Hello! My name is Mrs Needham and I love being part of the great ‘Ryecroft Family.’ It’s wonderful getting to know our children and their families. It’s such a privilege to be a part of this special community and to see different generations coming through our gates year on year. It’s what makes Ryecroft a special place to be!

The best part of my job is seeing children’s horizons expand when their learning takes flight in fun, creative ways. It’s a thrill to be a part of their learning journeys.

If I’m not with my Ryecroft family, then you’ll usually find me spending time with my own family, getting up to new adventures in many different places and making happy memories…most of which include food!

Mrs Atkinson

Hi, I’ve been part of the Ryecroft team for almost four years.

I love working with our children and watching them learn and flourish. We all work incredibly hard to make sure that children enjoy their learning journey and are successful in all that they do.

My spare time is spent caring for my own family and spending time with my amazing grandchildren.

We have some super learning opportunities in store for the coming academic year and we can’t wait to get started! Enjoy your summer break and we look forward to starting the next leg of our learning journey soon!

Autumn Term 1

It has been a very busy half term for Ryecroft, (our travelling bear), during his epic, whirlwind tour of the world. He has contacted us at various stages during his travels and has enlisted the aid of our Year 2 children to help him discover facts about the various countries and cultures he has encountered along the way. To find out about what he might expect to see in Pakistan, the children wrote letters to Mrs Khan, (who used to work with them in Year 1). She had just returned from Pakistan and kindly wrote back with lots of useful information for them to pass on to Ryecroft Bear. Crocodiles also enjoyed writing reports about Islam and learned many interesting facts. After visiting Pakistan, Ryecroft Bear was off to South America to visit a colourful carnival in Rio de Janeiro. To find out more about this lively city, we read the book, ‘Mr Elephant’s Rio Tour.’ Our Crocodiles were inspired to write travelling adventure stories of their own, after finding Mr Elephant’s magical, flying umbrella in the classroom! In no time at all, Ryecroft Bear was off again, but this time, he travelled to the Arctic and became frozen in a solid block of ice! Once he’d thawed out, he told the children all about the incredible creatures he’d seen there. The children used their super adjective skills to write some fabulous Arctic poetry, based on what Ryecroft had told them. Here's Roman’s poem:-

Arctic Animals

White, fluffy Arctic hare,

Listening for predators with his giant ears,

White, massive polar bear,

Hunting silently in the snow,

Strong, fierce Arctic wolf,

Creeping sneakily in the night,

Deadly, giant orca,

Leaping dangerously out of the ocean.

An unusual package from ‘Hobgoblin Potion Suppliers,’ was delivered to school by mistake this week. The package contained all manner of strange ingredients, such as dusty, powdered cobwebs, gruesome, green frog powder and troll bogies – urgh! The Crocodiles were inspired to invent and write

instructions for their own imaginary potions. Ever hopeful, Mrs Needham is imagining that one of them will transform her into a beautiful princess!

Autumn Term 2

In the next half term, Crocodiles will be learning why poppies are a national symbol of remembrance at this time of year and some historical facts about our school. This learning will be used as a vehicle to strengthen our basic writing skills. We aim to write sentences that are accurately punctuated, with frequently used words spelt correctly. We are thrilled when our children draw pictures at home and write captions to go with them, so please continue to encourage your children in their wonderful writing ventures.

Your child will benefit hugely if you help them to practise their weekly spellings. Congratulations to Jessie, who is currently at the top of our ‘Spelling Bee’ leader board,’ and to Roman, Macey and Olivia for having their fantastic writing displayed on our WAGOLL Wall (What A Good One Looks Like). We feel very proud of them!

Sharks have been working on number skills and using addition and subtraction to solve everyday problems, including money. They have been finding halves, thirds and quarters of numbers, shapes and objects. In addition, they have been learning about 2d and 3d shapes and about direction and movement. Olivia, Henry, Lily, Dakota and Ruby-Jean have all featured on our Maths WAGOLL Wall (What A Good One Looks Like) and have really shown resilience and great reflective skills to solve some tricky maths challenges – well done! It is really important for our Sharks to sharpen up their quick-fire mental mathematics and it’s always appreciated if you could encourage children to do this at home too. Here are some of the things we have been working on:

Pairs of numbers that add up to 10, 20 and 100

2 times table

5 times table

10 times table

Doubling numbers to 20 – e.g. double 1 is 2, double 2 is 4 etc

Halving even numbers from 2-20