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

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!