Monks Risborough CE Primary School
Spring 1 - Who helps us in our community?
Happy New Year Robins - welcome to 2026!
This half term we will be focusing on our school value of Community.
To help us to answer the question of Who helps us in our community ? we will be looking at lots of different jobs that people can do and looking for inspiration for our future careers! We will be looking at lots of non-fiction texts surrounding these jobs but also some fiction books to fit with each community member. We are hoping that lots of members of the community will be able to come in and support us with our learning and teach us more about their jobs.
Keep checking back here for pictures of all our learning!
Week 1 - New Year.... Dreams and Goals!
Robins came back to school refreshed after the Christmas break and ready to learn. We introduced our PSHE topic for this half term all about dreams and goals. This linked in nicely thinking about people who help us in the community as we were able to think about what job we want to do when we get older! We have been exploring our classroom and its new layout, discussing which parts are working well for our play and which bits we can improve. We even have a new art area where we can paint whenever we want to! Take a look at pictures of our learning below:
Week 2 - Little Miss Helpful
We started topic thinking about people who help us in our school community. We enjoyed a visit from Mr Stratford who spoke to us all about his role as a caretaker and answered lots of our questions. We're thankful that Mr Stratford is not like Little Miss Helpful, the main character from our text this week, who likes to help people but actually ends up causing more problems! We thought about situations at school where we might need help, who we would ask, and what we would say. We wrote these down on speech bubbles to remind us should we need them!
Outside, we were helpful ourselves in making bird feeders. We melted coconut oil and mixed it with bird seed before spreading it on pine cones to hang in our learning garden. The children noticed on a frosty day that the ground was very hard, and that the birds might struggle to find food such as worms. A great discussion ensued after one child suggested that this was a good thing, as the worms are good for the soil! Great critical thinking, Robins!
Week 3 - Paddington Goes To Hospital
The children thoroughly enjoyed this text and have been role playing hospitals and doctors with enthusiasm all week! It has been fantastic to see children writing patient notes independently as part of their play, and the teamwork involved in bandaging up different soft toy patients has been wonderful. We are grateful for Mr Horton, a paramedic, who came into visit us at the end of the week to speak to us about about his job and answer our questions. He even let us have a look inside his ambulance! What a treat!
In maths we have been looking at number sequencing from 1 to 5, and noticing that there is a jump of one between each. The children identified that when you build these quantities with blocks and put them in the correct order, you end up with something that looks like a staircase - great spot! We enjoyed playing 'what's missing?' by hiding one of the towers from the sequence .
Week 3 in photos...
Week 4 - Emergency! continued
We are hugely grateful to have had visits from local community police officers as well the fire service this week! The children thoroughly enjoyed listening to them speak about their roles helping others in the community, asking thoughtful questions, and exploring the vehicles, pieces of equipment and uniforms that form part of their jobs. These hands on experiences have inspired the children to role play emergency situations and we've seen some fantastic independent writing and creative play in the provision as a result. We were also able to recall all the different emergency vehicles we'd learnt about in our class text and this inspired us to design our own vehicles to build next week. We thought carefully about what we would need to make them and what colours would be most appropriate based on what we've learnt.
In maths, we are impressing our adults with our solid understanding of numbers to 5. This week we have learnt different ways to partition 5 using objects, songs, and our 'digits' (fingers and thumbs) to represent this concept. We know that whichever way 5 is represented, altogether the total remains the same.
In music this week we began exploring ways to use our voice. We were able to sing with control and change the volume of our voices as required in a game of hide and seek, where a louder sound meant the seeker was close to finding the object and a quieter sound meant they were getting further away. Great job, Robins
Week 5 - You Can't Call An Elephant In An Emergency!
We've continued learning about helpers in our community with aweisit from an A&E doctor and an anaesthetist! We retrieved from our memories our learning about hospitals from a few weeks ago and were able to think of some questions to ask our visitors. We've loved exploring the real world pieces of equipment that were lent to us - thank you very much!
Following on from our fantastic designs last week, we began creating our own emergency vehicles out of junk modelling resources. It has been wonderful to see the teamwork, perseverance, and higher levels of vocabulary being used and demonstrated throughout this process - we are very proud of all the children! We'll continue to work on these next week, using our designs to inform our builds.
In maths we have begun to explore numbers 6 and 7, and how they are made up of 5 and a bit more! We've noticed that 6 and 7 objects won't fit on to our five-frame, and that we need another one to represent these quantities. We've been exploring different ways to make 6 and 7 using objects and our fingers, and have enjoyed playing games of 'flashy fingers' where we must show the quickest way to represent the given number on our hands.
In music, we've enjoyed exploring tempo changes. We played another game of hide and seek, but this time we increased the speed of the song if the seeker was getting close to the object, or slowed down if they were moving further away. Great effort!