What a wonderful start to our autumn term! This term, our learning has been inspired by Humanities, as we explore our village and the history of our school within the community. With our school celebrating its 40th anniversary, we’ve enjoyed looking at old photographs, sharing stories, and beginning to plan what we’d like to learn and discover next. It’s been exciting to see how much our school and community have grown and changed over the years!

In Maths, we have been developing our understanding of place value and numbers to 20, 50, and 100. Using a variety of equipment and hands-on resources — and even a Super Mario Bros-themed number game that we designed ourselves — has made our maths learning both fun and meaningful. We’ve also made the most of the last of the summer sunshine by taking our maths lessons outdoors and enjoying practical, active learning in the fresh air.

In Literacy, we’ve been building our reading, sentence-making, and writing skills. A highlight of the term was creating a written sequence of our apple juice making activity. From apples picked in our own school grounds to pressing and tasting the juice on site, it was truly a drink with zero air miles! We’ve also continued to develop our phonics skills through a multisensory approach, becoming enthusiastic word detectives along the way.

As we look ahead to Harvest, we’ve been learning a Pie Corbett passage about how the world was made, and practising a lively song celebrating God’s creation — pictures to follow soon!

It’s been a busy and exciting start to the year, full of creativity, curiosity, and community spirit — the perfect way to begin our 40th anniversary celebrations

Through Jigsaw, our PSHE approach, we have explored the themes Being Me in My World and Celebrating Difference. Together, we created a class ‘hive’ to celebrate the things we are proud of, discussed the different ways we like to learn, and developed our class charter – our shared rules for living and learning together respectfully.

In Maths, we used ICT to enhance our place value learning, accessing a variety of interactive games and activities that supported different learning styles and encouraged independence and confidence.

In November, the excitement of Strictly Come Dancing came to school in support of Children in Need. Our class danced a lively Cha, Cha, Cha as our challenge for the year and we were thrilled to be professionally filmed by a local film company as we truly danced the light fantastic!

Outdoor learning has also played an important role this term. Alongside friends from Llyn Alwen, who are Hedgehog Ambassadors, we learned about hedgehogs and how to protect them. Following instructions carefully, we built makeshift homes to help these little mammals thrive in our Forest School areas.

We have continued to enjoy our British Sign Language sessions, learning the alphabet, numbers, colours and items of clothing, helping us to communicate in new and inclusive ways. A special highlight was meeting Dasher, a wonderful support dog, who happily became a much-loved member of our class.

Then, in what felt like a flash, it was Christmas. Inspired by the beautiful story The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, we created our own script, with children choosing parts, songs and adding their own creative twists. Our performance told The Greatest Story Ever Told – the Birth of Jesus – in a truly memorable and meaningful way.