School Blog

Saving Water Assembly

 in Church / Class Four / Class Three / Whole School by

On Wednesdays, class teachers take it in turns to lead key stage assemblies and this term we are having an environmental theme based on appreciating and doing our bit to look after God’s wonderful world.

This week, we have been exploring how to save water when cleaning our teeth. Do you leave the tap running while you brush? Well, we discovered that over 2 litres of clean, fresh, drinking water goes trickling down the drain unused if you do!

We had 2 willing volunteers demonstrating good brushing that used about a quarter of a cup full to do the job well. Let’s try to make a small change and make a BIG difference.

 

Times Tables Rock Stars!

 in Class Three / Maths by

After Mr Dean and Class 4 demonstrated Times Table Rock Stars in Celebration Assembly last week, Class 3 have been super keen to get going themselves. This week everyone has been hard at work speedily beating their times and sharpening up their quick recall with great enthusiasm. Keep up the good work and next week we’ll be exploring the shop to spend your well earned gold coins!

Here are some of the class hard at work.

Storytelling and place value

 in Class Three / English / Maths by

We’ve made a super start to the new term in Class 3. We have had great fun learning to tell the story of “Why dog is friends with man” inspired by a local storyteller Taffy Thomas. If you’d like to hear the tale, do ask anyone in Class 3 and they’ll spend a happy 5 minutes with added actions and sound effects to entertain you!

We have also been working hard on representing numbers in different ways. Year 4 have proudly worked out lots of representations of 4 digit numbers here from a range of images.

Welcome from Class 2

 in Class Two / English / SCARF by

Class 2 have been busy creating speech bubbles and shields to share information about themselves. We are proud of the display we have created.

Superb Shelters!

 in Class Four by

A big welcome back to everyone in class 4!

It’s been so nice to see all of your smiling faces this week. Everyone has come back with a whole bundle of enthusiasm, and it sounds like everyone has had an amazing holiday! We’ve been up to plenty of fun things in class this week (as well as just a little bit of maths!), and we’ve finished everything off with a trip to our forest schools area.

Buzzing with enthusiasm, we all made the short trek up the hill to learn that we would be building shelters! In teams of 4, with nothing more than a tarpaulin, rope and 4 pegs, our task was to design and build a shelter that would protect our group from the elements. We learned how to elect a suitable site, thought about how we could use the natural world to our advantage, made a plan and then got to work.

Most groups settled on a nice, simple ridgeline design, creating a tent shape with a line between some trees. Some amazing teamwork was spotted, with people teaching each other the skills they had picked up from activities outside of school and playing to their strengths. Take a look at our shelters below. One was even big enough to keep the whole class out of the rain!

Keep your eyes peeled for more shelter blogs coming your way soon as we bring our knowledge back to class to write a set of instructions for building your own shelter. Who knows – maybe you could give it a go at home!

End of term fun for our Year 6 leavers

 in Class Four / Whole School by

All our year 6 leavers were treated to a very special evening meal made and served by our very professional, attentive and talented year 5 chefs and waiters!

They also enjoyed a wonderful trip to Brockhole that included a picnic by the lake and fun on the Treetop Nets!

3D Symmetry

 in Maths / Skiddaw by

We have been having fun creating 3D symmetrical creations. We worked in small teams to use any bits and pieces from our classroom to create patterns and models that had one or two lines of symmetry. We looked carefully at as many of the details as we could – writing and patterns on things made it really tricky but we made it as symmetrical as we could!

 

 

If you go down to the woods today…

 in Bowfell / Whole School by

If you did happen to pass Heaves woods this afternoon, you may well have seen Reception having super fun at their forest school session! The rain did not put us off, especially as we had one of Miss Butler’s brilliant shelters to hide underneath when we got there! We all enjoyed having a scavenger hunt to see what we could see and hear, we thought about why we might not have found certain things on our list and created our own magical wands from nature’s treasures. Mrs Haslam was also very proud of her newly acquired fire making skills, which were put to good use for us to toast marshmallows on to complete our afternoon!

 

Chocolate Rocks!

 in Science / Skiddaw by

Skiddaw class have been learning all about rocks in Science recently. There is nothing better than chocolate to show the ways of making different types of rocks! The Rock Cycle goes round and round and rocks are changed into other types over millions of years. We started with layers of grated milk and white chocolate to represent the sedimentary rocks like limestone and chalk. We pressed these little bits down just like the sea presses the layers down to make these rocks.

We then applied a bit of heat from our hands and twisted the chocolate sediment to form metamorphic rocks like marble and slate.

Then we put some of the chocolate into a cup of hot water and melted it and cooled it, like the igneous rocks that are formed underground and then erupted out of a volcano like granite and basalt. We know that rocks are weathered and eroded into little bits that flow into rivers and into the sea and the whole cycle starts again!

Of course, we stopped and ate our chocolate which tasted pretty good even though we had changed it to much!

Violin Showcase

 in Music / Skiddaw by

The benefits of learning to play a musical instrument are very well researched and understood. So with this in mind, Year 2 have been ‘adding a new string to their bow’ and learning to play the violin with the wonderful Mrs Hurley, kindly supported by a bequest from Guy and Maggie Paton, local residents, in memory of their son Jamie.

As a showcase for their new skills they performed a concert to the rest of Skiddaw class and our VIP guest Mrs Coker. They demonstrated how to hold the violin in rest position, how to position it to play, pluck the strings and use the bow. So much thinking and fine movement is involved; it is a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time! Superb listening, following of instructions and great enjoyment from everyone.

Well done to all Year 2 pupils, and Mrs Matheson who learnt too, saying learning this new skill was a highlight of her week! Each week, Mrs Hurley played great solo tunes to the group on her violin, while they tidied away, and Year 3 and 4 often stopped to listen too – a real treat for the ears! We are looking forward to continuing violin lessons again for those in Year 2 who wish to carry on in September. Please see the letter that has come home for more details.