Welcome to week 1 of Mrs Maguire's Magical Story Time. Each week I will be sharing a new text for a family story time session. The texts will be suitable for all children in school to listen to and there will also be opportunity for family discussion of some key questions too. The text for this week is 'The Lion Inside' by Rachel Bright. I hope you enjoy!

The Oak National Academy is the online school portal set up in March to provide learning opportunities for children during the period of school closure. This is a resource that is free to use and still has lots of ideas being updated now. A recent initiative is a collaboration with the Literacy Trust to provide a 'school online library'. The site will publish an 'author of the week' and children will be able to access a story, some information on the author and some follow up activities to complete if they so wish. I would stress that this is a resource for both Primary and Secondary students so please ensure you check the story is suitable for your child's age range before they access it. However, this weeks story is a Tracey Beaker novel by Jaqueline Wilson which I am sure will interest some of our KS2 children. 
The link for the website is   https://library.thenational.academy and I would encourage you to check in each week and see if it is an author your child would be interested in.
Happy Reading!

Last week, Year 4 created magazines in the style of National Geographic. We used all the amazing information we'd learned this half term to create fun and engaging content for our readers. We considered how to best lay out our ideas in order to not only show our knowledge but draw the eye to the important information. Have a look at some of our fantastic magazines. 

Over the past two weeks, Year 4 have been using the book Wolf Wilder by Katerine Rundell to inspire a piece of art in the style of Gelrev Ongbico. 

We have been carefully learning how to sketch wolves, blend colours and using printing techniques to transfer our sketches onto the background. 

Today, two of our Year 4 students visited the local shop to put their knowledge of money to the test. A huge thank you to Miss Lau and Miss Lawrence for helping bring the learning to life. 

After a fantastic week last week settling back into school life and getting to know their class teachers, Year 4 are really excited to get underway with their topic. This half term we will be going on a "Road Trip USA" and learning all about the United States of America. We will be finding out about the different states, native American history and comparing life in the USA with life in the UK. 

As the start to our topic, the children enjoyed learning how to describe exactly where in the world the USA is using geographical language.  Year 4 also completed an orienteering challenge to locate and collect tickets from 14 US states hidden around the field, before plotting their locations on a map of the USA.

Today, the children at school made crazy teeth puppets and learned about how to keep their teeth healthy. Then finished off with a fantastic hedgehog race. 

Many thanks to Mrs Toms for this week's bedtime story

Dear Parents and Carers
As you are all aware, you are set to have your children at home for at least the next few weeks. As a school, we are very aware of how challenging home schooling can be, especially whilst trying to work and often in a very busy house (I speak from painful first-hand experience of this!). We have worked very hard to put in place a home learning system where we are offering daily activities for English and maths that provide a level of challenge but allow the children to complete these independently. Alongside this, we have our weekly theme and our staff have been coming up with lots of creative ideas, which your children are really embracing.
We are constantly reviewing our provision and we wanted to share with you some additional resources, which have become available and we think will support your child when learning from home. Firstly BBC have launched their online learning tools which we have out a link to on our school website. In addition to this the Oak National Academy has been launched. This is an Online National Platform to help parents educate their children at home.

 
 Each day 3 hours of lessons for children will be released with online lessons, interactive quizzes and independent activities for the children to complete.
Our team has spent today looking at the resources and here are our suggestions:
Reception
We feel that some of the learning will be a bit easy for our children and that seeing lots of different teachers may confuse them. We will continue to set daily activities on our website for Reception children. We do think the maths lesson on Oak Academy would be useful so you might want to try some of these
 
Year 1  - Year 4
We really like the English and Maths lessons and they cover many areas that we would be doing in school. If possible, we would like to you to have a go at doing these activities daily. We feel that the Foundation lessons do not fit with our current curriculum and we would like you to continue to have a go at the Purple Mash activities and our weekly creative activities. We will continue to set daily English and Maths tasks on our website and you have the choice to do either these or the Oak Academy lessons.
 
We appreciate that to do the lessons you need to have access to a laptop or tablet. The Government are looking to support families with this but we are currently awaiting details on how this will work.
 
When you try this initially, your child will need some support to navigate the site and understand the tasks but I think within a day or two they will be able to do lots of this independently (I have used my own children as guinea pigs today!). To support you I have uploaded a ‘how to’ guide and we have put all the links you will need up on our school website.
 
For Pupils with Special Educational Needs you may wish to access an earlier year group’s learning. Mrs Burnett is reviewing the guidance for SEN pupils using the Oak Academy and will be in touch with an update this week.
 
Finally, it is really important to stress that at this time the most important thing for all of us is that we have happy children (& parents) who feel safe. All of the learning we are setting is to support you with home educating but if the way we are doing this does not work, please ask us for help.  Any feedback on the home learning will help us lots so please feel free to contact me on: lgrove@woottonlowerschool.co.uk
 
Many thanks for all your support and stay safe
 
Mrs Grove