Squirrels Heath Junior School

What an amazing fortnight of reading we have had!  Well done to all those children who have continued to read during the half term and this week - we can't wait to see how many pages we have all read by the end of our Readathon next Friday.  Across the whole school an astounding  93,298  pages have been read - a huge increase from our first week's total of 24,836   Our winners for Week 3 are... 1st place  - 4 Beech (15,836 pages)  2nd place  -  3 Elm (11,381 pages) 3rd place  - 5 Palm (8946 pages) Also well done to 6 Maple and 4 Pine who also read over 8000 pages each.  Keep Reading!

 Over the past few weeks in Year 3 we have been studying Haiku poems.  We decided to celebrate finishing off our book for English this term by writing Haiku poems about the main character. Once we had created our poems, we showed great courage by performing our poems to our class.  We had great performances and even added some actions! We are now Haiku experts and would love to share some examples of our work with you.  Look at the photos below of our work:  

 This week we became pirates, stealing treasure and sharing it out…we even wrote instructions about how to do it! 

Rosie, in year 6, decided that it was time to have a change of hair style.  Many children would have just gone to the hairdressers and got a new style, but Rosie had different ideas.  She knew that her hair could benefit someone who had a medical condition that would not allow them to grow their own.  Rosie said "I didn't want my hair to go to waste, and wanted someone to have the chance to have my hair while they were going through a difficult part of their life." Rosie represents our school values everyday and is a credit to both her family and our whole school community.  Well done and keep it up!

Well done to everyone across the school who has read this week and kept count of their pages. It has been an amazing first week, with some truly fabulous results! Across the whole school an astounding 24,836 pages have been read.  Our winners for Week 1 are... 1st place  - 4 Beech (6620 pages)  2nd place  -  3 Elm (4640 pages) 3rd place  - 5 Palm (3331 pages) Let's keep reading lots more during the holiday and maybe we'll have a new class leader next time! Well done everyone!

Today Year 6 joined a very special workshop online held by the Houses of Parliament. They found out how the Houses of Parliament and the Houses of Lords work, what an MP does and how the laws are made. They even had the chance to think about who would be worthy to join the House of Lords. Suggestions ranged from Marcus Rashford, Daniel Radcliffe, Ed Sheeran and even Mrs Chestnutt! Well, you never know!    It was a very informative session and the children were able to join in and answer questions. During the session our local MP, Andrew Rosindell, also joined in and told the children all about his role and how he works to help the local community.  The children came up with some very probing questions for him too... 'Have you ever met the Prime Minister?' 'How can we tackle the problem of littering in the local area?' 'When are you planning to lift all the Covid restrictions?' 'What do you think are the most important issues that the government are facing?...

 On Monday, Year 5 spent the day completing activities about ancient Egypt. We worked in research teams to find out about daily life in ancient Egypt and then chose artefacts from a range to best represents this topic for an exhibition. We also mummified fruit, learned about and painted the gods and wrote our own messages in hieroglyphs. Make sure to ask us all about what we learned!

What an amazing day we have had…Thorgil the Viking came to visit from Denmark on his longship! He rowed all the way here…we rowed to Danelaw! We also made longships, baked out cakes and made coins, jewellery, braids and a draughty board! We even wrote on Runes! We have been so busy, we may need to carry tomorrow… As the children said, “it was exciting and fun, I was amazed Thorgil came to visit!”