Reading 

Please continue to read new fiction and non-fiction texts. Try to spend at least 20-30 minutes of reading daily. 

After reading the text, please engage in a variety of discussions with your parents/siblings, focusing on different aspects. This can include:

• The characters

• The language used

• The theme of the text

• Making predictions

• Opinions and evidence to back opinions

 

Reading books will be changed every Monday (they have the option to change their books more frequently). 

Children will visit our school library every Thursday.

If you'd like to learn more, visit the BBC Bitesize website for KS2 - here you'll find relevant and fun activities which will support your learning in each subject.

Please find the slides from the Ufton Court Final meeting delivered on Thursday 4th February 2026:-

 

 

A special message from Mick Gowar (Secretary of The Ted Hughes Society)

To children from Pegasus and Scorpius classes,

Thank you so much for sending such an excellent selection of book reviews and book jacket designs.  There is a very impress variety of reviews, and some extremely good questions and criticisms which I'll do my best to answer if I can.  I won't be able to mention everyone's work, but I'll pick out a few.  If I don't mention you, that doesn't mean I don't think work was good - I think all the work is outstanding, but I've got rather a lot of things to do before I go to bed tonight.

Anira, whose review is on the first page you sent me, makes a very good remark that the book is trying to tell us something - perhaps to be careful.  Ted Hughes was a writer who had very strong opinions, especially about how badly a lot of people were treating the planet - forgetting about how they should look after birds and animals and the rivers and the seas.  And about how people can be violent to people they don't know, people who are different to them, sometimes because they are frightened of them.  But if people are patient, thoughtful and kind then others they first thought were bad  may turn out to be brave and kind.  Do you think that's part of the story of 'The Iron Man'?

I enjoyed the folded booklets, they were very well-drawn and colourful; and like all the reviews you sent, the writing it was very good - well spelled, well planned and neatly and clearly written. Saathvik, who made one of the booklets, writes a very good review which isn't all praise; there are some things that Saatvik doesn't like, so 'The Iron Man' gets 4 stars and not 5.  Saathvik writes: 'There should be another book that would contain more chapters.' Good news, Saatvik: there is another story book by Ted Hughes called 'The Iron Woman', which is about people polluting the water in the rivers, which poisons the river and all the plants, insects, fish and animals who live in or beside the river.  It's also about how the Iron Woman, Hogarth, a girl called Lucy and The Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon make the people who are damaging the river, and harming the living things in the river, understand the harm they're causing. 

The boy or girl who created the booklet which is in the top right of page 5 (it's got some very good decoration on the cover of coloured curved and L-shaped marks, but I can't find a name) asks two very good questions: how long does it take to create a book? And where did the name Hogarth come from?  I'm afraid I can't ask Ted Hughes, because he died in 1998, but I did know him a little and I'll do my best to answer from what he told me and what other friends of his have written. 

So, 'The Iron Man' took years from Ted Hughes getting the idea, writing it down, correcting it - as you do with your writing, I'm sure - and the printed book first appearing in 1968. 'The Iron Man' began as a bedtime story he told to his children, Frieda and Nicholas - if you look on the first page of the book, it should say 'a children's story in five nights', because that's how long it took him to tell the story.  After that he wrote it down, and it took several versions before he was happy with it.  Then he sent it to a company called Faber & Faber, a publisher, who would turn it into a printed book.  They had to make a lot of decisions:  which artist they would ask to draw the pictures; what font or typeface they would print the book in and how big the print would be; which magazines and newspapers buy adverts in to let people know the book was being published; which printer to ask to make metal plates of all the words and pictures and to print the pages...on and on. It usually takes nearly two years from when a writer finishes writing to their book finally appearing in the shops for the first time.

Hgarth's name. I have a friend called Ann who was a very good friend of Ted Hughes, and she says he chose the name because of the sounds it makes: 'Oh' and 'Ah' - which sound like breathing in and out. Try saying the name yourself and see what you think. But I have another idea.  When Ted Hughes was thirteen years old there was comic strip about a superhero called Garth which was in a British newspaper called 'The Daily Mirror.'  Ted Hughes's father owned a shop that sold newspapers and Ted read a lot of papers and magazines that his father sold.  I wonder if, when he had to decide on a name for the young hero of a book for children, he might have remembered the name of a hero from the comic strip he read when he was young: Garth.  Maybe he a added a heroic sounding 'Ho!'?  Sadly I can't ask him.

It's late now - nearly 10 o'clock and I have a busy day tomorrow, so please excuse me if I stop typing very soon. Thank you again for your excellent pictures and very interesting and intelligent questions.  I do hope you keep reading all the other wonderful books written for children - like 'The Sheep Pig' by Dick King Smith, 'Charlotte's Web' by E.B. White', 'The Wind In The Willows' by Kenneth Graham.  And of course, other books by Ted Hughes like his poems about Moon creatures "Moon-whale', 'Meet My Folks' about his crazy family, and 'The Iron Woman'. 

Happy reading and Good Night!

With all good wishes,

Mick Gowar (Secretary of The Ted Hughes Society).

Hey Year 4,

A special message from Chris Callaghan

 

 

Year 4 began the summer term with a wonderful surprise – they received a letter (see below) from the author Wendy Orr, whose book Nim’s Island they read during the spring term. After writing letters to Wendy Orr, the children were thrilled to receive a reply. It boosted their confidence, excitement and creativity, as they now know that their writing has a real purpose and audience.

"Thank you very much for these letters with your insightful reviews and questions – and your amazing artwork. I loved them." – Wendy Orr

What a fantastic way to kick off the summer term! 

 

 Dear Year 4

Thank you very much for these letters with your insightful reviews and questions – and your amazing art work. I loved them. I was also impressed by the very neat handwriting, which is something I find difficult – mine is very messy, and it’s a big nuisance because sometimes I can’t read what I’ve written.

 

I’ll have to answer you all in one letter and just hope I get everybody’s questions, because I have been working very hard on a new book and am ready to go bed now!

 

I’m sorry that I didn’t make it clear that Nim’s mum died. I hoped that the way I described it made it not so terrible, but because it is such a very sad thing everyone hopes it’s not true.

 

Some people didn’t like the storms, but the reason I put them in is that in a book the characters have to face big problems that we wouldn’t like to face in real life – but when we face them with the book characters sometimes it helps us be braver in real life.  And books would be very boring if characters didn’t have any problems, so I always give my characters big problems – and they always manage to sort them out in the end, in one way or another, which is like life too.

 

I didn’t draw the pictures – I don’t draw nearly as well as those of you who sent me pictures! Kerry Millard drew the ones inside, and Chris Riddell drew the cover on the copy that you have. There are different covers in nearly every country, so I will send you a slide show with a bit of the story of how I wrote the book, and some of the different covers.

 

I think it took me about 18 months to write the book, because I wrote a lot of drafts before I started to get it the way I wanted. I wrote it in 1999.

 

My favourite part is Nim riding Selkie through the waves, and that’s my favourite picture too. There aren’t any parts I don’t like, because I wouldn’t put them in if I didn’t like them. Though I certainly don’t like the Troppo Tourists! (They have to be in there to be a problem.)

 

I can never decide who my favourite character is – probably Nim herself, and Selkie and Fred.

 

 The name Nim came from the Hawaiian word for coconut – Niu, but I couldn’t figure out how to say it, so I played with it and made it Nim. After I finished the book my son became good friends with another boy called Nim – and a few people have written to me to say they’ve named their baby Nim because of the book!

 

Jack Rousseau was to sound a bit like Crusoe, for Robinson Crusoe, and for Jacques Cousteau, a famous underwater explorer. Alex Rover sounded like a good name for an adventure writer, and one that you wouldn’t know if it was a man or a woman. Selkie is like a mum to Nim so I named her for the mythical Celtic selkies, who are seals who can shed their skins to become women.

 

Chica means little girl in Spanish, so I thought it was a  funny name  for a giant sea turtle. And Fred was named after my parents’ dachshund, who was very greedy, very jealous – and very loyal and loving.

 

Now I have to say goodnight, so I’m going to give you the link to the Nim’s Island page on my website where you can get the slide show and answers to a few more questions.

https://wendyorr.com/book/nims-island/

 Happy reading

 Wendy