We have had an amazing week exploring our guiding question ‘How does what I do impact my Crew and others?’ We spent time discussing what it means to be kind and thinking about the different ways we can show our kindness. We decorated biscuits and gifted them to our Reception classes as a special act of kindness.
What an incredible first week it has been for Class 1! 💛
Starting Reception is such a big milestone for our children. There are new faces to meet, new routines to learn, a new classroom to explore and lots of new experiences to take in. We could not be prouder of how wonderfully our children have risen to the challenge!
This week, the children have been busy getting to know one another, making new friends and beginning to build our very special Class 1 community. We have been talking about what it means to be part of a crew, thinking about how we can look after one another, be kind and help each other. We have also been helping our Colour Monster to become untangled by thinking about different scenarios that might happen at school and discussing what we could do to be kind, caring and helpful. The children have been fantastic at sharing their ideas and showing us that they already understand how our kind actions can make others feel happy and cared for.
The children have also been learning all about our new classroom and routines. From finding their way around the different areas of provision, learning where resources belong, getting ready for lunch and remembering our tidy-up routines, they have already made such a fantastic start.
We have seen lots of brave faces, kind actions, curious minds and proud smiles throughout the week. There have been moments when things have felt a little tricky too – and that is completely okay. Starting school is a huge change, and we are so proud of the children for persevering, trying new things and gradually becoming more confident each day.
We have particularly loved seeing the children beginning to play together, share ideas, help their friends and explore their new learning environment. It has been wonderful to watch their little personalities shine through!
We have ended our week with a fun parachute crew session…
It’s going to be a great year! xx
What better way to finish our first week together than with a Crew Breakfast! ❤️
We spent the morning sitting together, chatting, sharing food and continuing to get to know one another. It was such a lovely opportunity to slow down, enjoy each other’s company and celebrate what has been a brilliant first week in Year Two.
But what made our breakfast extra special wasn’t the food… it was the crew thinking that happened all around it.
The children decided that we needed to all sit together so that nobody was left out. Without being asked, they organised themselves, moved furniture around and worked together to create one big space where we could all be together. 🥰
And when breakfast was finished, they didn’t just leave it for someone else to sort. They worked together to degunge the classroom, put everything back and rearrange the furniture ready for the next part of our day.
These might seem like little things, but they are exactly the things we want our crew to be about — looking out for one another, taking responsibility, working together and making sure everyone belongs.
What a start to the year! 🌟
I couldn’t be prouder of Crew Attenborough and I can’t wait to see where our journey together takes us. 💚
We have had a wonderful first few days settling into Class 2! It has been lovely to see the children getting to know one another, making new friends and becoming familiar with their new environment.
Each day has begun with Crew time, giving us the opportunity to make sure everyone feels happy, safe and welcomed in our class. We have been enjoying learning one another’s names, sharing information about our families and talking about our favourite things.
The children have had great fun exploring our classroom, both indoors and outdoors, and have enjoyed taking part in a variety of exciting new activities. It has been fantastic to see their confidence beginning to grow as they settle into their new routines and build new friendships.
We are so pleased with how well everyone has settled and are looking forward to a fun-filled year of learning, exploring and making wonderful memories together!
What a brilliant first week back for Crew Attenborough! 💚
We have spent lots of time getting to know one another, learning what makes our crew special and, most importantly, beginning to understand what it really means to work as a team.
We have tackled lots of crew challenges, including one where we had to build the tallest tower we could. It was fantastic to hear the children thinking carefully about how they could work together. One child summed it up perfectly:
“We need to work together or we won’t do it.”
Another noticed just how important communication was:
“We did some good communicating to help us.”
And today, our collaboration skills were REALLY put to the test… because the floor turned to lava! 🌋
Working in small teams, the children had to figure out how to get safely across our classroom using only the stepping stones. Just when they thought they had cracked it, Mrs Parsons made things even trickier…
The floor was lava all the way to Mrs Bradshaw’s office! 😱
There was lots of problem-solving, communicating, encouraging, changing plans and, most importantly, persevering when things didn’t go quite right.
Step by step, the children worked together to pass the stepping stones all the way from Class Five, along the corridor and safely to Mrs Bradshaw’s office. And, of course, we couldn’t resist a sneaky little photo when we finally made it! 📸
What a brilliant way to finish our first week. We are already seeing the beginnings of a crew who listen to one another, encourage each other, solve problems together and don’t give up when something feels tricky.
We wonder what Crew Attenborough will be able to achieve when we really start working as one crew… 🌿💚
Watch this space!
Today, Class Five took our guiding question beyond the classroom… and beyond the school gates!
We decided that if our crew is about looking after one another, being part of something bigger and making a difference, then perhaps our crew should reach much further than our classroom.
We started by choosing some of our favourite books together. We talked about the stories we love, the books that make us laugh, the ones that teach us something new and the ones we think other people might enjoy too.
Then came the fun part…
We became Book Fairies! 🧚♀️🧚♂️
The children designed their very own Book Fairy characters and created special labels to go inside our books, explaining what our mission was all about.
And then we headed out on our crew mission…
Beyond our school gates and into our community! 🌳📚
Armed with our books and our Book Fairy labels, we hid our books in different places around Norton for members of our community to discover.
But there was an important part to our mission…
We weren’t giving the books away forever. We wanted the people who found them to read, enjoy and then re-hide them for somebody else to find.
So our books could keep travelling.
Our crew mission had gone beyond the school gates, but so had something else…
We loved imagining someone walking through Norton, discovering one of our books and wondering who had left it there. We wondered where our books might travel next, who might read them and whether they might make someone else’s day a little bit brighter.
It made us think about how being part of a crew isn’t just about what happens when we are together. It is about what we choose to do for the people around us — even people we might never meet.
So, after lots of discussion this week, we think we might have an answer to our guiding question…
Does crew stop at the school gates?
Absolutely not. ❤️
Our crew stretches into our community, our kindness can travel further than we can, and today… our books did too. 📚🧚♀️✨
This week in Class Five, we spent some time thinking about something that might seem very simple… circles.
But we quickly discovered that circles can be pretty powerful.
A circle has no beginning and no end. It is strong, connected and continuous. And, of course, circles are a big part of life in our crew. Every day, we circle up together — to listen, share, celebrate, solve problems and make decisions. There is something special about sitting in a circle because everyone is part of it. There is no “front” or “back” and nobody is left out.
Our guiding question this week has been:
Today, we started to explore that question by thinking about all the different crews we belong to outside of school.
The children came up with an amazing range of crews — football teams, families, gymnastics clubs, church groups, dance groups, friendship groups and much more. We organised ourselves into our different crews and then started to notice something really interesting…
Our crews overlap!
We might belong to different football teams, different families or different clubs, but we often had people in common. We discovered that although we are all wonderfully different, we actually have lots in common with one another.
This led us to think about how we behave in our different crews. Do we act differently depending on which crew we are in? Or do the things that make us us follow us wherever we go?
We thought about our character traits and realised that being kind, respectful, courageous, honest or compassionate doesn’t just belong in the classroom. These are qualities we carry with us into all of our crews.
So perhaps crew really doesn’t stop at the school gate…
In the afternoon, we took our circle thinking into our art.
We looked at the work of Wassily Kandinsky and noticed that he used circles again and again in his artwork. We explored his use of colour, shape and pattern before setting off to create our own Kandinsky-inspired pieces.
This time, we created trees made from circles, bringing together our ideas about connection, growth and belonging with our love of circles. ⭕🌳
It was lovely to see the children begin the day thinking about a simple shape and finish it thinking about something much bigger:
Who are my crews? Where do I belong? What do I bring to each crew? And how are we all connected?
Perhaps our circles aren’t just something we sit in after all… ❤️
This week Class Six have been thinking about the question “does Crew stop at the school gates?”. As part of this, we have been thinking about what we can do to help our local community and we decided we were going to be Book Fairies!
All week the children have been working really hard. They have been showing respect when listening to the stories and even spent time designing and redrafting their very own Book Fairies.
This morning we have been out on a walk around Norton hiding lots of books! If you are out and about around Norton today, or even walking home from school, make sure you keep an eye out for a book to take home and read!
What a beautiful way to begin our first Community Meeting together! Our children sat so beautifully, listening carefully and modelling our character trait of respect. It was lovely to see them showing each other that they were ready to listen, learn and share.
We shared the wonderful story Try, which reminds us that things don’t always work the first time. The message is simple but powerful: when something feels difficult, we don’t have to give up — we can keep trying, learn from what happens and have another go. 🌱
This led us into a conversation about heroes. At first, our heroes were the ones we might expect — Hulk, Superman and other superheroes with incredible powers! 🦸♂️🦸♀️
But then our thinking began to change…
We wondered: Does a hero have to have superpowers?
Could someone be a hero because they are kind? Because they help someone? Because they keep going when something is tricky? Because they stand up for someone else? Because they make a difference in their community?
And perhaps most importantly… could we be heroes too? 💛
It was wonderful to watch the children move from thinking about heroes as characters with superpowers to recognising that ordinary people can do extraordinary things through their choices, their courage, their kindness and the way they look after others.
What a lovely first Community Meeting — and what a brilliant start to our year together. 🌟
What a first day! We have had such a busy, exciting and joyful start to our new school year, and it has been wonderful to see the children settling into Class Five, getting to know one another and beginning to discover what kind of crew we are going to be.
We began our day in our Crews, before starting something very special — our Class Five Time Capsule!
We wanted to capture a little snapshot of who we are right now, on the very first day of our new school year.
Each child created their own information sheet, telling us about some of their favourite things, what they enjoy, what they are good at and what they would like to get better at this year. We also took a handprint and measured each child’s height using a piece of wool.
All of these precious pieces are now going into our time capsule, ready to be sealed away until the last day of school.
We wonder…
Will our favourite things still be our favourites? Will we have grown taller? Will we still enjoy the same things? What will we have learned? And, perhaps most importantly, who will we have become?
We can’t wait to find out!
We have also started thinking about our first week back question:
This is a question that we will keep coming back to throughout the week as we explore what it really means to be part of a crew and how we can look after and support one another both in school and beyond.
Today, we began designing our very own Book Fairies to help us explore this question. Our Book Fairies are going to have an important job to do, and we can’t wait to see where this learning takes us!
🧚📚 Keep checking our blog throughout the week to find out more…
We then spent some time thinking about something really important:
What do we want our classroom to LOOK like?
What do we want our classroom to SOUND like?
What do we want our classroom to FEEL like?
We talked about what would help everyone to feel happy, safe, included and ready to learn. We thought carefully about how the choices we make and the way we treat one another can help us create the kind of classroom we all want to be part of.
There were some fantastic ideas, and we are going to keep building on these throughout our first week together.
And then, after our afternoon break, something very mysterious happened…
We discovered a mysterious envelope waiting for us!
Inside was a message telling us that something special had been hidden in our classroom — but there was a problem…
It could only be found if we worked together as a CREW!
And so began our very first Class Five Treasure Hunt!
We had five challenges to complete: building the tallest tower we could, taking part in some very silly charades, keeping a balloon off the floor, spotting what had changed in our classroom and completing a very special kindness challenge.
There was lots of laughter, lots of teamwork and lots of excitement as we worked our way through the challenges.
Most importantly, the children were already showing us what we had been talking about all day:
Listen carefully.
Help each other.
Have fun!
After completing all of the challenges, we discovered our final clue…
What a perfect way to finish our first day together.
We ended the day knowing a little more about each other, having shared lots of smiles and laughter, and already beginning to build the classroom community we hope Class Five will become.
Day One was pretty special.
And this is only the beginning… ✨
