Reading With Prosody: The Secret to Survival
This week in Reading, Year 5/6 have been exploring a diary entry inspired by the first story in our class novel Survivors. The story tells the true account of a young girl who was travelling by plane over the rainforest when disaster struck and she suddenly found herself alone, injured and fighting to survive in the wild.
We began the week by inferring how the girl might have been feeling at different points in her ordeal, using clues from the text to build a deeper understanding of her emotions.
As the week went on, we turned our focus to performing the diary entry in small groups. Using prosody, we worked hard to make our performances engaging for the rest of the class – changing our voices, adding expression and making sure the story sounded as dramatic as it felt on the page.
Help at Home: Ask you child about how to read and perform with prosody.
Living and learning
I can use the 8Rs to help me with my learning.
This has been our living and learning statement this week. The children enjoyed discussing the 8Rs – reflecting, remembering, resourceful, resilient, reflecting, risk-taking, responsible and being responsive.
For each 8R, the children were able to give examples of when they had demonstrated one of these in school since the start of term.
“I always have the right equipment and I’m ready to learn.”
” I could remember the actions we had created to help remember our topic vocabulary.”
If you’d like to know a little more about our living and learning curriculum, please click here.
Science: what is air resistance?
In science, Year 5/6 have been exploring friction. This week, children took to the playground to explore the effects of air resistance. While our quick experiement might have had some limitations, we all agreed that we could feel the drag.
Help at home: review the forces vocabulary with your child.
Dates for your diary
Here is a copy of the Dates for your diary letter that was sent home this week. It contains all the key dates for meetings, ‘Stay and Learn’ and Learning Journey drop-in sessions.
Welcome to Reception
A reminder that our ‘Welcome to Reception’ meeting is on Wednesday 17 September, 2025 at 6pm. This is held at school.
Following our first welcome session, this is an opportunity to find out some basic ‘need to knows’ about life in Reception.
We look forward to seeing you there.
Welcome to Nursery
Hello everyone!
We’ve been busy this week meeting some of our new children at their home visits. It’s been lovely finding out about you all and what you like to do. We’re looking forward to getting to know you more when we welcome you to Nursery next week.
We are looking forward to welcoming back our returning children. We can’t wait see see how much you have grown and to find out about your summer holidays.
Nursery is now ready for the new school year. Have a look at the photos to see what you might like to play with next week. We’ve tried to make sure that there’s something for everyone to enjoy, including some of your favourite things that you told us about on home visits. We’ve got Paw Patrol, a farm, diggers, The Gruffalo and our mud kitchen bikes ready for you to come and play.
Where will you play?
A few reminders from home visits: what your child will need every day…
- A waterproof coat (named)
- A pair of wellies (named)
- A change of clothes (top, trousers/ leggings, underwear, socks)
- A filled water bottle (named)
Welcome to 1A!
What a fantastic week we’ve had in 1A! The children have settled very well into their new classroom and we are all getting to know each other. I am very impressed at how quickly the children have adapted to their new environment and routines.
We have practised some of our sounds in phonics and practised our handwriting. We’ve written our full names every day this week using a whiteboard pen! We are going to do this every morning when we come into school.
It is also important that we strengthen our fingers, so we’ve done some ‘dough disco’ to practise our fine motor skills.
In Maths, we’ve been counting all the way to 10 (forwards and backwards). We’ve also been practising writing our numbers the right way around in books. Today, we worked together to identify and order numicon from 1-10.
All of the children have been super brave and resilient this week. We’ve talked about our emotions, what makes us happy and how we can recognise emotions in others.
In PE we played a co-ordination game called ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and cone’. We even had fun balancing the cone on our head and walking from one end of the playground to the other without dropping it!
Well done 1A for a brilliant start to the year. I can’t wait to see what the year brings.
Living and learning: school rules
We have been talking about our school rules this week and how it is important to follow them so we make our school a happy and healthy place to learn.
Help at home by asking your child if they can tell you are school rules.
3,4C Class News
What a fabulous first week, 3,4C!
The children have started the year with a positive attitude to learning. They’ve spent time learning new routines, meeting new friends and learning to work as one big team. The pride and care taken with their work so far has been incredible! We are really impressed.
Here are the beautiful bookmarks that the children have made to use in class when reading.
Well done 3,4C. Have a great weekend and we look forward to seeing you next week.
Mrs Wadsworth and Miss Joicey
Phase 3/4 – Reading
Reading records
This week, we have spent some time in class settling the children in Phase 3,4 into reading groups. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, your child will read their book in class with their group. Your child will be able to access their book at home using the Collins login details. Their username and password will be on the inside of their reading record. Your child will be able to tell you the chapter(s) they are currently reading at school so they can practise reading the same chapter(s) at home. We are currently experiencing some technical issues with the children being able to log in. We will let the children know when they can access the e-books.
In addition to this, each child will bring home a library book to foster a love of reading.
Each class has spent some time going through the reading records so the children know how to use them. Each Friday, the children will be set a reading record task to complete for homework. Details of how to complete the tasks are in the reading record.
Please make sure that your child brings their reading record to the Book Club session each week. In this lesson, their class teacher will have the opportunity to check the reading completed at home, share reading records as a class and celebrate reading.
Book Club sessions:
- 3/4 A – Friday
- 3/4 B – Friday
- 3/4 C – Friday
Please ensure that your child is reading out loud and regularly to an adult at home and has an opportunity to discuss their understanding. There is space in the reading records to sign when your child has read at home.
Any questions, please ask.
We look forward to sharing the reading records each week during Book Club. Happy reading!
Phase 3,4 Team