It seems like the week has absolutely flown by and I can't believe I'm writing our first weekly update! You should be incredibly proud of how your children have started this year: they have worked hard, settled in and been absolutely wonderful! 

This week we have had a relaxed start into the year with lots of art and PSHE activities. We have created some beautiful artwork for our classroom, which hopefully you will be able to see on our Meet the Teacher evening in a couple of weeks time (more information to come soon), We have created our class rules and also thought about having a growth mindset and the power of 'yet' to help develop our resilience and positive thinking. 

We have done some hard work too in the form of Maths and English. In Maths we have started our unit on place value and completed lots of work on representing numbers, we even went up to hundred thousands on Thursday and Friday! We looked at the value of the digits, partitioned them in part-whole models and bar models and used place value charts to represent them. On Monday we started with a very tricky task on Roman Numerals up to 1,000 but with lots of practise we will get there! 

In English we have started our unit on writing a lost tale. We have read our model text about a girl who gets evacuated and loses a very precious photo of her dad who is fighting in the war. We have represented the text with our story maps, identified the toolkit in the model text and wrote a diary entry as the main character, Sarah. 

Talking of World War Two we introduced the topic on Wednesday and gathered what we already knew - it's lovely to see how interested some of the children are so early in the topic! I always find it's a topic that really engages children as so many have family stories. If you do have any artefacts from your family and are happy to have them in school we always like to share them in class. 

The children loved having Mrs Ward on Thursday afternoon where they did a fantastic front cover about their new unit of investigating the very philosophical question of 'Does God exist?'. Mrs Ward will teach the children on a Thursday afternoon until half term and after that Mrs Ward will teach them in the morning. It will alternate on a half-termly basis for the remainder of the year.

We ended the week with some discussions around Queen Elizabeth II and the sad news we received on Thursday. In the next couple of weeks we will be doing some commemorative work to remember her and her 70 year reign.  

Have a lovely weekend, 
Mrs Cotton and the Eagles Team