National Storytelling Week 📚📖

26th January 2024Sophie Elmer

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

Getting a plaster to help are friend 🩹

25th January 2024Lauren Marsh

In our experience lesson today we had to quickly run around the assault course around the playground and get a plaster out of the bag for our new friend Carla, who head a big red bump on her head.

We were fab at getting the plaster fast to help our friend! We also produced some lovely writing in our books.

Reading in MI

23rd January 2024Stacey McClare

We enjoyed finding our new vocabulary today whilst reading outloud 🙂 We used a read around the robin and a partner read today whilst reading. Mrs McClare then timed us to see how far we could read in 1 minute but still ensuring we were reading accurately. We discussed the story as we read thinking about our thoughts on the characters and what was happening. We tried to empathise with some of the characters, putting ourselves in their position. We tried to text mark some ideas as we read then shared this with another group. We then explored some questions as a group and even unpicked our green challenge question. We showed a great understanding today 🙂

Story telling in Crew MW

18th January 2024A Welburn

To finish off our week of ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’, Crew MW invited their siblings into their classroom to tell them the story that we’d been learning. We used our bridges, trolls and other props to tell the story, and repeated familiar phrases like, ‘Who’s that trip trapping over my bridge?!’ to show what each character said. We had so much fun with our brothers and sisters!

Meeting Carla.. 🐧🧺

17th January 2024Lauren Marsh

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.

Confidence builds in MI

16th January 2024Stacey McClare

In our reading lesson today we continued to work on our written questions from yesterday. We used the text to skim and scan for clues then recorded our answers. We are getting more confident in using the text and we are starting to believe in ourselves. We then moved onto reading the next part of the story, we were so excited to find out what happened! We discussed the text as we read, unpicked unfamiliar vocabulary and thought about why certain parts of the story had happened. We even used our inference skills to talk about why the characters had behaved in a particular way. We discussed our opinion on the ending of the story and this allowed for some great discussions, challenging our thinking.

Reading in MI

15th January 2024Stacey McClare

Today we recapped our previous vocabulary in reading by playing 4 corners! We loved playing this game! We thought about which word class the words belonged to and why. We read the words in context too to help us. We then read some of our text using a variety of reading strategies, we tried to do some text marking as we read. From here we tried to independently answer a range of fact and retrieval questions and also challenged ourselves with a green standard question. We used the knowledge we had gained in our previous demonstration comprehension lesson to help us to answer our questions.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff

12th January 2024A Welburn

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

12th January 2024A Welburn

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!

National Storytelling Week! 📚📖

11th January 2024Sophie Elmer

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