Year 5 presented a fantastic Chinese themed assembly for the rest of Key Stage 2 this week. We have been exploring more about the country and the culture during our recent celebrations for the Chinese New Year. Our assembly involved the telling of the traditional Chinese story of Sister Lace. This is a tale that involves passion, wisdom and a magical paper dragon! Having looked at different Chinese stories, Sister Lace is one that stood out strongly for Year 5. You can watch the tale unfolding in the video above.

8th February – Year 6 Southwark Junior Citizenship Scheme.

10th February – half term starts.

20th February – Year 1 trip to the V & A Museum of Childhood.

23rd February – Open morning for prospective parents. Please contact the school to book a place.

15th March – Year 1 trip to the Dulwich Wildlife Centre for Gardening.

30th March – A selection of Year 6 pupils will visit the Houses of Parliament.

We have been making grand plans at Michael Faraday School ahead of the formal opening of our brand new school building. For such an important new feature in our community we need an important guest to come along and help us celebrate! The children have decided that they would like to invite Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge to Michael Faraday to see the outstanding work that we achieve. We appreciate that the Duchess is an incredibly busy lady! To help Catherine understand more about what to expect, should she kindly accept our invitation, a selection of our pupils have made a short video to showcase all that we achieve. You can watch a sneak preview above.

The Nursery children have been having great fun with our new class-reading book of The Gruffalo. We have introduced the different characters, and then played many games, all based around the book. This is a wonderful story in which to use role-play to explore how the animals are all feeling. The Nursery children have made masks for all the different characters to help us out with our acting. The story has excited us so much that we are planning our own Nursery Gruffalo Hunt! We will be taking all the children out to nearby Dulwich Woods on 2nd February, to see if we can find the South London Gruffalo. All parents are welcome to join us on this trip.

The animal magic has also continued in the Nursery with a visit from Paul the Python Man! As the name suggests, our friend Paul brought in his wonderful python to help the children learn more about different kinds of animals. We were also able to see a tarantula spider and a lizard. Our work themed around animals and The Gruffalo will continue over future weeks. We will be using animals in our maths work, playing games such as counting the number of spots on a snake.

We are continuing reading in Reception our current class book of Aaaarrgghh Spider! This is a story that has fascinated the children, as they learn all about how spiders live and why they are able to weave webs. It has inspired us to make our own Reception webs, using glitter, weaving and even a huge human web! The story is introducing the children to many new words and helping us with our spelling.

The Reception children are also starting to learn about the traditional Chinese New Year story, and how this is celebrated each year in China. We are expecting to receive in the post quite soon a very special letter sent from China, telling us all about this special time of the year.

Year 1 have been learning about fairytales to help us with our literacy work. All of the children are incredibly familiar with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and so we decided to create our own Year 1 character – Little Blue Riding Hood! We decided that we wanted to make our fairytale have a slight twist from the original. We decided as a class that Little Blue Riding Hood needed to be smarter in order not to be caught out by the Big Bad Wolf. The children have been writing their own stories to help to explain this. We have heard some fantastic ideas – Little Blue Riding Hood feeds the Big Bad Wolf some chewing gum so that his teeth stick together! Another idea was that Little Blue Riding Hood is given a scooter so that she can escape. As well as writing out our stories, the children have also some made Little Blue Riding Hood puppets to help them act out their ideas.

To celebrate the Chinese New Year of the Dragon, Year 2 staged a special assembly for the rest of Key Stage 1. We have been learning in class all about the story behind the Chinese New Year, and some of the traditions that are associated with it. Our assembly involved acting out the story of the animal race that lends itself to the Chinese association with a different animal each year. As you can see from the video above, we also put on a wonderful dragon dance display!

Year 3 have started their Viking topic this term, learning all about the traders that came to our shores over one thousand years ago. We have been finding out exactly where the Vikings came from, and why they visited Britain. As well learning about some of the Viking raids that took place, Year 3 have been understanding more about trade and bartering, and why the Viking had to come to Britain to carry this out.

To help us out with our new topic, both Year 3 classes visited the Maritime Museum at nearby Greenwich. We enjoyed a wonderful workshop where we shown some of the original items that the Vikings traded. A number of our children also had the chance to dress up in Viking costumes! You can find out more about our visit in the podcast below.