🍂🎃 Fledgling's Autumn Adventures! 🎃🍂 This week, Fledgling's have been busy exploring all things autumn! From discovering pumpkins and their fascinating insides to investigating the beautiful colours, textures and treasures of the season, there has been so much to see, touch and explore. The children have been developing their fine motor skills through hands-on activities such as rolling pine cones across paper to mix autumnal colours together and scooping the insides of a pumpkin out to see what it looks like. These sensory experiences encourage curiosity, creativity and discovery. 🧡💛🤎 It's wonderful to see the children learning through play, using their senses and developing new skills as they explore the magic of autumn! 🍂

This week's guide from The National College to support you and your family. #wakeupwednesdays

Our little learners down in Fledglings have been making the most of the sunshine while developing their fine motor skills in lots of fun and creative ways! From exploring to practising new skills, our little ones are learning, transforming, and growing confidence through play.

The Owls loved showing off our Mighty Mayans project this afternoon at the Learning Expo! 🦉 They shared how we find information from artefacts like historians, use Mayan patterns to create masks, rank and justify Mayan achievements, and crack maths codes using Mayan symbols! It was a brilliant afternoon of sharing our learning and celebrating all our hard work! 🌟

This week's guide from The National College to support you and your family. #wakeupwednesdays

Year 5's Ancient Greek journey continued! We began with our Greek VR experience, stepping back in time to experience Ancient Greek triremes, temples and islands first-hand. After comparing Sparta and Athens last week, we explored how democracy worked in Athens. Using the Greek alphabet, the children deciphered names on ancient ostraka and discovered that citizens could be banished without committing a crime. This sparked a great debate: How fair was this system? Could wealth and influence have been used to bribe others and remove political rivals? Ancient Greece has also featured in English, as we followed Odysseus on his journey. After meeting the sorceress Circe, the children wrote their own dialogue between the two, before encountering the legendary Scylla. Now they are exploring more mythological creatures and creating adverts for them. And the big finale? On Friday, we'll hold our very own Greek Creature Market, where the children will choose their creature and use it to create a new Odysseus quest myth next week!

If you've noticed your children coming home with completely different Forest School stories each week, there's a wonderful reason for that! Our sessions are entirely child-led, meaning the children steer their own learning based on their unique interests, curiosity, and confidence levels. Across St Mary's this week, that freedom has led to all sorts of incredible adventuresfrom mastering mallets, bowsaws and palm drills for tree-cookie necklaces, to weaving with wool, building epic dens, and hunting down enormous spiders! The Fledglings even discovered a mysterious fairy door with a note asking for help finding lost magic (they've left some woodland treasures outside and are eagerly waiting to see what happens next week!). By following their lead, every session becomes a personalized journey of discovery, curiosity, and imagination. 🍂

On Monday, our Year 6 children stepped back in time with an incredible visit from Prime VR! Wearing VR headsets, they took a virtual journey to Chichén Itzá, standing at the base of towering temples and exploring where the ancient Mayans lived. It was a fascinating and immersive way to bring their history topic to life, and the room was filled with total awe and wonder!

This week's guide from The National College to support you and your family. #wakeupwednesdays

A brilliant day yesterday at The British Motor Museum with Kingfishers and Robins. We got to see so many exciting different cars, go on the big red bus and even see the first ever car! Wow!

What an sunny, action-packed week we've had outdoors! Our young explorers have been busy hunting for spiders, using ID guides to discover all the fascinating species living in our woods. We've seen amazing teamwork and creativity as the children built some truly imaginative dens, while over in the tool area, there was great focus and effort as they used mallets and stakes to dig and create giant woven patterns. Of course, there was plenty of tree climbing too! A special mention goes to our Fledglings, who crafted their very own 'log dogs' and proudly walked them all around the site. It's been a fantastic week full of curiosity, collaboration, and woodland fun! 🍂

This week's guide from The National College to support you and your family. #WakeUpWednesdays

Kingfishers have had another fun and busy week! We started the week with our WOW Day and particularly enjoyed making boats using paper and foil. We then tested them to see if they would sink or float and counted how many counters they could hold. In Art, we practised our wet-on-wet technique using watercolours, which the children really enjoyed. We ended the week with a fun PE lesson, practising our ball skills.

Sun's out, learning's out! 🌿 Our Fledglings took full advantage of this weeks beautiful weather by bringing their learning outdoors. Outside play builds big imaginations, strong muscles, and a lifelong curiosity for the natural world! 🐜🔍

Look at these incredible Mayan masks taking shape in Year 6! Our talented Owls have been hard at work using cardboard and paper-mache to build up intricate structures, bold features, and amazing textures to replicate Mayan masks they have been studying. They're already looking fantastic, but this is just the beginning... Check back with us at the end of the term to see the finished masterpieces!