The Chronicle

The Crackley Hall Junior da Vinci programme encourages all pupils to be inspired to be the best that they can be. The Junior da Vinci programme embraces three adapted principles - Creativity, Practice and Mastery - that the children demonstrate in their learning. This year we are ensuring that all pupils in the school have opportunities to achieve Junior da Vinci awards. This link provides more information about this programme. Look out for children achieving Junior da Vinci's in the Chronicle over the year.

In English this week, Junior 6 have been stepping into the shoes of ‘Jim’ from The Christmas Truce. They have constructed letters to home explaining what happened on that eventful day, exploring how to show their emotions and feelings in their writing. Their descriptive phrases and emotive language have meant some very poignant and heart-felt letters to home, showing great improvement in the maturity of their written work. The Junior 6 children will be continuing this theme next week, with their work being put on display for everyone to enjoy.

On Monday morning, it was fabulous to see the children arrive wearing their brightly-coloured odd socks to mark the beginning of anti-bullying week. This year’s theme is Reach Out, focusing on how to help yourself or others who are being bullied. The children have enjoyed many activities throughout the week, including an anti-bullying assembly, a PSHE lesson, various lively discussions, role play activities, as well as designing their own pair of odd socks. Well done Junior 5!

Despite it being a strange week with numbers very low, it has been learning as usual in Junior 5. In English, the focus has been on narrative writing based on a picture prompt. Why not ask your child to share how they interpreted the visual stimulus? In Maths, the children have been learning about multiplication and division in readiness for the next topic - fractions - which we will begin next week. 

We wish all the children, and Mrs Wildey, a speedy and healthy recovery.  

Junior 4 sang their hearts out this week practising for Young Voices in readiness for Resorts World Arena, Birmingham in January. We travelled Over the Hills and Far Away to Flanders, Portugal and Spain where Queen Anne commands. We then crossed the Irish Sea for a traditional Irish song of Molly Malone, also known as Dublin’s Fair City, before setting off again to Scotland with The Skye Boat Song, where loud the winds howls and loud the waves roars and thunderclaps rend the air – a 19th century Scottish song recalling the journey of Bonnie Prince Charlie. With dance routines and actions at the ready, we sang and danced to Rockstar, We are Family, and the ever popular 1978 disco song Le Freak.  Well done, Junior 4 – we are all music and dance superstars. Remember to keep practising at home!

This week in Junior 3 we have been soldering on with our understanding of subtraction. We have looked at ‘exchanges’ in both the tens and the hundreds and why and when this is needed. With the help of Tiny the tortoise and our place value counters, we have made our own exchanges and then applied this to completing accurate formal written subtractions. There were a lot of steps to success and a lot of brain power invested. We have also been reviewing the suffixes ‘er’ and ‘est’ in our English lessons and using these adjectives to write sentences linked to our story Lila And The Secret Of Rain which is set in the hottest and driest village in Kenya. We have missed our friends who are recuperating this week and are looking forward to being a whole class again very soon.

This week in Junior 2, it has been all about dragons' eggs! The children received a letter from Professor Hanan al-Hroub from Warwick University. She is conducting a very important experiment. She believes that the character of a dragon is changed by the environment in which the egg lays and she is hoping that by having the eggs in our classroom for two weeks, the baby dragons will be born with a kind and hard-working nature. The egg will have to be returned to the university before it hatches, but we will receive news and possibly some pictures following the birth. The only problem was that the eggs disappeared! Thankfully, we found them and we are keeping them safe, showing them how to love and care for each other so that when they hatch, they will grow to be as wonderful as the children are. We have written some amazing dragon poems and created dragon world landscapes to help ignite our imaginations for our English lessons next week. 

Junior 1 have spent their Maths lessons learning about 2 and 3D shapes. Not only have they learnt the names of the most common shapes, they also counted how many sides, vertices and faces each shape has. This led to sorting them according to their different properties and learning that sometimes there is more than one way to sort a group of shapes! Geography led us to learn about animal farms and what animals give to us. There were some surprised faces when they learnt that leather, cheese and yoghurt all come from cows! In History we took a trip back to the Victorian times and compared a Victorian breakfast with one we eat today. Did you know in the Victorian times you could only eat bacon for breakfast if you were going out to work?

In Reception this week we have been learning about Autumn through the story called Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. We have been sorting leaves and comparing colours and shapes. We then used the leaves that we found in forest school to create our own leaf characters and animals. In Literacy we had a go at writing where the Leaf Man went on his journey.

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