£10 Fundraising Initiative

As part of our enterprise initiative in school, Adventurers were given £10 to make grow, inspiring the children to develop new skills in creativity, problem solving, team work and leadership. 

The children decided to hold a clothes sale, tombola and cake stall: recycling old clothes and unwanted gifts, which was linked to our present topic ‘Together, we can change the world’.

We had a wonderful day preparing for the sale and then greeting our families and selling the donated goods.

We were delighted to raise over £400.00, some of which will be donated to helping koalas injured in the bushfires in Australia, and some towards buying binoculars for our ‘bird watch’ challenge later this year. 

A Victorian Visit – Preston Park

On Thursday 6th February, along with Discoverers, Leaders visited Preston Park.  The aim was to begin to investigate the Victorian era, immersing ourselves into life in Victorian times.

Leaders began by spending time in the classroom, learning what life would have been like in a Victorian school.  There were many surprises: the amount of children in every class; the different ages of the children in a class; how the children would have carried out their lessons on a slate; and the punishments that you would be given if you did not something you were asked.

Teachers would most likely be women although, once they got married, they were unable to be a teacher.

Leaders spent the afternoon investigating the Victorian street.  There were so many tiny bottles in the Chemist, all were made of glass, and contained an array of different ingredients that would be mixed together to make medicine to treat you.  Leaders found the bottles in the sweet ship far more interesting, filled with a rainbow of different coloured sweets.  The lady in the shop explained who would have been able to buy the sweets and how much they would have cost.  There were some very sad faces when they realised that this would not have been a daily or weekly event.

The Drapers was the place they found out about the Victorian clothes, investigating lost of different headwear, and saw some Victorian pennies.

Finally, they spent some time on the street having a go at paying with some of the toys.  The hoops were much harder to use than the children expected.

Fascinated by Microbes

We began the week singing and writing about washing our hands. As part of this work,we looked at images from under a microscope. These images showed different bacteria and the children were fascinated. Many of the Pioneers have drawn and painted and talked about the shapes and the colours. The resulting images are impressive. We have a new book to continue this work next week.

Go Pioneers

Getting Sticky. Cool Badger Food

The addition of flour and water made the compost much stickier and the children experimented with the consistency. They were very restrained when helping themselves to their required ingredients. They helped each other and at one point I heard a little voice say,”We are a team.”

Look out for some fabulous writing done on Friday. This will be displayed in the classroom from Monday.

Cool Badger Food.

So many beautiful moments in learning.

Friday 7th February 2020

This week, we have been on an exciting trip to Preston Park, where we explored their Victorian Street and the museum, and we had a handwriting lesson in a themed classroom. We were shocked at some of the punishments for children in Victorian schools. Did you know that if a child wrote with their left hand, and was caught doing so, they would be made to stand at the front of the classroom with their fingers inside a finger-trap?

Take a look at our exciting day below:

Mrs Hann,we love badgers.

Following on from our trip to the forest,the badger came and ate all the sandwiches we had made. He left us a message asking us to make some more and write him a list of all the things we used. This caused a lot of excitement and a huge desire to write. Some spent the whole morning writing for the badger,filling two pages of ingredients. Some constructed their own sentences asking for help when needed.

The excitement continued outside where more sandwiches were made using dough and stuff.

Lucky Badger and his naughty brother had lots of food.

All of the work done is up on the walls in the classroom. 

More Badger snacks will be created soon to extend our exxploration of sandwich fillings. It could get messy!

 

Friday 31st January 2020

Hello readers, we can’t believe that the last day in January is finally here: Christmas seems like it was months ago.

This week we have been designing and creating our own Victorian houses. This has been really fun and we have worked so well as a team! 

We will upload some pictures of the finished products soon, but for now here we are in action:

Celebrating Chinese New Year

We celebrated Chinese New Year by learning a bit about the traditions around the event. The key focus is on family. The celebrations bring together family who often live far apart for the rest of the year. We discussed stories,language and food. We used “Noodle Sticks” and had a sniff of some powerful spices. 

Everyone went home with a fortune cookie. Some went home with some Five Spice Powder on their clothes and some had a good covering of black paint!

A lovely afternoon.

Disgusting Sandwiches in the Forest

 

After reading The Disgusting Sandwich we went to our beautiful forest to recreate the tasty treat for badgers and foxes. The sun shone and it was so lovely. The Pioneers collected grit,grass,sand,bark and the odd log to fill their sandwiches. Some children realised that dry ingredients didn’t make for great sandwiches when all the filling fell out or blew away. This led to some unintended extra learning about texture and consistency!

We took the opportunity to sit quiet;y and listen to the birds. In a very short time the birds came back to the trees and the tweeting increased. We filled up the bird feeders and trudged back to school.

Back in the classroom we will be able to write lists of ingredients for our own sandwiches.

Pop in to see the progress.

Very happy learning.