Welcome to the first of many bulletin's of this academic year, it feels like only yesterday I was writing to you at the end of term. The new year is already off to a great start and there is much to share with you. Clubs started again this week and we had a great introduction to a huge range of activities, we have some old favourites such as cooking and cycling and some fascinating new programmes too, I was particularly impressed with the speed and enthusiasm with which pupils are learning British Sign Language!

This year, one of our key areas is sharing and celebrating our love of reading. As a Federation we genuinely believe that giving children a passion for the written word is one of the most vital skills we can give and this year we are increasing our momentum even further to ensure all children enjoy the pleasures of being lost in a good book.

Throughout the year there will be lots of events, celebrations and recognition of all things book related. You will see all of our excitements here on our bulletin so please keep coming back. We will also soon be sharing with you our most exciting new initiative our Reading Albums - watch this space.

We are also refining our curriculum, working tirelessly to make sure that our curriculum offers the very best opportunities for learning for all of our pupils. We will retain our topic based approach, with a main subject theme that links to other subject areas.

You will also see a slight change in format of this bulletin - following feedback from our families, I have added the calendar to this page so it is easy to see at a glance what is happening in school, I hope it is helpful to keep you up to date with all the events that are happening in school.

Jess Hutchison

We were very excited to have a real author in school on our first day back at school, I am sure you have heard lots about it, I know the children were certainly buzzing on the day and have continued to be inspired throughout our writing weeks.

Tom McLaughlin, author of The Story Machine came to Grazebrook and shared with us his journey to being a published author. It was very inspiring to hear how he overcame his own challenges to have such fantastic success as a writer. We then used the inspiration to create our own versions of the story, and will continue to work on these throughout our writing weeks.

Tom's visit is just one of the many reading related events we are hosting this year to keep our love of reading at the centre of all that we do. You will see Reading as a regular feature on this bulletin, please keep the passion going at home too, our wonderful Stoke Newington library is a great place to start.

This half term's Knowledge Organisers have been sent out to families alongside. They are designed to show all of our families the learning journey within a topic, specifically the knowledge and skills we will be developing. We have also developed them further for this academic year by adding our prior learning to them and also adapting our curriculum leaflets to go more closely with them in one helpful document.

Please do use them as a conversation topic with your children they will love to tell you all about their learning - I know they tell me about the interesting and exciting things they get up to in their curriculum lessons all the time.

This half term all of our topics have a history theme at the core. Please help at home by looking at history books, talking about history and even taking a trip to a museum. Of course our home learning maker mat projects will help too!

A huge thank you to our PSA who kicked off their year in show-stopping style with our annual Barn Dance. There was great music, great dancing and a lot of hay! The new season of Strictly has nothing on our Grazebrook dancers.

Thank you too to all of our families who joined us and made it such a special evening. It was especially nice to see so many of our newest families who have joined us in Reception or Nursery - now you know that Grazebrook can throw a party!

Many more PSA events to come this year, keep an eye on the PSA website, this bulletin and the PSA twitter feed to find out more: @Grazebrook_PSA