Meeting Carla.. 🐧🧺

After all the conkers fell on our head yesterday, today we opened our eyes to see that it was Carla (a bird) wrapped up in a washing line!! Carla was hungry, so we had to help her. We had a challenged to try and pinch a sandwich using cocktail sticks from Percy the Park Keeper. We used cocktail sticks to represent our hedgehog spikes. We also practised our rolling skills to see if we could stick the sandwich to our back.

Bring Back Book Bags! 📖

This week, Crew Hamill have noticed that they have been a little bit forgetful in bringing their book bags to school. They have worked really hard to improve their reading skills so we are now driving to ensure we remember to bring our book bags to school, with our home reading logged by our adults, every day! We have worked together to create this chart that helps us to see who has remembered their book bag and who has left it at home. We’re hoping to see everyone’s book name on the right chart!

Chapter One Meet and Greet

Today the children in Crew Robson and Crew Godley had the pleasure of meeting their amazing Chapter One reading volunteers and finally put a face to the voice. The children read to their volunteer once a week via audio call and it is having a great impact on their reading progress. It was lovely to be able to say thank you to these wonderful people who make time in their busy jobs to read with our children.

Hedgehog in the park 🦔

Today we started reading Percy the Parker keeper has a flying visit. We loved reading the first part of the book and experience what it must have felt like when the hedgehog was chilling under the tree in the park until bonkers fell down and bashed his head.

We looked up at the sky and shared what we could see, we then acted out what the hedgehog might have done when the conkers fell.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

Today in Crew MW, we hooked into our first story – The Three Billy Goats Gruff. We found a map in our classroom with a red X on it and some words explaining that we needed to ‘trip trap over’…After lots of discussion and a closer look at the map, we worked out that the map was showing our outdoor area, and that we needed to trip trap over the bridge! We had lots of feelings in our classroom before going outside. Some of us felt scared, worried and nervous, and some of us felt really excited! As we trip trapped over the bridge as a crew, we suddenly heard a big, scary voice from under the bridge shouting, ‘Who’s that trip trapping over my bridge?’ It was a TROLL!! We quickly ran inside to safety where we found a story had been left for us. It was The Three Billy Goats Gruff. We read through the story together and decided that the troll was very scary indeed! I wonder what we will get up to next week…

Crew MW’s hook into expedition

Crew MW began their new expedition this week – Who is hiding in the pages of this book? We hooked into the expedition by reading a story called ‘The Great Fairytale Disaster’. The story told us all about the Big Bad Wolf from the Three Little Pigs, and how he got bored of his own story so he went in search of a new fairytale to be in. We loved finding all of the different characters throughout the story and matching them to their fairytales. After that, we went on a character hunt around school to see who we could find. When we got back, we looked at the different characters and predicted that we would be looking at three stories throughout our expedition. We sorted the characters into ‘The Gingerbread Man’, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, and ‘the Three Billy Goats Gruff’. We’re very excited to get started!

Polar Bear Reading Challenge 🐻‍❄️

Crew Hamill have been set a brand new reading challenge!! Each member of our crew has their own polar bear that they need to try and save from sinking on the disappearing iceberg 🧊 Every time they read at home, their polar bear takes one footstep closer to the safety of shore! The first person to the safe iceberg wins a prize! And every polar bear that doesn’t suffer the dreadful fate of many polar bears by making it onto a paw print will also be rewarded! 🐻‍❄️🧊🎁 Who will be first to the top?! 👀

National Storytelling Week! 📚📖

Dear Parents/Carers, 

During the week commencing 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