Team R:
A Wonderful Start to Team R!
What a fantastic first week it has been for our youngest members of Team Rownhams! Our new Reception children have made a brilliant start to school life, settling into their new surroundings and getting to know their teachers and classmates.
The children have been busy exploring their new classroom, discovering all the exciting areas of learning and beginning to develop new friendships. We have been particularly impressed by their confidence, curiosity and enthusiasm as they have started to find their feet.
There has been lots of learning through play, conversation and exploration, with plenty of opportunities to practise independence and become familiar with our daily routines.
We are so proud of how wonderfully the children have begun their Reception journey. Well done, Team R – what a brilliant start!
Team 1 / 2:
A Fun Start to Team 1/2
We have had such a fun and exciting start to the new school year! It has been wonderful to see the children settling into their new classes, making new friends and getting stuck into their learning.
📦 From a simple box to an extraordinary creation!
We have started our English learning with the wonderful story On Sudden Hill. The story introduces us to Birt and Etho, two best friends who love playing together on Sudden Hill. Their imaginations turn a simple cardboard box into all sorts of exciting things as they create their own adventures.
We have been thinking carefully about the characters and their friendship. We have explored what Birt and Etho might be like, how they feel and how their feelings change throughout the story. We have talked about what makes a good friend and how we can show kindness and include others in our play.
The children then had the chance to become creators themselves! Each child was given a simple cardboard box and challenged to use their imagination to transform it into an extraordinary creation.
The results were fantastic! The children became designers, builders and storytellers as they thought creatively about what their boxes could become. They had to explain their ideas, make decisions about the materials they needed and work out how to turn their ideas into reality.
Our box creations have provided lots of opportunities for talking, developing vocabulary and sharing imaginative ideas, which we will continue to build on as we explore On Sudden Hill.
It has been a brilliant start to our English learning, and we can’t wait to see where our imaginations take us next!
Well done, Team 1/2 – what a fantastic start to the year!
Team 3 / 4:
As part of their writing, Team 3/4 have started to explore character perspectives from Fiona Roberton’s A Tale of Two Beasts. To help express the characters’ contrasting feelings, pupils played an interactive vocabulary pairs game, collaborating to match ambitious new words such as absurd, inconsolable, ambush, and reconcile to their definitions. Working together to unlock these terms has given children the confidence to use sophisticated language as they prepare to draft their upcoming diary entries and persuasive letters.
Team 5 / 6:
In this week’s Geography lesson, we kicked off our new map work unit by diving headfirst into the big question: what is a map actually for? After a lively “think, pair, share” session where we brainstormed all the different types of information a map can show—from hills and rivers to population data and even mobile phone usage!—we moved on to exploring the vast array of maps available to us. We matched key terms to their descriptions, distinguishing between street maps, topographic maps (for land height), political maps (for country boundaries), thematic maps, and climatic maps, before bringing our learning into the digital age by zooming around the UK on Google Earth to see what the different colours represent. We also discussed the pros and cons of digital versus paper maps, and then the children really got their detective hats on for the main task: given a selection of mystery maps, they had to identify the type, explain its purpose, work out who would use it, and even tackle the challenge of how two very different maps could both be useful for the very same job. A brilliant first lesson full of curiosity and geographical thinking—well done, everyone!
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