambassador who works to promote science as a career. We hope that he was able to inspire some of our children to think about astrology or engineering as a career.
We also have started our History work on Romans. We have started reading the book, Queen of Darkness by Tony Bradman, which tells the story of the revolt by Queen Boudica against Roman rule. The children are enjoying the book and we will be using it as a basis for our writing over the next few weeks.
Our focus in maths is now multiplication and division. It is great to see so many students know their times tables and we will be using these to solve a variety of problems over the next few weeks.
We will be going to Harrow Mosque next week and look forward to revisiting our learning on Islam from year 4.
