Throughout this year children in Year 1 classes in Nechells and Aston schools have received a free book every month (10 books in total). These books were supplied by the Nechells POD CIC through the Bookshare project , funded by the Smurfit Kappa SSK Foundation.

On Thursday Year 1 attended a celebration at Heartlands Academy.

We heard how each school have incorporated the books into the children’s learning.

Mrs Webster told everyone our favourite book was Stickman.

We enjoyed learning all about Stickman and enjoyed the trip to Sutton Park trying to find Stickman.

We heard stories from the author Steve Smallmann who wrote one of the books we have been given, ‘Batmouse’

Steve Smallmann also illustrates books and he drew us a picture using our ideas.

In literacy Year 5 have been writing their own versions of Alice in Wonderland.

We took inspiration from The Arrival by Shaun Tan to write setting descriptions for our story.

We have written our best paragraph onto paper so we can create weird and wonderful stories using all of our ideas.

Year Fives new topic for this half term is Time Traveller.

As part of our topic we are discovering what we looked like back in time. Can you guess which of these babies are our current Year 5? Can you find Mrs Webster and Mrs Austin-Smith?

Year 5 had a fantastic day at Aston University competing in the Aston Olympics. They took part in lots of different sports including football, bench ball, gym session, obstacle course and water polo. The classes favourite sport was water polo.

We were presented with a certificate for the school and one each to keep.

Year One and Year Two had the opportunity to watch and take part in a workshop run by Language Alive. They retold the story The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde.

We were pretending to be the children in the story.

We were helping to tell the story by recreating winter.

Year One have been exploring capacity.

We invited our parents into the classroom to see what we have been learning about.

We were looking at the language of capacity including empty, nearly empty, half empty, half full, nearly full and full.

We used the laptops to explore which container held more water.

We used our problem solving skills and the new language we had learnt to see whether we could put the glasses in the correct order.

We really enjoyed measuring capacity using a cup as a non-standard measure. The children loved pouring the water into the cups.

Year One have been looking at a story called Little Charlie. In literacy we have been writing our own stories based on Little Charlie.

We first told the story using a story map to help us.

We then decided on how we are going to change our story.

We worked together to draw story maps.

We worked really hard to change every element of the story.

We then retold the story using puppet.

We enjoyed drawing and cutting out our puppets.

We have used these ideas in this weeks big write.

In Year One we have been looking at our topic memory box.

We have been sharing memories of when we were babies.

We practised writing the sentences on whiteboards, remembering to use our capital letters, full stops and finger spaces.

Then we were allowed to use pen to write our sentences on leaves.

We then made a memory tree from our leaves as a display in our classroom.

On Thursday 21^st April the whole school celebrated the Queen’s 90^th Birthday. We all wore red, white and blue. We carefully made kites and enjoyed colouring in flags and bunting. We looked at the Queens reign in 1980’s, we loved looking at and described toys from that decade.

We drew pictures of the Queen from 1980’s and drew pictures of Princess Diana at her wedding in 1981.

We enjoyed making cheese and jam sandwiches with Mrs Ali.

We had lots of fun eating our food outside for the street party.

We even had time to do circus skills with Stu.