Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover! Crew White Celebrates World Book Day

5th March 2026Charlotte Newman

Today, Crew White celebrated World Book Day with a fun book discovery activity designed to spark curiosity about reading. Students began by silently exploring eight different books placed around the room, judging their first impressions based on the covers. After discussing what caught their attention, students read a selection of blurbs, noted interesting details and questions on post-its, and reconsidered their choices. To finish, we held a lively Book Tournament, where the eight books competed in a class vote until one Crew White Champion Book was crowned — which we’ll now begin reading together in class.

Academic Crew – personalised learning

12th February 2026Thomas White

Recently, during Academic Crew in Year 6 we have been showing independence, collaboration and hard thinking to help us get smart. During these sessions, we have our own learning target that we are focusing on. Some of us are improving our writing skills, some of us are becoming better readers and others are becoming better mathematicians. Last week, postcards were given to Rory, Tommy and Tiarna for their effort during this session. This week, postcards were given to Charlie, Ruby and Toby. Follow us to find out who will be next!

Reading Buddies Building Confidence

11th December 2025Thomas White

This week, our Reading Buddies programme has been in full swing, and it’s been brilliant to see. Our older, confident readers have been supporting younger students with their pre-reads, helping them practise tricky words, build fluency, and talk about the story before they meet it in class.

They’ve shown maturity, independence and genuine care in the way they guide and encourage their partners. The younger children have absolutely loved the one-to-one attention, and their confidence is growing every session.

It’s been a lovely reminder that reading isn’t just a skill, it’s something we share as a community.

Christmas

11th December 2025Elizabeth Frost

Crew Frost has loved getting into the Christmas spirt! We have been lucky enough to have a visit from Santa and receive a book each. Next we have been working hard in provision getting our decorations made for our tree and using our school logo as the tree topper. In expedition, we have been learning all about the Nativity, who is in it and why we celebrate it. We can’t wait to show our very own Nativity next week! Well done crew Frost!

Text Marking in Reading

8th October 2025Charlotte Newman

Today Crew McLoughlin have been working extra hard on their text marking in reading. While using their highlighters and pencils, they identified key ideas, annotated tricky words and added extra detail to show their understanding. Everyone showed great focus and teamwork, discussing their ideas and supporting one another. Well done, Crew McLoughlin – your reading skills are getting stronger every day!

Confidence is key!

12th September 2025Laura Hamill

Today in our reading lesson, we worked really hard as a crew and showed just how confident we have become at discussing the texts we read. We had in-depth discussions about our text and made some great links to our expedition topic. Mrs. Rankin was incredibly impressed with our ideas and opinions, and we were proud of how well we used our retrieval skills to answer questions. We are really growing as readers and enjoying our non-fiction texts along the way!

Demonstration Comprehension

1st July 2025Laura Hamill

Today, our crew worked hard in their demonstration comprehension lesson. We focused on the next chapter of our class text, Dark Flood, and tested our fluency by aiming to read 185 words in one minute, in line with the Year 6 expected standard. Following this, we worked with Miss as she modelled how to accurately answer a comprehension question, thinking about the best strategies that we could use. We focused on questions that had arisen as a problem for us based on our recent assessments. Once we’d done this, we then worked in pairs to attempt to answer some of our own questions, before coming back together as a crew to check if we all agreed on the answers.

A-m-a-z-i-ng Ph-o-n-i-c-s

26th March 2025Natasha Holdsworth

I would just like to praise these children for their continued progression when learning their sounds. Some even started Year 1 still learning Set 1 sounds and are now nearly at the end of their Set 3 sounds! Their love for learning really does shine through and we are so proud of you! Keep up the great work. Fred the Frog is so impressed!

World Book Day

7th March 2025Ruth Shields

It was fantastic to see so many children dressed up for World Book Day. We even had a dinosaur loose in the classroom.

In crew, we checked in by telling the crew which character they’d come as.

After break, we read with Crew Robson which was such a lovely time. It was lovely hearing the children read to younger children but also to hear them being confident enough to read to older children. And of course this was even better with a biscuit.

Well done to the effort and creativity that went into the paper plate challenge. Unfortunately we couldn’t give everyone a prize but well done to Lily-Ann and Emily.