These are the youngest children in the school. We have two classes, Explorers and Discoverers. Discoverers are taught by Mr Hardwick who is assisted by Mrs Liley. Explorers are taught by Miss Hellier who is assisted by Mrs Dunckley on Mondays and Fridays and Mrs Baker on Tuesdays-Thursdays. Cover teachers are Mrs Thirkell and Mrs Strand on Friday afternoons.

The reception class is the final year of the Early Years Foundation Stage.

The Early Years Foundation Stage has six areas of learning. These are:
" Personal, Social and Emotional Development
" Communication, Language and Literacy
" Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy
" Knowledge and Understanding of the World
" Physical Development
" Creative Development
All these areas are taught through termly and weekly topics.  Topics may include bears, traditional stories, harvest, autumn, Christmas, my family, transport, pets, minibeasts and other animals. Each week we have some direct teaching around these topics and this often leads into the children's play. We also like to get people in to talk to us. For example the police talk about staying safe, the fire fighters bring their fire engine, a vet tells us about caring for animals and mums bring their babies in and explain how they look after them.
We have lots of play based activities going on every day, both indoors and outdoors. The children are encouraged to choose what they would like to play with and adults help to develop their learning of all the areas of the curriculum through this. Adults will also work with small and large groups on specific tasks. Every day we have whole class teaching and a weekly circle time. We are aiming to make independent learners who share and care about their things, other people and the environment. We learn lots of important language and social skills through our play.
Snack time is a really important time for us to share with our friends. We have free fruit for our snack every day and access to our water bottles at all times.
We believe that parents have a key role to play in their children's learning. Before the child starts school we plan visits to the school and in the first few weeks we make a home visit to help us find out about the child's interests, strengths and needs.  We teach phonics every day using the Read Write Inc. programme.  Children are encouraged to take a book home to share with their parents and then we begin 'reading books' in November.
We use a range of teaching strategies, based on the children's learning needs. We use signing for the register, with songs and nursery rhymes and throughout the day. We also have a visual timetable to enable the children to see the plan for the day.

Class 2 has 30 children. Our teacher is Mrs Thorpe and our Teaching Assistant is Mrs Cartwright.  he children are either 6 or 7 years old.
 
Our learning journeys this year are:

Terms 1 and 2 - 'An African Adventure',

Terms 3 and 4 'Beaches, Boats and Pirates',

Terms 5 and 6 'A Walk in the Woods'.

Class Teachers: Di Crisp (4 days), Gill Hennebry (1 day), Liz Kelly (cover). TAs: Sarah Baker, Louise Leary

Class 3 is made up of 30 children aged 7 and 8 years old.

A base camp, set in the heart of our very own Y3/4 Winter Wonderland will give the children a place to rest and recuperate as they explore the mountain regions and consider survival in some of the World’s most hostile terrain.

The Independent Mini Projects embarked on by the pupils will begin by taking on a monstrous theme as children debate the existence of the Yeti and consider evidence of Yeti life found within our own school grounds. Yeti jokes will give children a chance to explore the humour of word play and consider ways of effective presentation of text using Word. They will extend these ICT skills as they work towards giving their own PowerPoint Presentations about Mountains.

After the half term break our journey moves down the mountain with the river stream and out towards the River Thames. Here, with the help of Michael Morpurgo, we meet the whale who strayed into the Thames a couple of years ago and explore his story.  Children will spend an exciting day designing and creating their own river boats in the ‘It’s a Floater’ Challenge! To this end we would ask for any donations of appropriate junk that could float or be used for boat parts.

Our journey will culminate with an exciting trip to the River Thames to see the Thames Barrier first hand. More information will follow nearer the time.

Year 4 is made up of 31 lively, intelligent and friendly individuals 
aged 8-9 years.

This term our learning journey begins with an Iron Man crashing to the bottom of a cliff. Children will be controlling and making their own robots to keep him company and will learn all about the uses of electricity.

The Independent Mini Projects embarked upon by the pupils will begin by taking on a robot theme as children consider where the Iron Man came from, use co-ordinates to collect body parts from the beach and ICT skills to control a wide variety of different types of robots. After half term the focus will be strongly on reduce, reuse and recycle and we will try to gain our Eco-schools award. 

French is taught weekly by a specialist teacher and swimming lessons take place each week.

The class will produce some brilliant work using our fantastic computer suite and a wide variety of programmes. We will be further strengthening our presentation and handwriting skills in order to share our fantastic work in topic books and in displays around school.

Class Teacher:
Mrs Woodcock
Classroom Assistants: Mrs Leary and Mrs McDaid

Class 5 has 31 children aged between 9 and 10 years old.

We cover 3 exciting creative curriculum topics over the school year but these will be kept top secret so as not to spoil the surprise for the children!

Our first topic this year is World War 2 and we have just been evacuated for the day – it felt very real. We will have many visitors to the class and visits to different places to link to our topics, as in previous years, such as: Sue Potter, from Tunbridge Wells Museum who will showed us some real Victorian artefacts and Anni Watson - an artist, a nurse, a policeman and a Judo instructor.

We are also looking forward to meeting our French pen-friends during our visit to Marchiennes in October.

Throughout the year there will be many opportunities to take part in a huge variety of sports events against other local schools.

Hopefully, the class will produce some brilliant work using our fantastic computer suite and a wide variety of programmes, including Graphical Modelling using Word, leaflets using Publisher and Powerpoint presentations. We will also be learning a lot about e-safety during Tunbridge Wells E-safety Week in October.

Class Teachers: Mrs Smith and Mrs Langton
Classroom Assistant: Helen Fuller, Elaine Knapp and Steph Baldwin.

The class consists of 32 lively pupils aged between 10 and 11.

The class is very social and thrives on interaction between its members and guests who come into the class.

In the Autumn Term 2009 our topic was ‘We’ll Meet Again’ when we learnt all about World War 2, including a trip by steam train when we dressed up as evacuees and did not know where we would end up!  Luckily we returned home later that day!

In Spring 2010 our topic is called ‘Up, up and away’, including everything to do with flight – from hot air balloons to jet planes via Icarus and Daedalus.
In the Summer Term we have to take SATs but we also enjoy our school journey to Paris, we get ready for our transfer to secondary school and not forgetting our fabulous Leaver’s Production.