Welcome back the the second half of the spring term. The children have come back to school ready and raring to go and have continued in the same brilliant way they left off before the holiday!
This week has been our annual World Book Week (which incorporates World Book Day), and we’ve had a fantastic time. We have been inspired by the author Nizrana Farook, and used her stories as the basis for lots of our learning this week. She was born in Sri Lanka (near India) and used the landscapes and wildlife there to shape her stories.
This week we have created and performed shadow puppet plays. We used the opening of Nizrana’s books to inspire us to tell the story in a magical way. Our performances were excellent: using voices actions and some wonderfully designed props to tell these tales.
We then used these extracts to create reading comprehension questions to challenge our friends later in the week. We read the stories again and tried to develop some vocabulary based questions which checked our understanding of the words in the story; some retrieval questions – where the answers were hidden in the text; and some sequencing questions, which challenged our friends to put events from the story into chronological order.
As part of a carousel around different classrooms and teachers, we really enjoyed making beautiful watercolour bookmarks which were inspired by the animals from her stories. An elephant, leopard, whale and bear. As well as this, we also competed in a Kahoot quiz all about Sri Lanka. It turned out we knew quite a lot about Nizrana’s tropical homeland. Whilst we were in Y6, we thought about who was kind to us and we wrote them a kindness postcard, to say we really appreciate them.
The whole school space story was really fun to write and Y5 had a lot of pressure to write a fantastic ending to the adventure – we hope you enjoy reading it. Our homework, this week, is to create a colourful, eye-catching and sensational title and front cover for our school story – Good Luck! It was great to spend time with other teachers and other children, as some of the staff came and read their favourite books to us and we had the chance to go and read stories to the children in reception and nursery.
We also participated in an exciting (and loud) world book day quiz in the hall, where Jupiter were crowned as the kings and queens of book knowledge! Well done to Ellisia, for being part of the victorious house team. One of our favourite activities was the QR code book hunt, where we had to watch videos of clues given by the teachers, and try to identify their favourite books. Some of them were really tricky and some of the staff still love the books that they read as a child.
Our week ended with some incredible costumes and outfits to celebrate our favourite stories and books. Thank you for all your efforts and supporting reading in school this year.
Pupils of the Week
Congratulations to Georgie in 2HS, who has shown increased confidence in his reading and a really mature attitude to the week’s activities.
Congratulations to Aston in 2DJ, who has really engaged and worked well with the wide range of activities during our reading week.
Attendance Award
Our Attendance award winners this week were Bailey, in 2HS, for having 100% attendance over the last half term, and Dayton, who is in school, on time, every day (with a big smile on his face)! Well done to both of you.
Readers
Our remarkable readers this week are: Hazel and Shanaya, with 3 reads at home. Ellisia and Musa with 4 reads at home. And with an incredible 5read at home: Alex, Elizabeth, and Ruben
