17/05/2024

What a busy 2 weeks we have had in Year 3!

Last Friday we had a fantastic alternative day of sports. Coaches from Arena came in to deliver some awesome games including Dartmoor 3 ball, Capture the Flag, American Football, Boccia and Archery. We had a fantastic day and we were very impressed with the skills and teamwork that we saw. 

Also this week we have been continuing with sewing. Year 3 first designed their pillows before cutting the fabric, sewing the motif and using a running stitch to sew it all together. The finished designs looks fabulous!  

In Science we have been looking at Plants and continuing with our work in the school Polytunnel growing flowers and vegetables. We conducted an experiment, which we have been monitoring for the last 3 weeks, to see if a seed will germinate and grow in a darkness, artificial light and natural sunlight. We also used soil and cotton wool to compare growth too.  We predicted that the seeds in the natural light and soil would grow the best as those conditions give a plant everything it needs to grow. The children were amazed to see that the seeds in darkness did germinate however, the seedlings were stringy, brown and did not look too healthy. After half term we will be starting to look at the Water Cycle and Rivers. 

We are looking forward to our Geography Field Trip on Monday and will post some pictures from the trip later next week.

Have a lovely weekend!

The Year 3 Team 

Mines and Mosques!

KS2 SATs
Well done to our wonderful Year 6 children. They approached the assessments this week with a determined and calm attitude. Today they have certainly let their hair down (and given it a rinse too) as they finished the week with some water fun. The warmer weather certainly added to their afternoon!

Summer 2024 Bridge Schools Trust Parent and Carer Questionnaire
Your feedback is really important to us as we work in partnership to achieve the best possible education for the children. Please check your email to complete a Trust-wide questionnaire that each school is sending out. For Q20, I would really appreciate your views on the key strengths to celebrate, as well as areas we could develop even further for all our children. Your time in completing this questionnaire is valued and will help us continually improve. Please complete by Friday 24th May, thank you. 

FOWPA Disco – Wednesday 22nd May
A reminder of arrangements:

14:15 – 15:00 Reception, Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 (in school time)
15:15 – 16:00 Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6

Children are invited to wear party clothes into school. Please note that Year 6 will need to wear their PE kit to school and bring a change of clothes if they are going to the Disco.

We will have a couple of quieter areas should children want to have some time out from all that dancing!

Don’t forget to complete a permission slip if your child is in Year 4 - Year 6, as the Disco takes place at the end of the school day. Spare letters are available from your class teacher/office. For this fundraising event, we would welcome a suggested donation of £1.50. Please ensure your child brings into school a water bottle that can be topped up. A small snack will also be provided.

Lost Property
Thank you to FOWPA for organising the nearly new uniform sales this week. Next Monday-Wednesday after school, we will be putting out all the lost property by the main entrance. Please do take a look to see if anything belongs to your child. Anything that isn’t collected will be donated to a local charity/clothes bank.

House Points
Congratulations to this week’s winners, Choughs!

Swans – 365
Choughs – 369
Cormorants – 281
Puffins – 331

Important dates coming up:
Monday 20th May: Year 1 and Year 3 Trips
Monday 20th May: Year 2 PE instead of Wednesday (please wear PE kit)
Wednesday 22nd May: 14:15-15:00 Reception-Year 3 Disco; 15:15-16:00 Year 4-Year 6 Disco
Friday 24th May: INSET Day – School closed
Monday 27th – Friday 31st: May Half term
Monday 3rd June: Back to school
Tuesday 4th June: 14:00-16:15 Year 5 and Year 6 Quad Games
Wednesday 5th June: Class Photos
Thursday 6th June: Year 6 Dance-a-thon
Friday 7th June: Community Day for Royal Cornwall Show – School closed for children

A reminder that school is closed next Friday 24th May for INSET. It’s a four-day week for the children before the May half term break.

Have a relaxing weekend.
Best wishes,
Chris Wathern

Summer 1 - Week 5 - Innovating, researching and recording! 

English

In English this week, the writing genre focussed on information texts. The children read up to chapter 7 gathering information about Podkin, his siblings and most importantly the 12 gifts from the Goddess.

The children used a planning format to innovate their own gifts from the Goddess. They had to consider its name, its magical properties, its history and its current whereabouts. They used 3 of the original gifts to give them inspiration before generating their own. The plan would then provide them with notes for writing their information texts independently.

The children then began writing the introduction, here they had to provide the reader background context, what the text would be about and some information about the Goddess.

Finally, they began writing their main body of the text; this was broken down into weapons, tools, armour/clothing. For each, they had to explain information about the gifts using descriptive language.

Next week, it’s poetry where the children will explore how to use onomatopoeia.

Maths

For Maths, we continued with position and direction. The children learnt about translation, and then translation using co-ordinates in order to be more accurate. They then were introduced to symmetry, where the children had to make connections to previous learning. Using mirrors, they located lines of symmetry on shapes and identifying horizontal and vertical lines of symmetry.

On Thursday, the children then completed their end of unit assessments. Their scores were recorded and next steps/targets set.

On Friday, the children then completed their half termly arithmetic assessment. This is where the children can work towards their targets making progress in their scores!

Wider Curriculum

This week, the children were Geographers learning how to describe and understand key aspects of the water cycle, whilst outlining the impact on human geography through the distribution of natural resources.

This was a heavy research lesson, with lots of discussion and use of retrieval skills to unpick information and record key facts. The children then created a double page spread explaining their understanding of the above. They then use iPads to continue gathering data and statistics.

Next, the children then looked at natural disasters, again the recorded what they had learnt making links to the UK and other foreign countries, outlining the impact on human geography.

We’ve had a busy week, next week is the countdown to half term!

Have a lovely sunny weekend,

Best Wishes,

The Year 5 Team

Summer 1 - Week 4 and 5

Adding to our learning journey

Over the last 2 weeks, the children have been busy impressing us with their writing and maths skills. 

Writing - Every morning, the children have been coming into class and writing sentences based on a picture stimulus. The progress the children have made in their writing has blown us away. They are saying their sentences aloud, applying their phonics knowledge, correctly forming their letters and getting more confident in using finger spaces. Great work Reception!

Maths - We have been working on addition and subtraction  stories over the last two weeks. In their addition stories, the children started with using concrete objects, and were then able to move on to writing addition sums. We moved onto subtraction within 10 this week which the children are starting to grasp. 

Music - We were lucky enough to have Mrs Wade join us to give the children an African drumming lesson. The children thoroughly enjoyed learning how to play the drum. They were able to copy rhythms and made their own rhythm up to perform it to the class. Thank you Mrs Wade for giving up your time to give the children this experience.

Thank you so much for your help in making drop off and pick up a smooth transition through our new gate. We really do appreciate it. 

Have a wonderful weekend. 

Best wishes,
The Reception Team 

The children have been learning about the  'Life cycle of a butterfly’.
We have had some real caterpillars for the children to observe and to watch grow.

Over the past few weeks, the children have been lucky enough to see the caterpillars develop into chrysalis' and then turn into butterflies. 
This week, the children went to woody corner to release the caterpillars that had come out of their chrysalis.’

Summer 1, Weeks 3 and 4: Determined designers

Another busy fortnight in Year 1 but we have been particularly impressed with the resilience shown in Year 1 - we have a lot of "Keep Going Koalas"! 

DT

Linked to our wider curriculum learning of the seaside, the children have been busy designing jellyfish puppets. 
Firstly, they had to work with small pieces of felt and investigate the 3 different ways of joining the pieces together - with glue, safety pins or staples. Everyone tried all 3 methods and the glue station got very sticky at one point with no one having much success - but that's ok because designers try things and evaluate whether it worked or could have been better. The children unanimously decided the glue wasn't for them and we tried our hand at stapling. We had more success here but did get through a lot of staples! We also tried joined the felt together using safety pins. We soon realised these were tricky - especially some of the smaller ones - but some of our classmates were amazing at pinning the pieces together and were nominated as "class experts" and they helped others out who were struggling - some wonderful teamwork turtle skills on show! 

Finally, we were ready to design our jellyfish so children chose a colour of felt and sketched out on a template what their jellyfish would look like. These were photocopied before the children used their cutting skills to carefully cut out the template and - back to the safety pins! - pinned the template onto the felt. They then had to cut out the felt and join their 2 jellyfish pieces together. This was where they chose which method they would like to use to join them. The jellyfish need to be finished next week and we can't wait to show them off!


English

We finished off our learning of the Singing Mermaid by reinventing the story together and the children decided they would like their new character to be the Dancing Dolphin. The Dancing Dolphin lived in the deep, blue sea and was warned by William Whale not to go with Sam Sly to the circus where she was trapped in a tank. Luckily, her friend Ollie Octopus helped her escape back to the sea. The children loved writing their stories and we are seeing them apply the knowledge they have learnt in lessons to their writing, often independently. For example, children were using exclamation marks and some wonderful adjectives to describe the characters and their feelings in the story. We really enjoyed reading their stories. 

We then started on a poetry unit, looking at our different senses and thinking what we can see, hear, smell, taste and feel at the seaside. Children worked in groups and studied different photos of beaches to make lists and we added adjectives to these the following day. For example, I can see the sea became I can see the crashing waves; and I can hear the seagulls became I can hear the noisy seagulls squawking. The children are then going to use these ideas to write their own seaside senses poems.

Maths

We have now moved onto learn about fractions and looked at halving an object, such as a pizza or an orange, and talked about now having 2 parts. We moved onto discuss halving a group of objects, talking about having more than 2 objects but still having 2 groups of objects. We identified to be halved, the groups need to have an equal number and we shared out different numbers of counters equally to see what half of a given number was. The children are making the link between halving and doubling, knowing that if 5 is a half, they have to double 5 to find the whole number. 

History

As part of our learning around the question "have people always liked to be beside the seaside?", we looked at what beaches were like in the past and how they have changed over time. The children loved looking at a range of photos of seasides in the past and learning what many Victorians did when they went to the seaside. Their favourite part was looking at the bathing carriages some Victorians were lucky enough to use where ladies were pulled by horse in a carriage into the sea where they would lower themselves into the water and have a swim before climbing back into the carriage to change and be pulled back to dry land. What a wonderful idea! They were less keen on wearing a suit or a formal dress to the beach though - much preferring their t-shirts and shorts! 

Phonics

With our phonics screening check creeping ever closer, we have planned in some fun phonics afternoons where the children have enjoyed playing phonics games in groups to practice their sounds. Please do continue to read with your child at home and practice their phonics sounds. There are some great games on "Phonics Play" website which are free to play and the children do love them! 

Reminders

If you have already done so, please do return your trip consent letter for the aquarium trip. 
Library day is Thursday - please do send your child in with their book so they are able to change it. 
Monday is PE so children should come to school in PE kits please. 

Have a lovely weekend, 
The Year 1 Team

Summer 1 - Week 4 - Things are hotting up! 

English

In English this week, the children began a new learning journey focusing on the genre ‘Myths and Legends’ and the text ‘The Legend of Podkin One-Ear’. Throughout the learning journey, the children will have the opportunity to explore a range of grammatical skills and knowledge before writing their own version of a chapter from the text.

On Tuesday, the children used their VIPERS skills prediction and inference to write a blurb. The only information they had was the contents page and a map. The children were presented with a range of WAGOLL’s to encourage imagination.

On Wednesday, the children then used their retrieval skills, where they learnt about some of the treasures from the text via an information piece. Using notes, the children then wrote two additional paragraphs, mimicking style, tone and vocabulary.

We’ve also noticed within writing lessons, the children find it tricky to edit, improve and re-draft their work. Therefore, on Thursday the children had the opportunity to improve a paragraph, continuing on from the information writing. They had to look at, sentence structures, formal language, punctuation etc.

Maths

In Maths, the children began their position and direction learning journey. To begin the journey, we introduced them to vocabulary that may appear throughout. We also used our Freya models, to discuss misconceptions and examples which the children can refer to throughout their learning.

So far, the children have looked at reading and plotting co-ordinates and then applying this when problem solving. They have also explored translation and then translation with co-ordinates. For this journey, we have also had the chance to apply our knowledge to real life scenarios.

In Morning work, we continue to revisit learning from our shape learning journey. This week, the children had the opportunity to draw angles using protractors accurately. We will continue to embed this over the next few weeks.

Wider Curriculum

In Wider curriculum, we have continued with our Art learning journey. On Wednesday, the children worked in their sketch books, experimenting with colour palettes for their Modroc animals. They decided which colours and designs words well and how to mix colours in order to generate the correct shade.

On Thursday, the children then began painting their base colours and painting the more intricate details. With the weather being so lovely, we were able to get outside and enjoy the sunshine whilst we painted. Once their animal was complete, they went back to the sketch books, writing annotations and evaluating their work.

We are going to keep hold of the animals and use them in our computing/animation project! WATCH THIS SPACE!

As always, have a magical weekend,

Enjoy the glorious weather,

Best Wishes,

Year 2 have been scientists this week investigating everyday materials. They started off finding and naming materials in the classroom (glass, plastic, wood, water, metal, rock, brick, paper, fabric). Then they thought about other objects that are also made from the same material. From here they were able to talk about if certain materials are suitable or not suitable for particular items. For example is glass suitable for a hammer? Why is wood suitable for a table? Why is cardboard not suitable for a water bottle? Then they used scientific descriptions to write why these materials or suitable or not suitable (waterproof, stiff, hard, smooth, absorbent, stretchy etc). Towards the end of the week they conducted an experiment to see how different materials can be bent, squashed, twisted and stretched. This helped them to deepen their understanding about the suitability of materials for everyday items and why it is important for some items to have its shape changed. For example, playdough needs to be squashable and elastic in clothing needs to be stretched.

Here is a link to continue the learning at home Everyday materials - KS1 Science - BBC Bitesize

Enjoy the sunny weather!