Ellington Primary School

January News

Happy New Year!

What a brilliant start we have had to 2026. It was lovely to hear what a wonderful Christmas everyone has had and all of the exciting things the children got up to over the festive period. They have come back to school refreshed and ready to learn!

In English, we have already completed our first unit of Spring term focusing on the story Traction Man by Mini Grey. The children came up with some wonderful ideas about the adventures of Traction Man using our prediction and inference skills. We explored retelling the story using our best superhero storyteller voice during a voiceover task. We then learned lots of new grammatical tools to help us write some fantastic newspaper reports about all of the heroic acts of Traction Man! My favourite part of this unit was the children coming up with their own newspaper names, there were some good ones!

This week, we have moved on to another new story, The Tin Forest by Helen Ward. So far we have explored the text and created our own settings that could replace the tin forest from the story.

In Maths, we have been working hard on our addition and subtraction skills using 2 digit and 1 digit numbers including crossing tens. We then moved on to some division including remainders. Some very tricky concepts but the children have shown great resilience and understanding during their tasks. We have also begun to work on shape by looking at lines of symmetry.

In History, we have started our new topic ‘How did we learn to fly?’. So far, we have looked at the lives of the Wright Brothers and Bessie Coleman and how they have been historically significant. We recreated the first flight of the Wright Brothers through a drama activity where we looked at the perspectives of different people involved. The children worked well in their groups to come up with some wonderful ideas about how each person would be thinking and feeling.