This school year, pupils have benefitted from a change to how they record their learning.  Across the school, classes have begun to explore using digital exercise books.
This links with the terms curriculum objective of enhancing basic digital literacy from typing skills through to working with data.  The progression of these skills has enabled pupils to feel more confident when choosing from a range of devices to complete given tasks.
However, what has been most encouraging has been receiving feedback from the pupils themselves about the upskilling of their learning provision.
 
Class 5CP TL
I am writing this email to you because you, to let you know how amazing the online books /how much better online books are / that online books are more practical / why online books are better.  I believe that they are great because it help with your spelling.  We can place images on them and our books cannot go missing.  Thank you very much for letting us complete lessons online.
 
Class 5NB  KO
Thank you for the computing books.  I really like it. Its cool and fun to use.
 
Class 5TH EW
I’m writing to you about my thankfulness for letting us use the chromebooks instead of books. The fantastic things about online books are using less paper, saving more oxygen and Sir can see all our work. I really love changing my background every Monday.

​Things have taken a festive turn in Year 4 this week.  Alongside the joy of Christmas Cards, recording a Christmas song and celebrating the term, pupils have concluded the term in style.
 
In English, the children have been reflecting on the various adventures of Christmas elves.  Each morning, pupils have discovered multiple elves between their classrooms abseiling, making snow angels and other shenanigans.  Utilising recent story writing experiences, the elves helped to inspire independent story writing, including use of fronted adverbials, adjectives, alliteration, rhetorical questions, exclamations, and ellipses.
 
In Maths, pupils continue to learn their x6, x8 and x12 times tables.  Further into the week, pupils used their four operation skills from this term in a myriad of Christmas themed Maths activities.  Additionally, pupils have had the opportunity to use Hit the Button, Mathletics and TTRockstars.
 
We are also pleased to say that all pupils have been read with, in time to update BugClub allocations for the holidays. 

We celebrated our Curriculum Enrichment Day by coming into school as Vikings. The teachers even dressed up too! Mr Palser, Mr Beven and Mr Haywood had tattoos on their faces and on their wrists. Lots of children looked amazing and some of the classes raided the other. We did some Viking themed work in the morning - crossword puzzles and drawing. Then, we had to go out in the playground to get some stuff which we would then use to create Viking longships.
 
After break, we began making our longships and we used big bottles of water (some cut in half) as the hull of the boat. We then used the stuff we found as various parts of our boat, we put some parts in the boat and we used some stuff for the outside of the boat. We had a really fun day and even Mr Beven was found to be a traitor and he was punished because of this. 

​We have had a busy week in Y6. On Wednesday it was Christmas jumper day and we used this colourful opportunity to film our Y6 Christmas song – ‘Step into Christmas’. We had fun filming everyone singing and dancing to this up-beat song and the final result (edited brilliantly by Miss Moore) will be on the school Facebook page next week.
In English we have been editing and writing up our diary entries as a Jewish child in Germany who experienced the horror of Kristallnacht and the extensive anti-Jewish laws. During our grammar lessons we have been revising our knowledge and understanding of main and subordinate clauses and subordinating conjunctions. We have also begun working on a persuasive letter to Hitler to tell him that the war needs to stop. 
In maths, we have continued to work with fractions, with some pupils continuing to practise adding and subtracting fractions and other learning to multiply fractions. Fractions are fun and are easy to understand when you know your times-tables really, really well.
Our computing lesson on spreadsheets moved us on from using multiplication in formulas (which we learnt last week), to using all four operations and we learnt how to use the sigma ∑ button to help us when we need to add or ‘sum’ large amounts of data.

This week we have been busy practising our Christmas song ready to record these next week. We have worked so hard to learn our words- especially those written in another language! On Friday we had our Curriculum day and this was so much fun. First, we designed our own stone age houses, thinking carefully about how to stabilise the structure. We then used these designs and followed these carefully to bring our creations to life. Using clay, we moulded the base of our houses. We had to use our hands to shape it so that it formed a stable circular base. Next, we used paper plates and string to weave a roof for the stone age house. We are all so proud of our creations and gave one another some really constructive feedback to improve them if we were to create these again.  ​

​In Year 5, we have continued to have a real buzz towards our learning. We have been exploring why and how the Vikings used Runes to communicate, and using the same method to send positive messages around the school and year group. In a more modern means of communicating, and in computing, it has been a pleasure to teach and explore website creation. The year group have been creating informative websites about our school (as epic as the website you may be reading this on). In mathematics, we’ve been exploring factors and investigating prime numbers; in English, continuing our adventurous narratives. 

​To show our awesome learning, a website has been shown below: