Hello all! We hope you have had a good second week back and are managing ok with the return to early mornings and school drop-offs!

We have really enjoyed welcomming your children into year 3 and KS2. From our point of view, everyone has settled back into the routines and, like one pencil said to the other, we are looking sharp…

This week we have started by looking at out book for the term, ‘Ten Word Tiny Tales’ by Jospeh Coelho. If you haven’t had a chance to look at a copy, I suggest you have a look! It’s a fantastic picture book full of amazing illustrations that are a combination of inspiring, mysterious and fun all with a sense of wonder. It has been brilliant for the children to look through these pictures and select their favourites. Later, we plan on writing our own ten-word tales, with a view to writing our own stories in the not-too-distant future.

In spellings, we have started to look at words that contain the spelling ‘ou’ and make the /ow/ sound (there’s a free one for you there). Your children will have their first homework on this set tomorrow (10th September) and it will be due on the 17th September. We have decided to set them 5 games for spelling, at least for the start of the year. As we all know, you can have too much of a good thing…

In maths, we have started to look at number and place value. So far, this has involved partitioning numbers with up to 3-digits, odd and even numbers and some times table practice too! Over the next two days (and for the next few weeks on a Thursday and Friday) we will be looking and measuring length and perimeter -that’s the long and short of it anyway.

As with Spelling Shed homework, we have also set Times Table Rockstars homework for the same dates. In this, the children will have to complete 10 minutes of times table practice with the programme adapting to their tables knowledge as it goes.

In other areas of the curriculum, we have started to look at rainforests around the world, discussed parts of a plant and seed dispersal in science, completed some self-portraits and will be looking at programming using Scratch in computing.

Going forwards, forest camp will be arranged on a rota (still on a Wednesday afternoon), using the following rota:

Swimming will also follow an alternating rota (this week being Week A – Week B children will swim Tuesday 15th):

I hope that makes sense! My Microsoft Excel skills (such as they are) let me down at one point, but I think I’ve got it now. Like the saying goes, give a monkey a laptop and eventually he’ll make a spreadsheet…

Hope you all have a great week!

Mr Coates and Mr Witcomb.