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

Reading in MI

9th January 2024Stacey McClare

Today in reading we continued to explore our new text! We enjoyed reading out loud with our partners today, recapping the new vocabulary that we learnt yesterday. We text marked this new vocabulary and thought again about word class. We then moved onto to look at some fact and retrieval questions doing some demonstration comprehension with Mrs McClare. We really thought about how we go about answering questions and what we need to look for in the questions. Once we had done some together, we then worked independently or with partner support to answer our own questions. We really enjoyed our lesson and proved we could use the text to find answers.

Reading in MI

8th January 2024Stacey McClare

Today we started our first hooked on books reading lesson where we started to explore our new text, ‘African Tales’ We explored the front cover and blurb thinking about what we noticed and we tried to make connections between other texts we had read. We explored and read the text in detail which really engaged us! We all wanted to start reading the book! We then looked at some vocabulary that would appear in the text when we started to read. We thought about definitions of each word and which word class the words belonged to. We then read part of the text using a chorus read, read around the robin as well as reading with our partner. We even started some text marking 🙂

New Class text

8th January 2024Ruth Shields

Today, we have started our new class text. We are excited to discover how this links to our Spring expedition.

Since September, we’ve also read George and the giant Peach, History Hackers – A Roman Rescue and The Night I met Father Christmas. We also read some of The Christmasaurus but unfortunately we didn’t get time to finish it and January isn’t really the time for a Christmas novel.

Crew Shields absolutely love our shared reading text and it’s something we look forward to. Everyone is always asking “Just one more chapter” 😊

Book Talk 📚📖🗣🗨

8th December 2023Sophie Elmer

 In today’s Book Talk session, we explored the front cover of our new text to allow us to fully immerse into the text and understand right from the front cover what we might expect from the book. We then read the synopsis that had been written which gave us a little more information and got us really questioning what the text might be about. We also explored some of the pictures from the text as an extra stimulus. We then tried to answer the following questions: What does it remind us of? What do we think it will be about or is going to happen? What do we wonder? And what do we notice? We recorded our responses during a ‘Silent Conversation’ and then shared our comments as a crew.

We ended the session by discussing how important it is to really look at the front cover, picture clues and read the synopsis before selecting a book. This was especially important for this text because lots of our initial responses were that the front cover looked ‘old’, ‘boring’, ‘old fashioned’ and ‘plain’. However, after reading the synopsis and seeing some images from the text lots of us changed our opinion of the text and are now excited to look at it more next lesson!