Parents' evening meetings are always a time of great excitement and anxiety.  It is always an absolute delight talking about the achievements and skills of our wonderful children however the pressure of ten minutes to cram so much in is always a challenge, especially for some of us who could talk for England about their favourite topic! I hope you, as a parent, have found the meetings helpful to ascertain how well your child has settled and what they are currently working on, however if you have any worries, concerns or questions, please do not wait for parents' eve but either let us know on the gate or in an email as we are always keen to sort any worries as soon as possible.  Parents' eve is also a lovely time for us to meet you and to get to know our children's families.  Other excitements this week have been around the concluding of lots of our topics and the anticipation of our autumn 2 units.  We have concluded our Cloud Tea Monkeys unit with a summary of the key events and perhaps the children could share the story with you so far!  In maths we have begun our new unit on addition and subtraction with mental strategies for adding and subtracting 1, 10 and 100 to any number.  In English, we have had a wonderful week pulling together all our descriptive vocabulary, the rehearsing of simple and compound sentences and some brilliant fronted adverbials to describe Hocombe Mead.  On Friday the children plan to write their top copy leaflets with illustrations which we hope to display at school or on Google Classroom.  In geography we have our final lesson on National Parks with a lesson that examines the impact of tourism and whether the benefits outweigh the damage to the environment on both the New Forest and Yosemite, before considering whether these two national parks should be twinned.   It has been a long and exhausting half term but the children have worked incredibly hard and I'm sure are looking forward to a well earned break.  We wish you a lovely half term and look forward to seeing you on the Tuesday after half term ready for another exciting half term. :-)