This Week in the Phase: KS1

Check out our exciting expedition adventure as we explore our new guiding question : “The Circle of Life: How do animals adapt to their habitats?”

After School Club Questionnaire

We are looking to develop our after school clubs and would love your help.

Please complete the attached form to tell us which clubs you think your child would like to take part in.

Your feedback will help us plan clubs during the summer term and the next academic year.

After School Clubs

Thank you for your help!

Crew Elmer Weekly Blog 30.04.21

Well today has been a slightly emotional day in Crew Elmer 😥 which is totally understandable but I do hope that the children have had the opportunity to digest the information received and that they enjoy a lovely long break this weekend! 😊 Fingers crossed for some sunshine! ☀

Star moment of the week: ⭐

This week’s star moment has to be our crew building session on Tuesday! The children really enjoyed working in mini crews to build towers using only marshmallows and spaghetti. I was blown away with how well crew members worked together not only to support each other but also in sharing ideas to allow them to ALL be successful. It was lovely to observe this 💕 Great Crew work Crew Elmer! Well done! 👍🙌👏

This week’s HoWL average is: 2.8

Not a bad weekly score but a little off our ME which is 3.0! Hopefully next week we can achieve this! 🤞

Next week’s weekly HoWL target is: 3.0

How can we develop this next week? 

All crew members need to work together to ensure that all crew members are working hard, getting smart and being kind ALL day to get those 3’s and 4’s.

This week’s HoWL Heros: 

This week’s HoWL Heroes were Harry, Esme, Frankie, Ray and Laila! Well done to all of you! 👏🙌👍😁

Our week in Crew Thiede 26.4.21

It’s been a busy week in Crew! The children have worked so hard.

Crew 👫🏻

We have been helping each other on the trim trail this week, practicing our balancing skills and building on our teamwork. We also worked outside to build a box, it was really tricky to match all the parts together but we got there by working as crew.

The trees have also began to blossom! We have been smelling the beautiful flowers and looking at the colours!

We have been focusing on kindness this week! We have been showing our new crew mates how we achieve green standard.

Maths 🧮

This week we have been talking about bigger and smaller! We talked about how baby animals grow and how we would describe it. The children were able to identify and use the language of size, some even began to use non standard measure!

English

We have been reading ‘Farmyard Hullabaloo’ this week! The children used shapes to draw the pigs from the story! Did you know a pigs nose is called a snout? The children couldn’t believe it and thought it was really funny to say!

Expedition 🐖🐑🐄

This week we have been thinking about how animals grow and change in their lifetime. We learnt lots of baby animal names like piglet, lamb and calf. The children would like to know what a baby alpaca is called; I wonder if you could find out with an adult at home?

We can’t wait for a new month next week and all the new, exciting learning it will bring!

Enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend, the children have worked very hard and deserve a good rest! See you next week!

Crew Welburn’s Weekly Overview – 30.4.2021

Friday ✔

We have had a busy week in Crew Welburn trying to work on our HOWLs by working hard, getting smart and being kind. We’ve had lots of reflection time during crew and we have made our pledges to help us to improve our HOWL scores. I have seen such an improvement today which is fantastic. I can’t wait to see our scores next week.

Highlight of the week:

Our highlight of the week has to be our expedition launch hook day. We got to jet off on an aeroplane to the African Savanna, the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica to explore different animals and the climates around the world. We had so much fun! Our classroom is now fully immersed in our new expedition and we can’t wait to get started!

Check out our TWIP video to see what else we got up to.

HOWL Heroes:

Work hard: Evie

Get smart: Charlie

Be kind: Harry

My learning legend for this week is Kairen Bell. Kairen has been a superstar since coming back to school and always works hard to be a fantastic role model in Crew Welburn. Kairen has been working hard to get smart in his phonics and writing lessons all week, and has created some fantastic pieces of writing about The Wizard of Oz. He has used his Fred fingers to write all of his words accurately, and re-read his work to check it made sense. This is amazing Kairen, keep up the good work. 

HOWL Score: 3.3 Well done Crew Welburn!

This week’s HOWL average: 2.9 We know what we need to work on next week Crew Welburn.

Crew Godley 30.04.2021

We’ve had a fantastic week in Crew Godley this week! Our expeditionary learning has been so exciting! We began with our gallery of photos from when we were babies. The children were so amazed to see themselves so small 👶🏻


We’ve been writing facts about animals to tell Farmer Ian all about the animals he could have on his farm if he wished to. We’ve worked so hard to demonstrate green standard by using our phonics to help spell those tricky words, finger spaces and full stops.

We’ve given out lots of Howls throughout the week for children who are demonstrating their ability to work hard, get smart and be kind. I wonder who will be our HoWL heroes next week 🦸‍♂️

I would like to praise SJ who has worked incredibly hard on his learning behaviours this week. I am absolutely delighted with his maturity and resilience even when things get a little tricky.

We have worked hard on our praises, pledges, notices and wonders this week in crew and I can’t wait to see more children sharing with each other in crew next week 💜

Howl Average: 3.6

We’ve definitely had the Friday Feeling today, so enjoy the long weekend Crew Godley and I will see you all bright and early on Tuesday morning 🙂

EYFS TWITP

Take a look at all the exciting things we’ve been getting up to this week 🦆 🐄 🐴 🐑

Crew Wilson Weekly Review: 30.4.2021

We’ve had a fantastic week in Crew Wilson this week!

We launched our new expedition with an exciting hook day! You can see the video of our learning journey on our ‘This Week in the Phase: KS1″ page.

We’ve been writing postcards to tell people all about our adventures and our writing is getting better every day! We’ve discussed each of the different continents we visited and shared our ideas to create a brilliant bank of adjectives to use. Shoutout to Tommy F and Perrie for getting smart and independently adding their own ideas to their writing, striving for that green standard!

In maths we have been exploring number bonds and making sure that we can recite them super quickly – it’s been a challenge but we have risen to it! We’ve also been getting smart with using our resources, and have practiced lots of number sentences on our whiteboards to get our writing speed up! Shoutout to Dalton and Aleks for really using their brains to think about how the numbers interact with each other – mathematicians in the making!

We’ve given out lots of Howls throughout the week for children who are demonstrating their ability to work hard, get smart and be kind.

Debbie-Mae was our learning legend for the week for her fantastic effort across all of our lessons since returning from lockdown, Debbie-Mae is trying so hard and it’s amazing to see her resilience, keep it up!

Whilst daily blogs have gotten away from me (it’s been a very busy week!) I will share daily Howl Heroes again from Monday, so watch this space to see if your child is really demonstrating those habits of work and learning that we want to see in school. We want to celebrate our successes so keep an eye out for the blogs!

Overall we have had a better week in terms of listening and attention, and today is the first time in a while that we have seen lots of fabulous fours in our Howl Scores, let’s keep it up for next week!

Howl Average: 3.6

We’ve definitely had the Friday Feeling today, so enjoy the long weekend Crew Wilson and see you all bright and early on Tuesday morning 🙂

We are proposing changes to our start and finish times and a new wrap around care option from September…

Dear Parents/Carers,

I am writing to inform you that we are proposing a slight change to our start and finish times from September 2021.

I have been thinking about the start and finish times at Carcroft for a while now, in particular since we lost one of Assistant Headteachers, last Summer. One of our lovely AHT’s left Carcroft last summer in order to take up a role in a school closer to home; she had shared that since having her little boy, her mornings had become a struggle, with us starting at 8.25am.

I did start to reflect upon this last year, but unfortunately, with us being mid way through a global pandemic, it just wasn’t the time to make any changes. However, since December, I have started to plan ahead and do believe that September is the right time for us to make some changes to our start time and finish times in order to better support our fab staff team.

One of the hardest parts of being a Headteacher, is trying to ensure that all stakeholders are happy with the way in which the school is being led and managed; I have a duty of care to all of our pupils, but in addition, I also have a duty of care to our staff team too and at times, this can be a challenge trying to please everyone.

I am hoping that the changes I am proposing will not inconvenience our parents, will still cater to the needs of our pupils, whilst showing our staff team, that their well-being is important to us too.

We have a number of Teachers at Carcroft, who are also parents, and I do worry that at the minute, they are working incredibly hard to spin all of their plates, in particular on a morning, when they have to not only get themselves ready for work, they also have to get their little one/ones ready for the day ahead and then finally, have to prepare for a full day with a class of approximately 20 pupils (as well as ensuring that their support staff are well briefed in order to ensure the smooth running of the day!); I am sure you can imagine, this is no easy task when you have to plan and deliver 14 subjects throughout the week.

After school, a Teachers job is not done when the children go home. As a staff team, we have two working meetings per week, which usually run from 3.30-4.45. These meetings are professional development meetings, whereby we meet to discuss everything in which we are doing, in order to ensure that it’s the best that it can be for our children. Following these meetings, Teachers then go on to prepare their resources, creating, printing and trimming ready for the next day.

After much thought and reflection and testing out a model school day, I have taken the decision to start our school day at 8.40. This will therefore allow our Teachers the time to get into school, after organising their own childcare etc and set up for their day in class without additional stress and anxiety of feeling that there is not enough time.

In order to allow sufficient time for staff to plan, prepare and organise for the next day, we are proposing that our school day finishes at 3pm on a Monday-Thursday and 1.50pm on a Friday. This way, meetings can start 15 minutes earlier and can finish 15 minutes earlier, giving staff an additional 30 minutes per week to spend on planning and preparation after school.

I have discussed our change of school day timings with our Executive Headteacher from the XP Trust in order to ensure they he is happy that our school day allows us to provide a full broad and balanced curriculum for our pupils whilst supporting staff well-being, to which he was happy for me to move forward and share with parents.

I have attached a copy of the proposed model school day below in order to demonstrate the coverage of our curriculum across a school week. so that parents can see what our week will look like.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C-z6M_l5YGcNluooRg2VSCAJxNnCm-OPoVYUY9u1Wq0/edit?usp=sharing

I am hoping that parents can see that despite slightly changing our timings, we can still fit everything into our school week, whilst ensuring that our fabulous staff team have the time to undertake their role to a high standard. Without our dedicated staff team, we would be unable to run our school and we want the best staff around in order to make our school the best it can be. I am hoping that these slight changes will support us in keeping the best team around.

I would be grateful if you could complete the Google Form in order to express your support or share any queries in which you may have. There are two options, one to express that you understand the rationale and are happy to move forward with the revised times and one where you can share you are unhappy and can share your reasoning as to why.

https://forms.gle/DjLzYqBAnFS7b7HM6

I will review parent voice and will ensure that I reflect upon any comments/queries and suggestions made before finalising the changes; I will be in touch in due course.

Wrap Around Provision and After School Clubs

I have also started to plan for our clubs to fully reopen after the summer break. In addition, we are looking to offer a wrap around care option for our working parents, something which we have been hoping to do for a while. This is the provision in which we are hoping to offer and would love to hear if this is something that would support/be of interest to you from September.

We are looking to offer a breakfast club from 7.30 at a small fee (to be confirmed).

We will also be offering 1 hour clubs until 4.15 (Monday-Thursday) at a small fee (to be confirmed).

Finally, we are going to be offering an extended after school club until 6pm (Monday to Friday) at a small fee (to be confirmed).

We hope that by offering these clubs, we can better support parents, pupils and our community as we move forward on our journey.

Please express your interest in our wrap around care offer/after school clubs by completing the form below.

https://forms.gle/U5Tj1Kszz4EvL5ZF9

We will be coming back to parents with our price list for clubs and wrap around and will be in touch with regards to booking places for September after our half term break.

Thank you in advance for your support. You may have noticed that Facebook commenting has been switched off, as the more efficient way for us to collate parent views is via a Google Form. It also means that myself and Mrs Lythe do not have to manage the Facebook feed/thread over the weekend as it cane become extremely time consuming.

Thank you for your understanding, have a lovely weekend.

Miss Laing

Crew Shields – 30/4/21

It has been an extremely busy week in Crew Shields and the children should be very proud of everything they’ve achieved this week.

In Maths, we have been learning about fractions and ensuring that we understand a fraction is part of the whole shape/amount. It has blown me away how well they seem to be grasping this unit of maths as it can be a tricky concept to understand. We have seen most children move on to problem solving and reasoning each day. Our arithmetic lessons have focused on embedding the method for column addition and children are really getting the hang of it.

Expedition has seen us exploring the difference between carnivores, herbivores and omnivores while also thinking about our own diets. This lead on to learning about the food chain and how some animals are predators and prey. They asked some fantastic questions that allowed some good discussions. Yesterday afternoon involved lots of giggles especially as we were learning about why we burp and fart. We spent some time on the playground to demonstrate what happens when there is a build up of carbon dioxide in the stomach or intestines.

Howl Weekly Average: 3.00