In the holidays I read 'Goodnight Mister Tom'. I loved this book as it was a story of an evacuee who escaped London during the war. My favourite part of the book was reading how Mister Tom and Will's relationship developed over time. It also made me think how the anticipation of the war and the rules and regulations are a little bit like our current situation with the lockdowns.

World Book Day

Remember, at Whitkirk, we are celebrating World Book Day on Friday 5th March so that we can share our outfits during our Celebration Assemblies. You should have received information about our Ready, Steady, Read competition that will be taking place during the week- we can't wait to find out which pupil and which class will have read for the most amount of time by the end of the week! Not forgetting our Potato Competition that we will completing, at home and at school, on Friday afternoon! We can't wait!

Let's see what our classes have been up to this week:

Reception:

To start of our topic this half term called 'How does your garden grow?" we read the story Oliver's Vegetables; this got us very excited to start growing our own plants. In our outdoor area, we set up a greenhouse together and filled lots of pots up with soil and then planted some bulbs. We then made sure we watered our plants to help them grow. As well as planting real pants, we have been role playing in our garden centre which we helped set up ourselves. We have been planting, selling flowers, and buying fresh fruit and vegetables. We have also been exploring foods to work out what part of the plant they are and which bits we can eat. We know the importance of eating a range of colours of fruit and vegetables and created rainbow meals.

KS1:

Year 1 pupils were very excited this week to start their new topic ‘Can animals live in extreme climates?’ by taking part in our engage activity. We decided as a class to adopt an animal through WWF to protect the species and support their futures. We worked in groups to research the following animals: giant pandas, penguins, polar bears, elephants and dolphins. In their teams, the children designed a poster to present to the class to persuade them to adopt the animal they had chosen! We have a class of future zoologists!

It has been a fantastic first week back for Year 1 Remote Learners- we have been learning all about animals from extreme climates. To launch our new topic, we set the children a task to create a piece of work to persuade Mrs Stout to adopt their chosen animal. The children showed amazing creativity; making their own video appeals, posters and animal models! In English, we have learnt about the David Walliams story Geronimo - a story about a baby penguin who dreamed of flying. We have been learning facts about different species of penguins and using these to create our own penguin factfiles. We have explored Purple Mash and used the tools on Paint Projects to create some super animal pictures!

Year 2 have gone animal mad! We have been so excited to begin our new Theme “Can animals live in extreme climates?” We had to pitch to our teachers which animal we should adopt from the WWF charity. This involved lots of research and explaining why which the children were excellent at! We will reveal this when our packs arrive in school. We have also been learning all about Emperor Penguins and enjoying the story “Geronimo,” by David Walliams in English lessons. All in all, a super first week back filled with enthusiasm and hope for the future. Keep it up Year 2- you are amazing!

LKS2:

We have had an amazing start to Spring 2 in Year 3! Miss Tomlinson and Miss Baker have been blown away with how enthusiastic all the Year 3 children have been this week and we can't wait to welcome everyone back on 8th March! We started our new topic this week called 'Why does Italy shake and roar?' and started developing our map skills, locating Italy on maps and identifying the main mountains and volcanoes. We have also been loving reading our new whole class text 'The boy who biked the world'. We made passports to take with us on our adventure round the world and we can't wait to start collecting stamps for each country we visit when reading the text! The highlight of our week was definitely creating our own 3D paper sculptures, using the new techniques we have learnt. We will also be learning all about rocks and fossils in Science and Charlie gave a very detailed explanation about what he had researched (with the help of Peanut!). Miss Baker and Miss Tomlinson can't wait to have all the children back in school soon!

We have had an amazing start to the half term in Y4! We have thoroughly enjoyed starting our 2 new texts – Stitch Head and Wind in the Willows and have worked so hard on identifying different word classes to create a mood for our reader. We’ve even managed to find time to interview Stitch Head whilst he was guarding the castle! In Maths, we’ve been persevering with identifying fractions in different representations, we knew that Y4 would rise to the challenge, even it made them slightly hungry thinking about cutting cakes into fifths, sixths and even tenths! We’ve also launched our new topic “What can we learn about our local area?”, where we have been exploring the area around us and identifying man-made and natural features, whilst making sure that we are staying active. This week, we began to explore our school environment by sketching what we can see around us. We were very thankful for the sunny weather which allowed us to do this!

UKS2:

The Year 5's are the fraction masters! We've been working our socks off with fractions and when Miss Gill started with 'This lesson will be tricky today but we will get there' she ended it with all thumbs up, smiles and even children jumping out of their seats (virtually but still physically) as they mastered subtracting two mixed numbers! It hurts our head just writing that! Alongside our fraction work this week, we have looked at mark making in maths and recreated the famous piece 'Starry night'. Our new topic of the Victorians is really getting our brains thinking as we're learning all about Queen Victoria and how Victorians went to school. We really appreciate how school is for us and we all can't wait to get back. One week to go!

The adults in Year 6 were almost expecting a sleepy return after the holidays where we would need to re-energise the Year 6s...not the case at all! Everyone has returned to learning with such enthusiasm that it has blown the adults’ socks off this week! A lot of the excitement is definitely due to our class text Running Wild; we cannot stop asking questions about the Boxing Day tsunami! We have been enthralled by documentaries, harrowed by survivors’ stories and enthralled by statistics. Believe it or not, we still want more! Over the next 6 weeks I’m sure many adults at home will be hearing all about our learning and may even learn a few facts themselves! What a gripping topic that we are extremely excited about!