Adisa the Verbaliser, a fantastic performance poet, joined year 5 for a day of imagination, rhyming, fun and deep thinking about language in poetry.

In the morning, Adisa performed a number of his poems and discussed his inspiration for them. A particular favourite for many of the children was Phat Bucks - a poem with it's own hidden meaning!

Later in the day, each class had a workshop with Adisa where they had the opportunity to develop their own poems with his support. Here is one of the poems that we developed.

If I were a building... by Hannah Young

I stand strong with my 10 floors and take things step by step.

I have my diamond smile with my delicate, paper heart.

I am made of steel as well as gold.

I am strong and I like to shine.

I face lovely north, the place to explore lots of mysterious animals and more.

With my circular windows I am soft and understanding to all.

Our visit to Maidenhead Heritage Centre by Phoebe Spiers

The inside, which was full of many ancient objects, was bigger than I imagined. A friendly man welcomed us, his name was Richard. He taught us all about the history of Maidenhead. Did you know that a few hundred year ago it took 3 days to get from London to Bath? Now it is less than 3 hours!

In 1205, a wooden bridge was made so people could cross the Thames on foot or by horse and cart. In 1839, an engineer called Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed and built a bridge out of bricks. Everyone thought the bridge would fall down because the arches of the bridge were so wide (37m) and he made it out of bricks instead of stone. He left the scaffolding up after the bridge was finished and one day a storm came and blew it all away. The bridge has been standing ever since.

We then made our own bridges using 100 Duplo bricks. The aim was to build the longest bridge possible with no support in the middle. The winning group built a bridge which was 84cm long! After that we thanked Richard and walked back to school, along one of the roads we had seen in an old photo.

I had a brilliant time at the Heritage Centre! It was fun and we did some great team work. I found it very interesting to learn more about Maidenhead.

This week, we had a visitor in to teach us about Road Safety. The workshop was lots of fun and we really enjoyed using actions to help embed our knowledge. Parents, do not be surprised if you get dragged out and about to practice the Green Cross Code! Your children are experts and will be able to advise you about where the safest places are to cross and what we can wear to make us more visible. To embed this knowledge further, the children then wrote a recount of their session and did an excellent job of using conjunctions to extend their sentences.

We’ve been spending lots of time practicing our Christmas play and are so impressed by how well children have learnt their lines. Keep up the hard work at home and it will be so worth it! More details for parents to follow very soon.

In computing, we’ve been learning about internet safety and how to keep ourselves online. Soon, we’ll be combining this knowledge with learning on how to send an email.

Keep up the hard work year 3, we're so impressed with you all!

Mrs Lawrence-Davis Y3 Team Leader

Year 4 have had an excellent start to the new term.

In maths we have been learning to use our place value knowledge to multiply and divide by 100. We have also been looking at patterns in our 3, 6 and 9 times tables to help us remember these.

In English, the children have been writing story build ups. We have learnt how to build suspense using short sentences, add personification to our writing to create atmosphere and writing descriptions using our senses.

Our new topic in science is about the digestive system. We got to eat some skittles during our science lessons in order to test our taste buds! We also investigated what happened to egg shells when they were left in different liquids. The egg shell is a similar material to our tooth enamel so we could see what would happen if we didn't brush our teeth! We have also recreated the digestive system; it was great fun and we all got very messy!

Mrs Barbosa Y4 Team Leader

We've had a very busy few weeks in Year 5!

Our visit to Maidenhead Heritage Centre kicked off our learning about the history of the local area. The children have been researching the building of the railways including Brunel's bridge and the effect it had on the people of Maidenhead. We have also been learning about the building of Victorian homes within the area and how they differ from homes built more recently.

The children have really enjoyed reading the Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen. They have produced some fantastic work warning others about the Bluchers and delving in to the inner workings of the character's minds. It has been a brilliant book which draws many parallels to our own lives within the last few years.

In Maths, we are working on our understanding of multiplication and division and have been focusing particularly on our understanding of how these operations work and why we need to use them. For English, we have been building our own short, blackout poems as part of our work on Remembrance Day.

Coming up, we are looking forward to continuing our poetry work inspired by Adisa the Verbaliser and discovering a familiar face when we research the history of the school!

Miss Moakes Y5 Team Leader

It has been a busy couple of weeks in year 6 and at the time of writing most of them are in Wales enjoying the sunshine(!) and learning all about independence, resilience and how to work in a team. By the time they come home they will be able to hoover, make their beds and their own lunches so parents get ready to put your feet up (or get ready for the mountain of washing!).

Children who haven't been to Rhos have also been busy making Christmas wreaths, going on their own farm walk and planting up the allotment ready for Spring - watch out in March for a riot of colour and thanks to the Rotary club who donated some bulbs.

Miss Johnson Y6 Team Leader