Rehearsals are well under way for our Park Street's Got Talent event next Friday! Every class in school has voted for an act they wanted to send through to the final on Friday afternoon.

Here are the Team CW act with their MC Grammar rap, minus one of the Rainbows who was absent that day.

​Our fingers are crossed for the final!

This week Rainbows have been problem solving in maths. In one of the lessons we listened to the story "How Many Legs?" by Kes Gray and Jim Field. It was a really fun story but got very tricky at the end with lots of large numbers!

We then solved some problems together about how many legs the animals on the board had. It was fun to try and work out how many altogether and the slug kept tricking us at it doesn't have any feet!

We finished the lesson by choosing animals to make an amount and had a really good discussion about which creatures it could and couldn't be!

This week Rainbows have done lots of writing about our trip to Whistlestop Valley. We looked through the photos and talked about what our favourite part of the whole day was.

We have also been writing some secret notes to our friends to let them know how special they are. We focused on saying the sentence first, then Fred Talking each sound in the words. Some of us wrote a capital letter and used a full stop at the end.

​Here we are in action!

Rainbows are making good progress with their phonics reading and writing skills. Here are one of the groups working REALLY hard to read the story with their partner. They read some speedy green words then some story green words and finally some red tricky words.

Here they are supporting their partner to read by teaching them if they find it tricky and listening carefully.

It was a really funny story about a diver who found a treasure chest and was shocked by what was inside!

Each week Mr Smith chooses his PE Class of the Week. This week he chose Rainbows! He chose us for always being incredible!

He also chose a PE star of the week and you can see the lucky Rainbow below! This is a well deserved award because he is always doing the right thing at the right time.

​WELL DONE!

What a brilliant day Rainbows had on our visit to Whistlestop Valley today! We were all so excited to go and couldn't wait to get on the coach! Some of the Rainbows had never been on a coach and really enjoyed their first time. We sung songs and spotted lots of different things from the windows including cows, sheep and horses.

When we arrived we sorted ourselves out and had three different activities before we boarded the train. One of them was listening to talk about how steam engines work and we got to see inside the cab of "Hawk" and find out what all the different parts do. It was really interesting and some of us loved sharing our knowledge with the lady.

Another activity was a ride on the miniature train. We sat inside the carriages and went around the track and there was so much to spot! We saw a fairy garden, fairies, toadstool homes and dinosaurs! It was really fun, especially when the whistle blew when we went under the bridge!

The final activity was exploring the adventure playground! It was so much fun! There were slides, swings, climbing walls, rope bridges, a seesaw and spinning seats. It was lovely to see some of the Rainbows try some things they hadn't before, even though they were a little bit scared.

Finally we got to ride on the train at Clayton West! We rode on "Fox" and we had seen Fox in some videos we watched before we went. We listened carefully to the safety talk and then got in the carriages and waited for the guard to blow his whistle, and then we were off! Some of us hadn't been on a steam train before and were very excited! We loved it when the whistle blew and the best bit was going through the long, dark tunnel! We spotted so many farm animals, vehicles, walkers and houses and Emley Moor mast was ENORMOUS! We stopped briefly at "Cuckoo's Nest" station before we carried on to our destination.

When we arrived at Shelley station we alighted from the train and were able to watch how the train turned around to take us back. Two Rainbows even got to help turn the train on the turn table!

We had our lunch (that we had been asking about all morning!) and had a play on another adventure playground. After that we boarded the train to head back to Clayton West. On the way back we had to stop as there was a rock fall on the track but the driver cleared it and we were safe to go.

We had such an amazing day and had so much fun, and we were very tired on the coach on the way home. What a fun day out!

We hope you like the photos!

Rainbows have been exploring African instruments this week, and as you can see by the photos below they have really enjoyed it!

They have been singing Che Che Kula which originates from Ghana. They used the instruments to play to the beat, following the pattern of the song. Some rainbows could repeat it back and some challenged themselves to sing and play independently!

This week Rainbows have been learning about Africa for our "Off we Go" topic. We have listened to stories including Handa's Surprise, Handa's Hen and Mama Panya's Pancakes. Rainbows loved Mama Panya's Pancakes so much they chose to read it again at our story voting station! Rainbows know that Africa is a continent far away and we have to travel by plane or boat to get there. They have learnt about different African cultures including what life is like for some people in Kenya.

There have been lots of fun activities including painting repeating patterns, making animal silhouette pictures in the creative area with a beautiful sunset, retelling stories with small world characters and imagining their won, writing about African animals and exploring African instruments.

Here we are having fun!

As our theme this week has been "Africa" for our "Off we go" topic, we have been looking at repeating patterns in some of the African cultures.

We know that a repeating pattern is where colours and/or shapes are repeated again in the same order.

We worked as a class to solve some repeating patterns puzzles and then had a go on our own. We challenged ourselves lots by either completing patterns with different colours and different sized objects, or by completing patterns with different shapes and colours.

Some of us even designed our own repeating patterns and continued them on.