The Department for Education has published a child-friendly version of Working Together to Safeguard Children, including a downloadable booklet and animation to help young people understand safeguarding processes.

The guide, titled A Guide to Safeguarding for Children and Young People, explains how professionals like social workers, teachers, doctors, and police collaborate to keep children safe. It encourages children to speak up and reassures them that help is available.

This guide responds to calls for greater inclusion of children’s voices in safeguarding. Access these child-friendly resources here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-together-to-safeguard-children--2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ntSqMCSUI

Our Bumblebees, Caterpillars and Dragonflies have been super busy since returning from their Easter holidays! We launched our new project on Journeys and the children were excited to share all the journeys that they had been on during the Easter break! Our Early Years explored a range of maps and discovered why they might be helpful. Following this the children also walked around our school grounds using maps of the school to help them on their journey. Once the children had returned back to their classroom they 'had a go' at designing their own map. They drew parts of the school that they had noticed such as the log park, pond, woodlands and more! We used directional language and our senses as we travelled around. Many of the children were inspired by the different map's in our classroom and chose to create another one during busy learning. 

Our Bumblebee's, Caterpillars and Dragonflies have been making good use of our planting area outdoors (and the sunshine!) The children have prepared the growing beds and planted a variety of vegetable seeds in pots. Our Early Years have been caring for them in their own gardens and when they are ready the children will re-plant the vegetables in our growing area where they can continue to grow until they are ready to eat!

In maths with have been using our subitising and composition knowledge to make '5 and a bit'. The children have been making links and using different representations to explore the composition of numbers to 10. During Marvellous Maths they have enjoyed exploring money through role play shops in their classrooms. We have also explored positional language, maps and following a route around the classroom. 

This week we began retelling the Gingerbread Man traditional tale through actions and words. We linked the Gingerbread Man story to our project 'Journeys' and the children created their own story maps to help them retell the story in sequence. We have also revisited our mathematical learning on weight and have created our own delicious gingerbread biscuits which the children took home! 

Our Early Years children took part in a painting workshop with Amanda from Norden Farm Arts Centre. The workshop, Our Town Map, helped us to launch our Summer Term project on Journeys. The children worked collectively using colour and shape to produce Bumblebee, Caterpillar and Dragonfly Towns. They were extremely proud of their creations and are looking forward to sharing them in our Early Years Exhibition next term.  

On Thursday 15th May our Early Years children went on a school trip to Windsor as part of their learning this term about 'Journeys'. To prepare for the journey our Bumblebees, Caterpillars and Dragonflies learnt about landmarks in our local area, map reading and different ways to travel. We started our journey at school and boarded a coach with maps of the local area. The coach then took us on a journey around Maidenhead and we spotted local landmarks before travelling on to Windsor. We walked across Alexander Park and boarded our boat. Captain Jack took us on a trip down the Thames before returning to our starting point for lunch. The children excitedly talked about the places that they recognised and everyone had a fantastic day. Thank you to all the adults that helped make the day a success and our brilliant Bumblebees, Caterpillars and Dragonflies who were all fantastic role models for our school. 

What a way to begin our new project, We’re Going on an Adventure! by learning so much from our friends about the different places, towns, cities or countries that they had visited or were special to them! We learnt about a huge variety of places! It was wonderful to see and hear the children speak so passionately about their chosen place. Thank you to everyone who spent time preparing the objects, outfits, posters and also for discussing your children’s ideas with them!

As part of our new project we travelled around the world to visit South Africa, Brazil, New Zealand, Pakistan, Canada and France. We recalled key facts from each place and boarded planes to reach our destinations. We investigated some of the main physical features, languages, weather and animals found in each of the countries. We have also been learning about the continents of the world and looking at their similarities and differences.

During our maths sessions our drip feed has been to recognise the UK coins and notes. We have also been working on the beginnings of multiplication and division by counting in steps of 2s, 5s and 10s, grouping objects into equal groups and drawing arrays. These concepts fit in with the big idea of unitising: counting in steps of equal sizes and treating a group of, say, five objects as one unit of five. We have also just started having ‘Fun with Fractions!’, learning all about halves and quarters of objects, shapes and quantities.  We have proved that two equal parts make a whole (halves) and four equal parts make a whole (quarters) and shown our understanding in different ways.

In outdoor learning we have enjoyed some improved weather! We have been enjoying cloud watching, bug hunting, creating observational drawings of the pond and its surroundings, playing parachute games as well as quietly reading books listening to the bird song.

We have been thinking about how technology is integral to the supply of our food as it is grown and transported from all over the world.  We enjoyed guessing where different fruits had come from and learning where they had travelled from. We have also been busy applying our Sticky Knowledge of primary and secondary colours to designing and painting our own flags.

We have learnt about five groups of animals: mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles and thought about the special characteristics that enable them to be classified in one of the groups.  We have also been thinking about the way that animals adapt to their environment, such as the symbiotic relationship between clown fish and sea anemones and how different types of frog are either brightly coloured to warn off predators or how they can camouflage into their surroundings.

We have also been enjoying learning about Judaism in RE and we have been learning about the importance of Shabbat. Miss Dexter came to tell us more about this and even bought in some Challah bread for us to try! 

We have had an exciting start to our project 'Wonderful Water!' which we launched with our Brilliant Beginning. We called this our Water Creative Day and enjoyed two creative activities. We explored Hokusai and recreated our versions of his artwork The Great Wave and also created our own class collages of the ocean, thinking about the different marine animals who use the Pacific ocean as their habitat.

Continuing with the artistic theme we have also been exploring the work of J.M.W Turner and paying particular attention to his use of watercolour paints. We have been experimenting different techniques we can use to help us in creating our own piece of artwork. We were also very excited to link this to our maths learning of money as we found Turner on the back of a £20 note!

Following our exploration into J.M.W. Turner's technique and paintings and our research into the five layers of the ocean, we have created our own ocean themed artwork and we have also painted each layer of the ocean.  We have thought carefully about the creatures that live in the ocean and represented them in our paintings.

We have also been busy learning about the five different oceans and the different layers of the ocean, creating our own information sheets with illustrations to show what we have found out. We have been using information books, iPads and globes to further our research skills.

Plastic Pollution has also been a theme we are beginning to investigate, thinking about the impact of this on our oceans, humans, and animals. We have been taking part in our own rescue missions using tweezers and a water tray in our classrooms!

In RE this term we have been focusing on the religion Islam in our RE lessons and Mrs Akhter kindly led an assembly on wudu to help us think about how Muslims most feel like they belong.

Finally, as mathematicians we have been busy exploring fractions and learning that fractions can be fun! :-)