PRIMARY school children in Bolton have been working in creative ways to stay connected with classmates.

Pupils at Harwood Meadows Primary School spoke about their lockdown learning with MP Mark Logan during a visit to the school on Friday.

Two Year Four students, Ethan and Billy, showed off their projects, including research about different European countries,

Sophie Jacques, their teacher, said: "At the moment we're reading The Nothing to See Here Hotel together on Zoom, and we go through two chapters each day.

"We bought every child a copy of the book at the start of lockdown, and all of our work in English has been based on the book.

"We're also really trying to do a lot of work with authors, we tweeted Andy Shepherd, who wrote this series, with some of our work and he replied to us."

The classes are currently split into three groups, with two "bubbles" of classes being taught in school, and a third group completing all work from home.

As the school closes for the summer holidays, teachers have a few more weeks of work ahead of them to return the usual furniture to classrooms, ready for the whole school returning in September.

Siobain Barnes, headteacher, added: "We're just trying our best, and it has been absolutely brilliant, parents have been dropping work off and it does feel like everybody's doing the same thing.

"We've worked really closely with other schools in cluster one, people think we're in competition for places or rankings but it's all about the children and what's best for them.

"One of the other headteacher's said it best when they said 'I feel like we've started out as colleague and ended up friends.

"All throughout we've sent letters and updates as a cluster so the community can see we're all working together and know that if one of us is doing something good, the rest of us are too."