To all our wonderful Highflyer families,

Welcome to the last few – but very happy - weeks of our summer term and a new history topic of “What is a Monarch”? We will be thinking about the role of a monarch in our country and how it has changed since William the Conqueror over 1000 years ago; although must say that we have had great fun this week recounting tales from the Battle of Hastings in 1066 – and whether, or not, King Harold should have ‘allegedly’ promised William the English throne before he left France (to return to England) … HUGE thanks must, however, go to the Hughes family who generously shared a fabulous printed copy of the entire Bayeux tapestry for the children to enjoy – spanning the width of the entire classroom wall – with many of the children enthralled by the idea of Harold building a fortress on the top of Battle Hill before William’s plan changed their ‘secure’ position – and resulted in the Saxon army descending the hill … with the rest, as they say, confined to history books!

We shall also be continually referring to our local town of Wallingford – given it remains steeped in history with its castle (ruin) and past links to the royal mint – before, we hope, building up to – and culminating in Week 7 – to celebrate our current monarch - King Charles III.  Further details about this term's other topics are, I promise, detailed in our T6 curriculum letter (on the Highflyer Class web page) including our most up-to-date/current timetable.

Following our ‘Spelling Quiz’ on Monday (1.6.26), with what was clearly a terrific half term break for all our lovely HF families – it felt only fair to allow the children an extra week to ‘practice’ adding our suffixes of -ment and -ness … bless them … so quickly popped together an alternative ‘T6, Wk 1’ list together to facilitate this … with a little re-run - as usual  - this coming week – given first thing on our first Monday back, genuinely, seeming a little tricky for many … and, particularly, as I never like any of the children to feel at all worried, or worst still underprepared ;) !

Forest School continues – as per ‘the norm’ on Wednesday morning from 10am with Performance Sport P.E. this term concentrating on Athletics each Thursday afternoon from 1.30pm.

Our phonic focus for Week 2 will switch to applying the Suffix of -sion (pronounced as /zh/ as in television/usual/pleasure) and will also include two new homophones of plain/plane.

In Maths we will be starting some practical tasks encompassing our previous knowledge of statistics – alongside looking at data and creating individual graphs – as a much-enjoyed unit in previous years; alongside our daily mastering number focus to continue to develop the children’s deeper understanding of strategies to calculate and help problem solve as well.

A lovely way to end our week today – celebrating World Environment Day with – hopefully – our new Group Reader of Bea’s Pumpkin already making its way safely ‘home’ (after distribution on Monday afternoon!) … but if not, then please do not hesitate to pop in for either a spare copy … or a quick look in your child’s classroom tray :)

Wishing you all another great week – with fingers crossed that our sunflowers, broad beans and BEAUTIFUL new class plants (courtesy of ‘Team Kingsford’ – thank you again!) continue to grow marvelously – and not, as per the children’s suggestion, through “the ceiling” like Jack and the Beanstalk’s version!?!

Best – as always

Mrs Winters and the HF ‘Team’