Norton Infant School | Learning together, we grow healthy minds and kind hearts

🎨 Class 5 Artists – Sketching Like the Greats!

20th April 2026Laura Parsons

This afternoon, Class 5 fully embraced their role as artists as we continued exploring our guiding question:
The Blue Planet: How Can I Impact the World?

We began by reminding ourselves of our exciting final product — a reusable water bottle featuring our very own artwork. The children were buzzing with purpose, knowing their designs will help promote looking after our planet 🌍

✏️ Inspired by Beatrix Potter

We started by learning about the wonderful Beatrix Potter — a famous artist and writer who loved sketching animals using pencil. We noticed how carefully she observed real creatures and used soft, delicate lines to bring them to life.

Inspired by her work, we practised using our art pencils to create a range of tones, from light shading to darker, bolder marks. We then explored different patterns and textures, thinking about how these could help add detail to our own artwork.

👀 Thinking Like Artists

Next, we became art critics! We carefully studied a selection of model sketches and asked ourselves:

How has the artist used shading?
Where are the darker and lighter areas?
What techniques do we like and want to try ourselves?

One of the examples was Mrs Parsons’ own artwork… but the challenge was set — could we do even better?

Finally, we took our sea creature outlines and began transforming them into beautiful, detailed pieces using all our new sketching skills.

The concentration in the room was incredible — children carefully adding shading, experimenting with tone, and bringing their sea creatures to life. Every piece is unique, thoughtful, and full of creativity.

We are so proud of the effort and artistic flair shown today — we can’t wait to see these designs printed onto our reusable water bottles! 💧✨

We’re on the Hook!

20th April 2026Sarah Winkley

The whole of EYFS last week were well and truly hooked, lined and sunk into our new summer expedition “Seaside Explorers, what happens where the sea meets the shore?”

The children explored various sea creatures introduced to them through our hook text, “Commotion in the Ocean”. Each crew were given a sea creature to investigate and research, using the internet and supporting non fiction texts. The children then compiled fact files about their given sea creatures and created a large scale piece of artwork between them working collaboratively. They had lots of fun doing this and found out the most amazing facts! Each crew have employed all of their artistic talents to really think about how the creatures look and bring out the best in their features.

Both Nursery and Reception classes presented their sea creatures and fact files to each other in our weekly community meeting. They were so excited to share their interesting facts and spoke thoughtfully and beautifully about their creatures and the new knowledge that they now have! We can’t wait to dive deeper into our thrilling summer expedition. Just look at the quality and craftsmanship of our work, the children really were Go for it Gorillas!

Sharing our Stories: 17/04/2026

17th April 2026Geoff Hewitt

Beautiful work this week

Here’s a selection of beautiful work from across the XP Trust!

To read about other stories from across the XP Trust, visit xptrust.org.

Top of the Blogs

Hook Week Orienteering @ Green Top

We are archaeologists! @ Plover

Year 6 Easter Revision @ Carcroft School

Crew Brunel @ XP School

Weekly Update for Families @ XP Gateshead

Finding our happy @ Norton Infants

Year 11 Rise to the challenge! @ XP East

Litter picking legends @ Norton Juniors

Share your stories with us!

We now have a new dedicated news email so that you can send your stories, updates or ideas about potential news articles directly to us in Comms.

It might be something you or your students have achieved, a charity you’re supporting or anything at all that deserves a wider audience.

Write to us at [email protected] – we want to hear about it, write about it and celebrate it!

Finding Our Happy – Supporting Emotional Wellbeing in KS1

15th April 2026Laura Parsons

This week in Key Stage 1, we came together for a short community meeting built around the beautiful book Find Your Happy. Through this story, we explored something really important: understanding our feelings and knowing what to do when they feel big.

At school, the children are very familiar with the Zones of Regulation, which help us to recognise and name how we are feeling:

Blue Zone – sad, tired, or unwell
Green Zone – calm, happy, ready to learn
Yellow Zone – excited, worried, or a bit wobbly
Red Zone – angry, overwhelmed, or out of control

During the community meeting, we talked about how we all move through these zones every day—and that’s completely normal. The key message we shared is that all feelings are okay, but we can learn ways to help ourselves feel safe, calm, and ready again.

Using Find Your Happy, we explored how the character experiences different emotions and discovers simple strategies to feel better. We then practised some of these together:

Breathing techniques – “smell the flower, blow out the candle”
Relaxing our bodies – tightening and releasing muscles
Thinking of something that makes us smile

These small strategies can make a big difference, especially when children are feeling in the yellow or red zones.

How you can support at home

You might like to continue these conversations at home by:

Asking your child which “zone” they are in
Talking about what helps them feel calm or happy
Practising simple breathing together
Reminding them that it’s okay to feel all emotions

By using a shared language between school and home, we can help children to better understand themselves and build the skills they need to manage their feelings with confidence.

Our key message

We reminded the children that being in the green zone all the time isn’t the goal—because that’s not realistic for any of us! Instead, it’s about learning how to recognise our feelings and find our way back to feeling safe and ready.

We are so proud of how thoughtfully the children engaged with this important message. Ask them about how they “find their happy”—you might even learn a new strategy yourself!

Thank you for your continued support.