Non-chronological Reports

Yesterday we began to explore non-fiction writing. We are going to create our own non-chronological report all about hedgehogs as we have been learning about them in our expedition lessons. We stared by exploring the features of a non-chronological report such as headings and subheadings. We then worked in pairs to find out some of our own hedgehog facts to use in our writing later in the week.

Book Talk – The Last Bear

In our book talk lessons this week, we have been text marking the next pages in our book “The Last Bear” by Hannah Gold. The children really enjoyed finding out what happened after April and her dad received the official government letter. The children picked out lots of words they didn’t understand and we were able to discuss reading around the word to figure it out. Some children had used their grammar knowledge and found words with capital letters. They remembered that words starting with capital letters are nouns so Oslo is a place.

Storytelling week starts in MI

Today in crew we thought about what storytelling is and what it means to us. Mrs McClare shared her experiences as a child and her favourite book. Our crew check in allowed us to share our favourite stories with each other and why we like those particular books. We then went into the library and shared some books together. Some of us even read out loud to the rest of the crew! This was lovely to see. Finally after discussing the stories we had read, we wrote some book recommendations. We really enjoyed doing this and look forward to the next activities in the morning.

Trying to fly…

After everything that the hedgehog has done for Carla, his one dream was being able to fly. We firstly had to use Percy the Park Keepers help to unwrap Carla from her washing line and then we watched her with the other animals (fox, badger, the two mice) flap her wings to fly.

We were so lucky that we got to fly with Carla and she helped us out after all we had done for her.

Book Talk

Today we finished our second book talk lesson. We spent some time enjoying we understood the vocabulary and reminded ourselves that if something starts with a capital letter it’s the name of a place or person. We enjoyed a game of round table where the children had to take turns finding nouns in the text then we did a whip around sharing our answers.

We worked together to do a sequencing activity to order events in the text.

While reading the text, we had some questions to allow us the opportunity to give us reason for reading.

National Storytelling Week 📚📖

Dear Parents/Carers, 

Next week, Monday 29th January we will be celebrating the National Storytelling Week event here at Carcroft Primary School! We highly value reading and the importance of telling stories to inspire, entertain and educate our pupils. We will also take this opportunity to continue to promote the love of books and reading. 

Throughout the week, pupils will participate in a range of engaging activities including sharing their favourite stories, listening to stories, creating stick puppets, writing mini stories to share, performing plays, contributing to drama activities such as ‘hot seating’, ‘conscious alley’ and ‘freeze framing’ as well as sharing stories through different mediums such as films and short clips and so much more! We hope that by providing our pupils with these carefully planned activities that these will support our drive to maintain, promote and engage our pupils in reading. Each Crew Leader will create a blog at the end of the day/week so that you can see all of the exciting things that your child/ren have been getting up to throughout the week! 

As part of this exciting week, we are asking for children (and staff!) to come to school in their pyjamas or comfy clothes (lounge wear) on the final day of the event on Friday 2nd February. On this day, children will be exploring ‘bedtime stories’ as well as books for our older pupils that are perfect for reading as they drift off to sleep! Pupils are welcome to come to school in their dressing gowns but please can you also ensure that they have a coat as the weather is still likely to be wet and cold at this time of year. Pupils are also welcome to bring their slippers to school but will need sensible footwear to wear outside at break and lunch times. For this school event we will not be asking for any monetary donations. We are aware that as a school we will be celebrating other exciting National events linked to reading such as World Book Day on Thursday 7th March, where it is likely that pupils will dress as their favourite character, which is why for this upcoming event we have made the decision to go with comfy pjs! We hope that you understand this decision as our utmost priority for the event is for our pupils to love reading!

Either at the end of this week or in preparation for the week it would be lovely for you to share with your child/ren your favourite story/ies or maybe even orally share a story with them. It is also a good opportunity to discuss characters, story morals and plots with them. At the end of the week I am sure that they will have lots of stories to share with you! 

We look forward to celebrating this National event with you! 

Thank you for your continued support and cooperation. 

Mrs Elmer 

English Lead