It has been great fun visiting Mrs Tickner in the office, Mrs Parker in her office and Mrs Wray in the kitchen. Mr Phil popped in and explained all about his job and the children really enjoyed asking questions to find out more. The children loved hearing about the ways these people help us and the jobs they do every day that make our school such a great place to be. The children even visited Mr McCarthy in the study and found out how he helps everyone at Russell House!

On Wednesday, it was lovely to welcome all the children's families into school to enjoy our Harvest celebration. All the children in the Pre-Prep stood on our big stage and sang their songs brilliantly. We were very proud of Form 1’s excellent behaviour and, of course, their fantastic singing!

In maths this week, the children have been learning about addition and spotting groups of numbers within numbers. The children are getting more confident to subitise and use their knowledge of how numbers work together to quickly find the total. Linking with our interest in all things vegetable, it was fun to get a little bit messy and explore the inside of a pumpkin. The maths challenge was to find out how many seeds were inside! Using a 100 square, the children put a seed on each number to find out, amazingly, there were 78. We then wondered if a bigger pumpkin would have more seeds... this is ongoing as we have not finished counting them yet!

In literacy this week, the children have started writing sentences and learning all about finger spaces and full stops. The children each wrote a sentence about their favourite part of their trip to Bore Place, meeting the claves was definitely the highlight for many of the children.

We have been getting creative this week and exploring how to use pastels and paint to create moonlit pictures of pumpkins. The children looked closely at a real pumpkin to think about the shape and colour. Using an oil pastel, the children drew the outline of a pumpkin and then added lines to represent the ridges that they could. They then mixed orange and red paint to create just the right shade to match the pumpkin. The children also drew leaves in the same way and painted them green. Once dry, these were cut out and the children glued them onto black sugar paper.

Using pastels, the children added an autumn moon, twinkly stars and a curly vine. They look really great in the Form 1 classroom!

The children have also been learning about the life-cycle of a pumpkin and drawing each stage on paper plates. We have also made autumn trees using pipe cleaners and beads, threading red, orange and yellow beads onto each branch. As always, the children have also been following their own interests, playing games and initiating activities for themselves. They have particularly enjoyed writing cards for each other and decorating envelopes this week.

Another great week in Form 1!