9th February 2026

Dear Parents and Carers,

As we come to the end of a busy half term, I’ve found myself reflecting on so many wonderful moments — children proudly sharing their work, supporting one another, and showing real responsibility in their learning. I am incredibly proud of our children for the respect and kindness they show every day, grateful to our staff for their continued hard work and care, and thankful to you, our families, for your ongoing support for the school.

Celebrating Our Children

There has been so much to celebrate this half term, and the children continue to impress us with their enthusiasm for learning and their pride in their achievements.

Thanks to recent donations, our Tiddlers and starfish have wonderful new bikes, helmets and outdoor equipment, which the children are already enjoying responsibly and with great excitement. We are very much looking forward to welcoming the remaining resources soon, including Tiddlers’ new mud kitchen setup — watch this space!

Our new phonics scheme, Read Write Inc., has been a great success. Our Reception and Key Stage 1 children have made fantastic progress, supported by the commitment and care of our staff and volunteers. The amount of organisation and preparation behind the scenes has been significant, and I would like to thank everyone involved. The children’s enthusiasm for reading is a joy to see — they are so keen to show off their skills and share their reading achievements.

The artwork coming out of our Jellyfish and Dolphins classes has been truly incredible. The creativity, focus and pride the children take in their work is wonderful to see.

And finally, I always treasure any moment I get to spend with our Seals class. Their positive attitude to learning, respect for one another, and pride in their progress shines through every day across all of their subjects and they take pride in the responsibilities they take on across the school in various roles.

A Word of Thanks to Our Staff

I would like to take a moment to thank our whole staff team for their continued dedication and kindness throughout the half term, particularly during a period that has seen increased levels of illness. Their care, flexibility and extra measures to keep children safe and well never go unnoticed, and we are very lucky to have such a committed team.

Reminder

A quick uniform reminder as we move forward: children should wear completely black shoes or trainers, along with their school logo jumper or hoodie. Thank you for your support in helping us maintain high standards and a strong sense of belonging.

As always, thank you for your continued support. We are really excited about all that next half term has in store as we head towards Easter, and we look forward to welcoming everyone back refreshed and ready to learn.

Warm regards

Last week we moved onto Julia Donaldson's 'Room on the Broom' in drawing club, the children are always really excited by drawing club and it is really helping to develop confidence in fine motor skills, vocabulary (whoosh, swoop, fiery, horrible, passenger) and story telling. We have been using the story in provision to create potions and construct things we can carry a passenger on. The year 1's have also continued with writing setting descriptions using their senses.

In Maths the Reception children have been working on recognising and creating patterns and the Year 1 children have begun their addition and subtraction unit to 10.

This week in History we will be drawing simple maps of Combe Martin and talking about how the shops in the town have changed over the years,

Maths - We have started our addition and subtraction to 20 unit. We started by using paper plates and counters to represent wholes and parts.

English - Reading- We have continued our learning around where the wild things are - we have done some performance poetry, each table taking a verse of a poem linked to the story and have continued our retrieval and summary skills throughout.

English - Writing - We have started our setting writing unit. We have looked at an Autumnal picture and thought about what we could see, smell and hear in the picture. We have then used these ideas to write some sentences - making sure we remember full stops, capital letters and finger spaces.

RE - The children really enjoyed the visit from Neomi - she is a practising Muslim. She told us about her day to day life, demonstrated how she might pray and talked us through her son’s wedding. She also had some wonderful artefacts for the children to handle and ask questions about.

Computing - This week we continued to learn how to use our chromebooks - we are still practising our keyboards and our mouse pads. This week we used a drawing app to help us learn how to use the mouse by double clicking and selecting tools.

Art - Mrs Railston taught some of the children this week to do some careful observational drawings of shells using continuous lines. They drew using handwriting pens and concentrated and worked hard!

This week, Dolphins have been planning and writing a narrative story based on the wordless book, Journey by Aaron Becker. They have explored a variety of adjectives and adverbs to describe the setting and actions of the character.

In maths, they have looked at rounding numbers to 10 and 100.

They have embraced being historians and scientists, thinking critically about the Palaeolithic period and how to group rocks by their properties. This will link in with their art over the next few weeks where they will be turning the class into a stone age cave!

On Monday we were visited by Neomi who is a practising Muslim. She travelled from Exeter to tell us about her faith and show us some artefacts. This links with the Religious Education topic which the children are currently doing where they are learning what it means to be a Muslim in Britain today. Thank you to Mrs Adams for arranging the visit.

We have completed our Place Value unit in maths and will now move onto a short one week unit on Addition and Subtraction.

We have also completed our narrative unit in English. The children have written stories based on the events of Shackleton’s expedition in Antarctica. They have been inspired by the resilience and determination shown by Shackleton and his crew.

This year, throughout the school we will be introducing and using the Zones of Regulation. The Zones of Regulation is all about developing our social emotional regulation skills and competencies.

The first concept (unit) explores how regulation also helps us have more control over how we manage our feelings, energy, and behaviour. We will explore the same concept over a few weeks before moving onto the next one. These will be introduced in assemblies and then discussed in class. Each of concept expands upon skills, lessons, and vocabulary taught in earlier ones.

We have attached some information so you can continue to support your child at home with the current concept.

Further explanation on The Zones of Regulation can be found via this link https://zonesofregulation.com/how-it-works/

Whole School Attendance (This academic year)	92.9%
Whole School Attendance (Last Term)	93.2%
Starfish Class	94.1%
Jellyfish Class	90.9%
Dolphins Class	94.4%
Seals Class	93.2%

Monday	No Clubs
Tuesday	Football Club - Run by Exeter community trust - £5 per session bookable on Schoolmoney Max 18 children Collection at 4:15pm
Wednesday	No Clubs
Thursday	8am - Tennis Club - Run by Devonshire Tennis Academy - Bookable at bookings@devonshiretennisacademy.com Glow in the dark football - Run by Primary Sports - Bookable at www.primary-sports.co.uk Collection at 4.15pm
Friday	No Clubs

Jellyfish artwork

Jellyfish artwork

Jellyfish artwork

Monday

No Clubs

Tuesday

Wednesday

No Clubs

Thursday

Friday

No Clubs

OTHER CLUBS

Hot Chocolate Friday Children : For always going above & Beyond

Class Updates

Tiddlers

Starfish

Jellyfish

Dolphins

Puffins

Seals