It really felt as though Spring had sprung this week! We took full advantage of the glorious weather spending lots of time outside and making several trips to our lovely field. Some of the year 6 children even came to play with us; they taught us some parachutes games that were so much fun! Thank you year 6 – we love spending time with you!

One afternoon, we took our baskets to fill with leaves, sticks, pinecones and daisies and, when we returned to the outdoor classroom, we created our own mini Garden of Gethsemane to continue our learning about Holy Week. Can you spot Jesus in the garden below?

We used Google Earth to fly on our magic carpet from St. Matthew’s to Jerusalem to have a look at what the Garden of Gethsemane looks like today and we thought “the trees looked very old”. Then, we visited our own beautiful school garden where we spent some time sitting quietly, thinking about how sad Jesus felt after the Last Supper and how he gathered strength for what was to come on Good Friday through prayer.

Back in the classroom, we learned about another beautiful garden; this time, a garden belonging to the famous painter Claude Monet. We read the story of The Magical Garden of Claude Monet and found out that he loved to paint pictures of his garden.

This story, along with the visit to our own garden, inspired us to become artists ourselves! We each created the most beautiful, and very individual, daffodil painting on a tile as a gift for Mother’s Day. Here we are busy painting and wrapping our gifts:

Our Spotlight Stories this week helped us to think about our wonderful mums and all the many things they do to look after us and keep us safe. First, we read Monkey Puzzle by Julia Donaldson:

And then, My Mum by Anthony Browne:

In our picture news lesson, we learnt about the journey of a letter from postbox to front door. We watched this video of a birthday card making its way from a granddaughter to the postbox, through the sorting office to her grandmother. The video inspired us to make our own cards (for our mums) and send them through the post in time for Mother’s Day!

Before posting our cards into the postbox, we each checked that our envelope had a stamp on it, along with our mummy’s full name and our address. We knew that the postman would not know where to take the card if it just said ‘my mum’ on the front!

While we were waiting patiently for our turn to post our cards, a red van pulled up next to the postbox and a postman got out and said hello! He wanted to know what we were doing and the children were happy to explain. He even offered to have his photo taken with us. Thank you so much Mr. Postman – what amazing timing!

We very much hope everyone’s card made it in time and wish all our lovely mums a very Happy Mother’s Day!