Colour mixing

Class 2 has been exploring colour mixing, they have made colour wheels and then used the skills that they learnt through this to create concentric circle art work. They have created some very effective pieces of art work.

National Year of Reading 2026!

 

Hodnet School is excited to embrace the National Year of Reading in 2026.

 

What is the National Year of Reading?

The National Year of Reading is a UK wide campaign by the Department for Education and the National Literacy Trust. The campaign’s theme is ‘Go All In’ meaning read about things that really matter to you. Whether it’s sport, music, fashion so something else, if people ‘go all in’ on a topic, the hope is that they will enjoy what they are reading and do it more.

 

Why is this the National Year of Reading?

Studies have shown that reading is connected to lots of lifelong benefits, including wellbeing and confidence, and improving writing and conversation skills. Unfortunately, reading for pleasure among young people is at its lowest for 20 years. We need our young people to read in order to improve their own life chances, both in education and the workplace.

 

Is reading just about books?

Definitely not! The National Year of Reading is promoting all types of reading including comics, magazines, online blogs, e-readers, instruction manuals and audiobooks. The campaign wants everyone to read in a way that works for them.

 

What is happening during the National Year of Reading?

Throughout 2026, there will be lots of events across the UK. At Hodnet School, Mrs Bessant has created a calendar of events to ensure that we enjoy a reading event every month of 2026.

National Year of Reading Calendar

Our first event is ‘Reading Resolutions’ – allowing our children to set a reading goal for the year. This could be about trying a new format of reading or perhaps trying a new author or genre.

The Department for Education want children and families to read for at least 10 minutes every day and Hodnet School we want that for our children as well. How amazing would it be if we could all achieve that goal!

Living and non living

We have started a new unit of science learning this half term about living things. We learnt about Mrs Gren who helps us to remember all the life processes and we also looked at: living, not living any longer and has never been alive. Miss Manton put a selection of items on our table and asked us to sort them according to whether they were: living, not living any longer and have never been alive.

Grouping and writing the expressions

We have been working on grouping again this week in maths sessions, writing the multiplication expressions for this.

Photography

Today we kicked off our photography unit in computing in forest schools. We worked in pairs to take six photos: an insect, a tree, a close up, an action shot, a photo of the distance and a group selfie. We talked about how to make this photographs successful, children took photos on the i pads, looked through what we had taken and then took more if we were not happy with the quality of the photos we had taken.

Planning a warning story

This week we have deepened our understanding of the warning story we are focusing on this term about two polar bear cubs. At the end of the week we have planned our own version of a warning tale, we have changed the animal and thus several other aspects of the story.

Reading skills – The Way Home for Wolf

Over the last two weeks we have been reading the Rachel Bright book called: The way home for Wolf. We have identified valuable vocabulary in the story, read an extract and then the whole story. We answered retrieval questions about the text. We also compared it using venn diagrams to other Rachel Bright story books. At the end of the day we listened to the audio book version of the story.

Robot algorithms

Last term we learnt about algorithm’s and programming simple robots. The children learnt to write their own algorithm for a bee bot and then programme the bee bot with that algorithm. If the bee bot did not follow the pathway we expected we learnt how to debug the algorithms we had set. Children worked together in pairs to design their own mat and pathway for the bee bot to follow from the beginning to the end of the route.

Gymnastics

This week in our gymnastics lesson with Miss Manton we developed our gymnastics skills, we worked on making shapes with our bodies. Children learnt that in order for balances to be successful in gymnastics they needed to develop good body tension, this will help them to have stable and still balance shapes.

Learning about grouping in maths

This week we have started learning about grouping and repeated addition in our mathematics lessons. We have been working with cubes to help us develop an understanding of this.