Book Week

Book Week is always a big celebration at Prospect House and this year was no different!

As part of launching our new approach to improving writing skills across the school, we took advantage of Book Week to encourage all our pupils to take part in an exciting project. We kicked off with an assembly where Miss Leach, our Head of English, read a story to the children, lit by candlelight and with added forest sounds to create a magical atmosphere. The Last Wolf by Mini Grey is an original re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood, where Red sets off to hunt a wolf. As she makes her way through the forest, she learns some valuable lessons and the story does not end quite the way it does in the original fairytale.

After Miss Leach had finished reading the story aloud, our pupils were treated to a video recording of Mini Grey herself in which she explained her inspiration and why she felt that it was an important tale to tell. She told the children of the lynx, the bear and the wolf, all of which can no longer be found in English forests.

Each year group, from Reception to Year 6, was assigned a section of The Last Wolf to work on re-telling in their English lessons. All week the children have been using the lenses, vocabulary collecting and sentence stacking techniques to create incredible pieces of writing that perfectly capture the magic of the story and the original fairytale it was based on.

As part of this project, our older pupils have been mentoring the younger students with Year 6 joining Year 2 and Year 5 joining Year 3 for their lessons on sentence stacking. After our visit last term from Jane Considine, the creator of The Write Stuff, the children have shown such determination to stretch their writing skills in the most wonderful ways and they have certainly make all their teachers proud!

The staff have been really impressed by the creativity, imagination and commitment shown in each English lesson. The pupils have also shown great empathy in understanding the deeper meaning behind the story and this has fuelled some powerful conversations about our ecosystem and the importance of protecting our wildlife.