Children’s Mental Health Week is now in it’s sixth year. The theme of this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week is ‘Find your Brave’. Life is all about taking small brave steps every day. Bravery could be about sharing worries and asking for help when you need it, trying something new or making the right choices. Life often throws us challenges. Bravery isn’t about coping alone or holding things in. It’s about finding positive ways to deal with things that might be difficult, overcoming physical and mental challenges and looking after yourself. Place2be have created a range of age appropriate top tips for pupils and parents. The free resources will help children and young people explore what it means to be brave.

More information and resources can be found here: https://www.children’s childrensmentalhealthweek.org.uk/schools
More resources can be found on the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families website here:
https://www.annafreud.org/what-we-do/schools-in-mind/resources-for-schools/

This week we have been reading the story ‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers. ‘Lost and Found’ is about a penguin who feels lonely and so as it is Mental Health Week, we have been talking about the penguins feelings as well as our own. We have also learned lots of fun facts about penguins and Antarctica. Today, for Fun Friday we have made banana penguins, they were peng-tastic!

What a busy week as always! Who can believe that we have already arrived at the end of week 5? Wow, indeed.

This week, we have continued to explore the texts by Julia Donaldson, focusing on Tiddler. The class loved joining in with the story telling, shouting out the repeated phrase, ‘Tiddler’s late!’ Based on the story, we introduced them to question marks, linking our key questions to the 4 posed by SaLT – Who? Where? When? What? 

Science continued to investigate animals. Using our Science knowledge, we worked in pairs to design a new animal that could survive living in a mountainous habitat. Pupils presented their mammals before receiving feedback from their peers. Lots of features were considered but the only weakness that most had was camouflage! We had a wonderful array of rainbow mammals!

Our Numeracy lessons focused on consolidating ‘more’ and ‘less’ within 20 – finding the order of numbers, 1 and 2 more or less a number and varying the context of using them. The pupils played a final game and it was lovely to observe their team spirit as they supported each other in finding and checking their answers.

Finally, we have started our mission to become ‘programmers of the future!’ The pupils worked in pairs to explore ‘Scratch,’ a programming resource which enables them to move an object around a computer screen. What extremely competent computer users, LB 1 are!