Today, at 3.20pm, Melissa Pinfield will be running the Scholastic book fair for the final day. If you haven't already done so, please drop by and browse the books available; there are books for all age groups. The book fair is in Class 4 and Melissa will be on hand to help provide information about payments and ordering online.
We are passionate about children having access to high quality texts through reading and being read to. Having access to books and reading outside of school is something we strongly encourage. Our reading provision is at the heart of our curriculum offer, with children having a healthy daily diet of reading, being read to and using a variety of texts across the curriculum. During their first week at school, our new reception children are partnered with a Year 6 'reading buddy', who share a book with them every Friday. Across the infants, children are taught phonics and early readings skills daily and junior children have access to a broad range of real books banded to match their ability. Unfortunately, this year we have been unable to sign up for Accelerated Reader, a programme that allows children to read a real book and then compete a short online quiz to determine how much of the book they have understood. We have used Accelerated Reader for many years but the cost has become prohibitive. The children still have access to the full range of Accelerated Reader books and we will still be assessing them to determine when they are ready to progress, but we are no longer able to provide online quizzes. Apologies to those children who enjoyed the quizzing, but hopefully there may be a time when we can afford Accelerated Reader again. In the meantime, please read to your children, hear them read, visit the local library to borrow books and visit the book fair later today to buy some great reads if you haven't already done so.

Next week, our music lead Abi Flashman has arranged for a group called Rocksteady to run infant and junior music workshops. This should be an exciting introduction to music beyond our usual curriculum provision. The following week, on Thursday 9th October, school photos will be taken at the village hall. Further details will be provided by the school office. 

Thank you everyone for making time to join us for the Reading Together session in Class 2. It was lovely to see all the parents and carers, and to share some of our amazing adventures with reading in our class. 

In Literacy, we have completed writing our draft copy of our report on lions. We spend this afternoon editing it using our toolkit. In Maths, we have been comparing numbers. We have also been having fun counting in 2s, 5s and 10s. We used a series of very amusing songs to help us remember the tips on counting up in 2s, 5s and 10. You can also share in the fun by following the links below and singing along to the video.
Counting up in 2s: https://youtu.be/GvTcpfSnOMQ?feature=shared
Counting up in 5s: https://youtu.be/EemjeA2Djjw?feature=shared
Counting up in 10s: https://youtu.be/Ftati8iGQcs?feature=shared

In Science, we discussed the importance of a balanced diet by looking at a food pyramid. We learned a lot of new vocabulary - carbohydrates, protein, vitamins and calcium being some of them. We also had another amazing PE multiskill session with Liam from Pro20 on Thursday alongside our regular Tuesday PE with Miss Walker where we developed our skills for dodging and changing directions.

As you all know, in History we are learning about how schools have changed over the years. We have been looking at a lot of different artifacts relating to our schools history. We had oodles of questions about how our school was like in the 1990s. One of our parents who studied here in the 1990s very kindly joined us on Wednesday to answer some of our questions. We had an awesome afternoon with Mrs Blatchford who answered so many of our questions and help us identify some of the things in the pho0to album from her time at Harrowbarrow. We will now be going further back in time to the 1800s to see how our school was like. Exciting!
 

Finally, a very well done to:

• Jane for getting the Ready Award for the amazing care she took to make sure all her numbers were formed correctly.
• Lilly T for getting the Respectful Award for always taking time to keep her table and workstation clean and tidy.
• Ivy for getting the Safe Award always taking time to help everyone in the classroom.

It has been another really busy week across the school, with classes fully emersed in their autumn curriculum work following the settling period at the start of term. As well as the artwork Class 3 are doing with me (shared last week), I am teaching art to Class 4 this half term too. They are learning to turn 2D into 3D and started by scaling up a silhouette of an animal onto A1 paper using a grid method. Josh's example above is really impressive and very accurate. Next week, the children will be adding texture to their animals before making them 3D.

At our weekly celebration assembly today, alongside our Ready, Respectful and Safe awards, we introduced a new certificate. For those children who use TimesTables Rockstars, we are able to look at a heat map of their performance and award a Going Green certificate when they have demonstrated they can correctly answer times tables questions repeatedly in less than 1 second. This is phenomenal and something many adults would struggle to do!

Our after school and lunchtime clubs started again this week. Depending on their age, children are able to join football, music, art, multi-skills and cross country clubs. Our peripatetic music teachers also started lessons again, with guitar, keyboard and brass tuition on offer. For further information or to sign your child up to a club or instrument lesson, please contact the school office.
 
Finally, we welcomed Bridge Trust Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) Hannah Prinn to the school this week. Hannah will be supporting me, as Harrowbarrow SENCO, in this important area of our work. She will be visiting once a fortnight and brings additional experience and expertise. 

This week ended with a high note this afternoon with a very active and creative Art lesson. Class 2 went put on our artist heads and opened our artist eyes and went exploring into the wild that is the Forest School area. We found some amazing natural things which we brought back into the classroom to create our own works of art. We then used Showbie to take photos of our works. I can't wait to share some of the amazing creations with you!

In Maths we have continued learning about numbers by exploring number lines. In Literacy, we have finished planning our reports and are looking forward to using all the skills we have learned so far to write our draft reports. In Science, we continued our explorations of what living things need to survive by talking about the differences between the needs of humans vs other animals.

In RE, we worked with Miss Walker to try and understand what Muslims think about god. We also had a really good Decider Skills session with Hannah on Thursday, where we learned how to STOP-PAUSE-BREATHE when we begin to feel FIZZY. In History, this week we made a list of questions we have about the history of our school. To help answer some of these questions, we have decided to invite some people who used to come to school here in the past. We cant wait to meet them and have our questions answered!

Besides our Tuesday PE sessions, we are so lucky to have the team from Pro20 with us on a Thursday to teach us key PE skills. This Thursday, we had our first session (with the Year 1s). We thoroughly enjoy ourselves playing Aliens and Planets, and other team games.

A very well done to:

• Freya for getting the Ready Award for her efforts during Maths lessons and finishing her Greater Depth questions.
• Finely for getting the Respectful Award for looking after his books and his impeccable presentation.
• Emily for getting the Safe Award for helping her friends get ready for home time. 

Here is an example of some excellent maths work from Belle who has been rounding to the nearest 10,000. 


We've had a wonderfully busy week in class, diving into a range of exciting learning activities! In science, we've been exploring how light is reflected and designing our own experiments to investigate this fascinating topic. In English, we've been crafting stories that include a moral and using personification to bring our characters and settings to life. Meanwhile, in maths, we've been sharpening our number skills by rounding numbers to the nearest 10, 100, and 1,000. The class has shown fantastic focus and enthusiasm, working hard across all these areas-well done, everyone!

The spellings for this week are words with the suffixes ing/er/est: lightening, lighter, lightest, hunted, hunter,  prouder, proudest, yawned, yawning, sprinted

Here are the KIRFs questions for this week to work on:

A busy start to this year's art lessons

Over the past few weeks, we have enjoyed the first few lessons of our 'Inspired by Flora and Fauna' unit. 

Our Year 1's started by enjoying the work of Henri Rousseau, Jan van Kessel and the late local writer and illustrator, David McKee. We responded with our own drawings (ink on watercolour) and then added colour using pastels. 

Our new reception children loved joining in too, with a few stray wild animals and Lilo (no Stitch).

What a creative start to the school year!

What an awesome week and 2 days we have had after our long, hot summer break! Out first full week back had been jam-packed with oodles of learning and fun outside.

In Maths, we have started our fist unit of work on Place Values. This week, we have been using our part-whole models and place value mats to split numbers into tens and ones. We have also been working really hard on our number formation, focusing on forming number 3 the right way round. In Class 2, we do this by making sure our pencil is on the LEFT hand side of the square and then using a following rhyme to remember how to write the number: "Around the tree, around the tree, that's the way to make a three!"

In Literacy, we are learning how to write a report. This week, we have practiced writing 2A sentences and using conjunctions to add more details. We have also begun collecting facts about a new animal for our own reports.

In History, we have begun a new unit that will help us answer the question, "How was school different in the past?" This week, we had some very heated debates about how schools might have changed. We are so lucky that at Harrowbarrow we have such a rich collection of photos and artefacts that document our school over the years. We spent an afternoon looking at these photos and artefacts. We finished our session by talking about what similarities and differences we could see in the the way children learned at Harrowbarrow in the past compared to our school today.  

In Music, this term we are exploring pulse and rhythmic patterns. This week, we had a very lively session of composing call-and-echo movement sequences for our friends to follow.

Art this term is all about exploring and drawing. This week, we investigated the concept of artists as explorers and collectors - exploring the world and ideas and collecting artifacts from nature and all around them to inspire their art.

We watched a video about Andy Goldsworthy, a British Sculptor who has become know for making art from things he finds in the landscape. In the video, he shared how he takes ice and rocks from the landscape and lets it make a "drawing" as it thaws in his studio. Inspired by this, we went outside to look for colours in nature and experimented with creating colours with our found natural things.

During my morning 'meet and greet', I think I have managed to see most parents and carers since the start of the new academic year. If not, welcome back and I look forward to catching up with you next week. A special welcome to our new children and their families; we hope you have been made to feel welcome and the children have enjoyed the start to their primary education. Within days of our new reception children starting, I began to give tours of the school for prospective new families for September 2026. If you know of anyone looking for a school place for next September, please feel free to share my contact information so they can book a school viewing if interested: head@harrowbarrowprimary.co.uk

We start all new school years with a period of settling the children back into routines and setting expectations. After a six week break, I am always surprised at how quickly the children settle into the rhythm of school life. This year has seen an especially good start across the school, with smiley, happy children bounding into class, enthusiastic to learn at the start of the day. We look forward to celebrating the children's successes and achievements at our weekly celebration assemblies on Fridays. Please look out for praise certificates and ask your child to explain why they were awarded them.

We welcomed new teaching assistant and lunchtime supervisor Sarah Marley to our team last week. Whilst there are no other new members of staff, some staff are working in different roles. A reminder of the staff organisation for this year:

Class 1: Teachers - Tom Ottewell-Taylor, Abi Flashman & Jo Walker (Wednesday afternoons). Teaching Assistants - Angela Bushell, Stacy Vinson, Sarah Marley
Class 2: Teachers - Ati Charlesworth & Jo Walker (Tuesday afternoons). Teaching Assistant - Lesley Connell
Class 3: Teachers - Sam Watts & Andrew Hunt (Thursday afternoons). Teaching Assistants - Jo Cocking, Sarah Marley, Jo Walker, Brendan Thomas
Class 4: Teachers - Melissa Pinfield & Andrew Hunt (Monday & Tuesday afternoons). Teaching Assistants - Heather Thomson, Brendan Thomas

Lesley Connell is no longer working in the school office but remains as Breakfast Club and After School Club lead. For all office queries/communication, please now direct emails to Elaine Moyle: emoyle@harrowbarrowprimary.co.uk

Elaine does not work in the office on Fridays, so if your query or communication can wait until another day, please avoid calling into the office. I will be covering the office on Fridays but am also often involved in meetings or cover teaching.

In my role, I am fortunate enough to work with all the classes. This week, I particularly enjoyed teaching an art lesson to Class 3. The theme for their work this half term is 'drawing stories', with the aim of illustrating a piece of text at the end of the unit. The children started by looking at a tableaux and imagined it as a scene from a story. Here are some examples of their charcoal and chalk sketches:




We have lots of exciting learning opportunities planned for the term ahead and look forward to sharing these with you in the weeks to come. One of our new developments this year is the work we plan to do through our climate action plan. A copy of this can be found in the information tab on this website: www.harrowbarrowprimary.co.uk/Information/Climate_Action_Plan
If you feel you might be able to contribute to our work in this area, please contact us as we want to involve our whole school community.
I look forward to sharing more of the children's learning achievements in the coming weeks.

What a lovely start it has been to the term.  It has been great to welcome back the Year 6 and to see the new Year 5 get settled into the class. 

The spellings for this week are silent letters.  They are: gnarl, gnash, gnome, knead, knight, knuckle, knock, knot, know

The KIRFs below to practise with your child

Class 2 is a Year 2 group of 18 children. The class is taught by Mrs Ati Charlesworth, along with Miss Jo Walker and Miss Lesley Connell. Miss Jo Walker covers Mrs Charlesworth's PPA on a Tuesday afternoon. If you ever need to get in touch, please do not hesitate to contact Mrs Charlesworth at acharlesworth@harrowbarrowprimary.co.uk or ask to speak to her via the school reception on 01579 350576.

Please find above the Curriculum overview for the Summer term 2026. You can also download this as a PDF document by clicking the PDF icon below (Curriculum overview Summer 2026.pdf).
Also find below, a link to download a copy of the KIRF focus for Summer term 1 (Year 2 Sum1.pdf).  

Here is a copy of the timetable