With so many of us enjoying a staycation this year, it seemed the perfect time for Year Two to learn about the delights of the UK. What better way to show off their learning than with some travel brochures! Year Two teacher, Natalie McClellan, updated us on the young travel agents, "In Year Two, we are enjoying learning all about the UK. We want to tell people who live all around the world what a wonderful place it is, so we decided to make leaflets telling people to visit. Planning our writing carefully was important, so we thought about the words we needed to use to make readers want to visit straight away! Next, we made a draft copy in our books and wrote under sub-headings for each UK country. Once we had edited our work, we copied our writing in our neatest handwriting and created eye-catching leaflets. We hope you enjoy reading them!" It's so lovely to the hear of the care and effort our children put into their writing tasks. All the preparation and drafting most definitely paid off. The finished work is stunning.

Our library has undergone a complete overhaul this half-term. Heading up this monumental operation has been Thijs Morris, with help from lovely parent and library regular, Jo Wilson.

Mr Morris opens the book on what has been happening, "When lockdown was announced, we made it a priority to ensure the children had access to books. With a period of lockdown learning in front of us, it was so important children had access to as many books as possible to aid their learning. As you can imagine, on our return to school in September, we were awash with returned books to sort. We used this as an opportunity to update our library, adding the many new books that were bought and donated (after quarantining them first, of course). Each classroom's bookshelves have been replenished, as well as topping up the library. After re-stocking we found we had a huge excess of books, so we were able to donate ten boxes to the Fara charity."

It has been a major operation and hats off to Mr Morris and Jo - the library is now in apple pie order. So, when do our children get access to the books again and much longed for library time? "To get the library ready again to welcome our children, we have been busy adding hundreds of books onto the library system, as well as stickering them up so the children can access the Accelerated Reader quizzes after they finish reading. It's been a lot of work but we were finally able to re-open the library last week to Years Three and Four. Due to the current restrictions we are not able to open the library fully but were keen to utilise the books we have access to. Year Four has a library slot on a Monday afternoon and then we quarantine the library until Thursday, which is when Year Three visit. Going forward, depending on the restrictions, we plan to alternate classes every half term, so as many children as possible get to use our lovely library. We also thought, if we can't bring the children to the books let's move the books to the children. We divided up the non-fiction books into the relevant year groups, so each bubble had access to books covering this year's topics. Big shout out to Jo Wilson for all her help. We couldn't have done it without her!" concludes Mr Morris.

Thank you so much to Mr Morris and Jo.