Rufford Park Primary School and Nursery

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Weekly Update-19/9/25

Posted: Sep 19, 2025 by: Mr Kyriacou (n.kyriacou) on: Beech Tree Blog

Hello everyone,

This week, in our writing, we have started our unit of work on character descriptions. The focus of this work revolves around the story of Beowulf. Together, as a class, we have read and discussed the story and watched a video depicting the story as well. The children really enjoyed the story and have chosen to Grendel as the character to focus on for their character description. Once the class had chosen their character, we looked at a WAGOLL character description and identified lots of the features that appeared within it. The following lesson, we banked as many adjectives and descriptive phrases as possible to describe Grendel. We then followed that up with a lesson where the children used all those ideas that they had generated and created exciting, expanded noun phrases with prepositional phrases to go with them. The children have really enjoyed this unit of work so far and are excited to work on their character description of Grendel.  We have also focused on using a and an correctly within sentences.

In reading, we have focused on the second chapter of our class novel and practised using our retrieval skills to pick answers out of the text and summarising skills to mention all the main events of the second chapter in four sentences or less.

In maths, we have been focusing on finding 1,10, 100 or 1000 more or less than a number and we have also been focusing on using number lines to 10,000 and understanding the calculations required to work out what each increment is worth on a number line. We have also been using those skills to help with estimating on number lines to 10,000

In art, our unit of work is on British Art this half term and our first two-part lesson focused on illustration skills and telling a story through a piece of art. The children watched a video about the story of The Monkey and The Crocodile, which would be the focus of the illustration. We discussed what the story was all about and the children were tasked with creating one illustration that could be associate immediately with a part of the story. We discussed all the steps and skills involved with producing accurate illustration and the children produced some lovely pieces of work and listened and followed the steps given to them.

In history, our first lesson focused on the chronology of different historical events and people that the children have previously learnt about, identifying them on the timeline, understanding that different periods in history could have been occurring at the same time and placing where the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings fit in within that timeline.

Take care, 

Mr Kyriacou :)