National Storytelling Week! 📖📚

1st February 2024Sophie Elmer

Dear Parents/Carers, 

As you may be aware, this week the children and adults within school have been celebrating National Storytelling Week here at Carcroft Primary School.

Throughout the week the children have been participating in a range of engaging activities including sharing their favourite stories, listening to stories, taking part in drama activities and much more!

Tomorrow (Friday 2nd February) will be the last day of this fabulous week and as a celebration we are asking both children and adults to come to school in their pyjamas, lounge wear or general comfy clothes! Children will be exploring ‘bedtime stories’ as well as books for our older children that are perfect for reading as they drift off to sleep! 💤 Children 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 a little chilly ❄. Children 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 look forward to welcoming the children into school tomorrow in their pjs and celebrating the end of a successful Storytelling Week! 📚📖

Thank you for your continued support and cooperation. 

Mrs Elmer 

English Lead

MI create their own story…

31st January 2024Stacey McClare

MI have been super busy creating their own story for the year 1 children. We are all so proud of the story we have created and well done to everyone in MI for contributing 🙂 Here it is…

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess called Abby. She had long blonde hair that looked like locks of gold. Her stunning blue eyes sparkled like diamonds and hypnotised anyone who came in front of her. Her kind and caring personality made her popular and her huge heart made her the most wonderful person ever! Rick had emerald green eyes but he was a poor man and struggled to survive. His hair was brown with hints of blonde and he longed to find his true love. His heart was sad because he had no other family. 

One day the princess was taking a stroll around the majestic lake when she came across a hideous, evil witch! All of a sudden, the witch grabbed the princess and dragged her into the forest. As they got deeper and deeper into the forest, the princess saw a dark cave in front of her. There was a dangerous shadow all around and she knew she was in trouble. The witch threw her into the cave and placed a spell on her meaning she couldn’t escape.
“Hahaha I have you now and you won’t ever escape!“ Cackled the witch in the scariest voice.
“Please let me go, I need to get back to my family.” Replied the Princess, crying as she spoke. 

A couple of days passed and Rick was busy chopping wood in the forest for his fire. Suddenly, there in front of him was an old lady who came over and spoke. She explained she had heard voices in the forest and wanted him to help. As the two walked deeper into the forest they heard a scream.
“What do you think that is?” Called the lady.
“I don’t know but let’s go and find out,” The man replied.

The two bolted as fast as lightning and came to the entrance of the cave. There in front of them was the disgusting figure of the witch. As quick as a flash the lady and witch started to battle against each other. Their long, sharp swords kept crashing against each others until the lady voiced a spell and this turned the witch into tiny particles that shot like a bullet into the sword. The witch was now trapped forever. 

The princess was also still trapped. Rick tried hard to break her free but the iron bars were just too strong. Rick looked into her eyes and knew he had fallen in love. The lady pointed her magical wand at the bars and soon the bars turned to ice. Another spell happened and suddenly the ice burned! The princess was now free!

Rick shouted, “Princess, will you marry me?”
“Yes I would love to,” She replied. “You have saved my life!”

The princess and Rick ran off into the sunset, making their way back to the Princess’ castle. They lived happily ever after together.

Book talk in MI

30th January 2024Stacey McClare

Today in reading we completed two entry tickets that allowed us to reflect on the previous stories we had read and then make predictions on the next story by using the title. We tried to make links to our current expedition and thought about what we already know about Africa. We then explored our new vocabulary, the language we would come across when reading our new story. We worked well in mini crews to do this. We then used a partner read and echo read when reading the text outloud. We text marked our new vocabulary as we read. We then moved onto some book talk questions where we use APE well to answer our impression question. We used evidence from the text to build our answer then made sure we linked our ideas back to the question. We are trying really hard in our reading sessions and our confidence is growing 🙂 Our exit ticket allowed us to think about what we thought is going to happen when the character is hunting. We even tried to explain our answers.

Trying to fly…

29th January 2024Lauren Marsh

After everything that the hedgehog has done for Carla, his one dream was being able to fly. We firstly had to use Percy the Park Keepers help to unwrap Carla from her washing line and then we watched her with the other animals (fox, badger, the two mice) flap her wings to fly.

We were so lucky that we got to fly with Carla and she helped us out after all we had done for her.

Book Talk

26th January 2024Ruth Shields

Today we finished our second book talk lesson. We spent some time enjoying we understood the vocabulary and reminded ourselves that if something starts with a capital letter it’s the name of a place or person. We enjoyed a game of round table where the children had to take turns finding nouns in the text then we did a whip around sharing our answers.

We worked together to do a sequencing activity to order events in the text.

While reading the text, we had some questions to allow us the opportunity to give us reason for reading.

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.