Author: Mrs Latham

We always have a ‘class novel’ that we read at story time and use to enhance our writing and reading lessons. They have mostly been picture books so far. This term, we are reading a short chapter book – The Boy Who Grew Dragons by Andy Shepherd.

All the classes are reading this book and we are loving it so far! Who wouldn’t want a dragon as a pet?

Help at home by asking what has happened in the book so far. You could borrow a copy from your local library (or buy one if you’d like) to read alongside at home (don’t tell us the ending too soon though). You could also find other books to read by the same author.

We really enjoyed our Poem of the week last week. After reading it every day, we become fluent and read with more and more automaticity. This makes the children feel like ‘real readers’. It also inspired us to draw our own aliens.

Help at home by encouraging your child to read the poem of the week to you when they bring home a copy of it on Fridays.

We enjoyed a brilliant video chat with Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler today. They read stories to us and Axel showed us how he does his illustrations.  You can enjoy their new book, The Baddies, here. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)

We really enjoyed our Geography topic last half term. We discovered an issue with pollution (litter) in our school grounds after doing a survey. So, we decided to sort it out! We made posters to remind ourselves to recycle and bin our rubbish and also did a litter pick with pickers borrowed from Scholes in Bloom.

We’re loving reading and learning a poem (or song) each week. This week, we read Ice Lolly by Pie Corbett. You can watch it here. It helps with our remembering, fluency and prosody skills.

We worked really hard on Safer Internet Day to learn about how to stay safe online. We wrote about what we can do to stay safe online and read a story, Chicken Clicking, to help us understand this too.

Help at home by making sure your children know your rules about going on the internet at home.

We talked about how to keep safe this week. Speaking to a trusted adult is very important. This NSPCC video, featuring Ant and Dec, talks about speaking out can help us stay safe. It also introduces Buddy, a mascot for this important message. (This is a YouTube link. Top tip for watching YouTube with your child: go to the settings cog along the play bar and turn off autoplay – this avoids an inappropriate clip coming up automatically, and helps to discourage your child from passively watching clip after clip.)