Our reception children have settled in nicely to Bowfell Class. This week we have started to learn our letter sounds, starting with ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘t’ and ‘p’. The children have been trying hard to form each letter correctly. The photo show them having a go on each others back! 
The Westmorland County Show field was buzzing with activity this afternoon as everyone was busy preparing for tomorrow’s show. This year the theme of Our Wonderful World celebrates work from each class. There are striking paintings in a variety of media all on a nature and the natural world theme. Examples using pencil crayon, paint, collage, ink pen and pastels are all represented. We have displayed some super Pebble Pets and mini pebble pet homes. There are photos of us at work in the outdoors too. Do come and take a closer look at our display in the magnificent Learning for Life tent on the far side of the show field tomorrow.
What a wonderful end to a great first week. On Friday afternoon we joined together for our first Good Work Assembly of the year. This included a story telling performance from Skiddaw about a talking papaya and poetry readings from some children in Scafell. We also celebrated the wonderful art work displayed by Levens School at Cartmel Show during the summer holidays and we congratulated all the children who had been recognised for something amazing in our Golden Book. Well done everyone!
Scafell have worked exceptionally hard this week, creating their own poetry. We began the week identifying poetry features and creating short poems called Haikus (Japanese short poems).
We then went on to learning about ‘The Magic Box’ by Kit Wright; a creative poem which uses lots of figurative language, alliteration, similes and metaphors. The class then had a go at creating their own, and what fantastic results!
The children gained a sense of accomplishment in our Good Work assembly this afternoon, celebrating their brilliant poetry talents. Their work has also created a lovely display in the classroom, for all to see! Well done Scafell.
This week Scafell Class have enjoyed creating beautiful pieces on pebbles celebrating our wonderful world; including: fish, leaves, strawberries, mice, a ladybird, a summer meadow and trees! These have been designed and carefully painted to form part of our display at this year’s Westmorland County Show taking place on Thursday next week. Look out for our stand in the ‘Learning for Life’ Tent!
We have got cracking with learning about our number system today reminding ourselves how our numbers are organised and the value (a hundred, a ten or a unit) of each digit in a number. See us here hard at work, some using Dienes counting materials and others problem solving and making use of patterns to be sure to find all the possibilities.
Today, staff have been busy updating their first aid training. It was a mix of practising bandaging, putting each other in the recovery position and discussing signs and symptoms of many conditions. But we also practised the latest CPR techniques as well as trying out some new technology in the form of the defibrillator.
Skiddaw have had great fun today measuring weight using all our balances and different sets of scales. They were challenged to find things in the room that weighed as close to 200g or 500g as they could. There was lots of counting and decision making as they tried to get it as exact as possible.
Today, we welcomed music students from QES into school. They came in a bus, heavily laden with instruments galore. They spent the morning, with Skiddaw Class, composing atmospheric music to describe, first below, Baba Yaga (a wrinkly, boney witch) and, second below, the Firebird (a magical creature) using the whole range of our wonderful percussion instruments and including violin and piano. In the afternoon, the group performed to the whole school excerpts from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. These were brilliantly introduced with points to listen out for in each piece – perhaps a conversation between the trumpet and the flute turning into an argument towards the end, or count how many times the triangle plays a part. It was interesting to see a great range of instruments playing so well together including a double bass (larger than most of our children) guitars, saxophone and three keyboards along with a wide range of percussion. Thank you so much to all the students and their teachers, Mrs Hartley and Mr Leather, for all your hard work in preparing such a fantastic musical extravaganza for us. Pictures at an Exhibition will be our new assembly music in the autumn term so we can really get to know the pieces in more depth. We’d love to welcome you back again next year!
Here we are baking rattie shortbread for our summer production; The Piper of Levens Village tomorrow evening. We have made approximately 160 biscuits; enough for everyone in the audience and the cast. Each one will be personalised with its own iced rat in a variety of colours.
Thanks to Mrs Mason it’s been a lot of fun!
Kacper and Olly
