A glorious start to May.

The children of Talland Class have been involved in several interesting activities this week which included researching and creating a timeline for the Maya civilisation. During this research, they were able to produce some amazing open questions about the civilisation: What was a typical meal for the Maya? How did the Maya protect their land? We will use these questions, and more, to help the children learn about the influences the Maya has had on contemporary society.

The children have loved digging into some horticultural work. They have managed to start planting crops in shallow beds, sowed some flower and vegetable seeds and spruced up the borders with a couple of shrubs. Who'd have known Talland Class had such 'green fingers'?  Well done, all!

English
Our English study has further developed the children's sentence structure. They are continuing to recognise complex sentences and beginning to use them confidently: for example, As the sun began to set, the children strolled towards the beach. 

Maths
The children have secured knowledge and understanding of decimals to thousandths. They used this knowledge to investigate percentages. They all recognise that percentages are shown by using the % sign.

best wishes,

Mr Parry, Mrs Swabey and the Talland Class team (Mrs Walters and Ms Rowlands)

This week's jokes:

Knock, Knock!
Who’s there?
Lettuce.
Lettuce who?
Lettuce in and you’ll find out.

What kind of bean never grows in a garden?
A jelly bean!

Our five tiny Canute Caterpillars arrived this week ! The children are going to look after them in the hope we can release them as butterflies at the end of this half term.  They are currently in a pot with their food and once they spin their chrysalis they will be moved into a netted home…we will keep you updated !

 In English the children edited their story map and created their own characters following the plot of Little Red Riding Hood, we had some really interesting replacements for the wolf – a crocodile ! a bull ! to name a few, they all used some fantastic adjectives to describe their villians. Reception children have been enjoying writing about Superworm in Drawing Club.

 In Maths,  Reception children have been doing doubling and odd & even activities, year 1 have stormed their way through the  multiplication and division unit and enjoyed being outside practically sharing and grouping everyday objects, year 2 have been weighing classroom items and estimating what measurement would be most appropriate, grams or kilograms?

 We took full advantage of the sunny weather on Wednesday and did our mini beast hunt in forest school.  We then used our mini beast data to digitally create some bar charts for ICT,  showing the quantities of the five most popular creatures. 

 In RE we have been discussing the Five Pillars of Islam and comparing activities Muslims do that we also do, like celebrating key events with our families and giving money to charity.

In PSHE we discussed the qualities of being a good friend and relied on some of these qualities in PE when the children worked in pairs. One had to direct their blindfolded partner to move items around the playground, clear communication was key, they all succeeded and had a lot of fun!

We hope you all have a lovely long weekend, hopefully with abit of sunshine!

Best wishes The Canute Class Team

Today, we thoroughly enjoyed welcoming the RLNI to school; we learnt lots about beach and water safety. Our favourite parts were the role play of saving a casualty in water and using a lifeguard’s radio to ask for further assistance.  

This week in our English lessons, the children developed their narrative plan. They boxed up the Beowulf text and planned their own using a similar story line. Each child improved their understanding of subordinate clauses and used relative clauses to add extra detail about their characters to their plans.

In our science lesson this week, we loved exploring irreversible changes. We learnt about new materials being produced and some of their useful uses.

In our history lesson, the children learnt about Viking life and how they travelled long distances across the sea.

As part of our art lesson this week, we built on our understanding of drawing techniques and applied these to our drawings of a Viking longship.

During our RE lesson, the children learnt about the key beliefs in Islam. They learnt about the five pillars and then thought about their own core beliefs.

In PSHE, we continued our focus on relationships. The children thought about the connection between thoughts, feelings and actions in different scenario and learnt ways to support themselves and others in difficult situations.

Homework has been set on Mathletics and Spelling Shed. Please also remember to read regularly and that we have Times Table Rockstar logins.

Points to remember:

Bank holiday Monday 6^th May
PE on Friday this week

SATs week- 13^th- 16^th May

Residential 12^th-14^th June 2024

Penhallow Class Blog: 3rd May 2024.

A jam packed week in Penhallow this week! 

We  started the week by learning all about how to group animals based on what they ate and whether this made them a herbivore, carnivore or a omnivore (like us).

In English, we are beginning to research our minibeast, ready to write a plan for our fact file.

Maths has been full of activity this week where the Reception children are learning what happens to numbers when we add more or take some away. Year 1s are flying through their multiplication and division topic where we are learning to count in 2s, 5s and 10s as well as understanding that it is easier to count in groups if they are equal. We also learned what makes up an array, recognising lots of new maths vocabulary like row and column. 

Kai received his 33 badge this week in 99 club, well done! It is getting tougher to achieve these badges now but I know with plenty of practice we will get them in no time! There are plenty of chances to practice these maths skills on twinklGO! Ensure you are also keeping up with your KIRFs that were attached in last week's blog.

We have enjoyed two really important assemblies this week. The first was on Tuesday when we learned what it meant to be sun safe. Please send your child in with some labelled sun cream, a named sun hat and a drink every day now that we are finally seeing some brighter days! In Penhallow, we love to take our learning outside! It will also be very soon that we take our PE sessions in our wonderful school swimming pool! Remember that our PE days are Wednesday and Friday so please make sure your children have their PE kit in school for these days. Our second assembly was on beach safety with the R.N.L.I. Sam and Harry taught us all about what to do to stay safe on the beach this summer.

PSHE was so much fun this week where the children learned that it is ok to say no to physical touch as a greeting, there are lots of other ways to greet each other and we enjoyed making some new ways of greeting our friends. 

Music was fantastic fun! We leaned all about the keyboard and what different sounds we could make with them.

Well done to our 'People of the Week' this week, all showing us how to be 'Excellent' in their learning! Sonny, Dexter, Evie D and Kai, well done to all of you!

Enjoy a wonderful, longer weekend! If you get the chance, pop onto TwinklGO! where you can play lots of games which will help you with your learning. We will see you on Tuesday morning for another week of fun!

Mrs Taylor, Mrs G, Miss Colton, Miss Cullingford and Miss Hodge.

We have started our learning about our new focus story book 'We're going on a bear hunt' and when we went to St Anne's we listened to the story together before creating some bear faces.

The bear faces had to have one wet, shiny nose, two big, furry ears, two big goggly eyes; we're not scared!!

Fortunately, the Grannies and Grandads at St Anne's weren't scared either!

Week 3 

The children have worked hard in English this week to imitate the story of Mr Gumpy’s Outing. With a lot of imagination, the story became Mrs Gumpy’s Outing and the children thought of many different animals to fit the story. The year 1 children then spent time writing a part of the imitated story and the foundation children worked hard to draw and label a picture from the imitated story. The year 1’s have also planned a new version of the story and are getting ready to write their stores next week.

In Maths the year 1 children have been exploring volume and capacity. They have enjoyed filing jugs and cups and exploring the capacity of an object and the different volume of water they could put in the jugs!

The foundation children have been working on doubles this week and have learnt a brilliant rhyme to help them remember.

In PSHE this week the children explored different relationships. They looked at different pictures and tried to guess the relationship between the people in the picture and whether it looked kike a good or not so good relationship. The children then worked in groups and role played how they like to greet known adults and their peers. Look out for the new greetings on the door soon!

The children have been exploring so much learning this week and continue to make wonderful progress and try their best!

We hope you all have a great bank holiday weekend and we will see you all on Tuesday

Foundation /year 1 team.

Reading We have been lucky enough to buy some new and exciting books for readers at all levels in school and nursery. In addition to this, specialists from the Cornwall Library Service recently came in and reviewed and restocked our school library. Your child will today come home with a letter about reading in our school, the books they can choose and how you can help them at home. The letter is also attached to this blog.

Sun Safety With bank holidays coming up and hopefully some good weather, we have this week had an assembly on staying sun safe. Here is a list of 5 top tips to help keep young people safe in the sun, put together by Macmillan Cancer Support, which we shared with the children https://www.soltansunready.com/for-schools/newsletter-sun-safety-top-tips Please ensure your child comes into school after the bank holiday with a sun hat and sun cream (at least factor 30.) If you have any spare sun hats which your child has outgrown, please send them in so we have spares in school.

Beach Safety Two lifeguards from the RNLI visited us this morning to hold an assembly about how to stay safe on the beach. They enlisted the help of pupils to demonstrate how to get help if they get into trouble in the sea. They also discussed where it is and isn’t safe to swim and what to do if you are caught in a riptide.

Wedding Bells You may have heard from the children that Miss Gibbings is getting married this weekend. I am sure you will join me in wishing her and her husband to be all the best for the future. On her return to work next week Miss Gibbings will be known as Mrs Wilkie.


Have a lovely Bank Holiday weekend. We look forward to seeing the children back in school on Tuesday morning.

Mrs Hillman

Summer 1 - Week 2 and 3 - Amazing Africa

Over the last two weeks we have continued our topic based on' The World Outside our Window' by exploring a contrasting place to where we live in Cornwall -  the continent of Africa! We started by reading Handa's Surprise and discussed the setting and characters in the story. This led us to learning a wide range of facts all about Africa. We have looked at the 'big 5' animals that can be found there, what a carnivore, herbivore and an omnivore is,  the different types of homes that are there, the climate and the lovely fruits that Handa had in her basket. We really have been busy bees!

In maths, we have been blown away with how well they are getting on with learning their numbers up to 20. This week we have had a particularly focus on 1 more and 1 less of numbers up to 20.  The children have been true 'Have a Go Hippos' in their perseverance to understand this concept, and they are becoming more and more confident with this. Also, to help us recognise the numbers up to 20, we have been having a little game of bingo. Ask the children to tell you all about it! They absolutely love it and ask to play everyday! 

Reminders -

• Please ensure that bookbags come in daily.
  
• Sun safety - As we head into the Summer Term, we hope to see more of the sunshine and here are just a few reminders…

TALLAND'S BLOG 3.5.24

What a gruesomely fun week we have had!

English:
We finished our instruction writing about how to make a gruesome smoothie this week. They were disgusting yet fantastic to read. We finished the week by going to the garden TO follow our instructions. What wonderfully sickening creations your children made… YUM!

Maths:
Year 4 finished their first decimals unit and are moving to their second unit next week. They have got really effective at dividing 1- and 2-digit numbers by 10 and 100.
Year 5 have also finished their unit on shape and are ready to move onto decimals next week. They have become experts at finding angles!

PE:
Has been great fun as ever! Orienting games have enhanced and badminton has moved onto backhands. We’ve continued to look at positional awareness and aiming the shuttlecock into space.

Art:
We have looked at many different ways of making collage effective. We’ve been experimenting with layering and practicing different ways of cutting, tearing and manipulating the resources.

Science:
Talland investigated which material was the best insulator. We used bubble wrap, cellophane and tin foil. Why not ask your child what we did during our experiment…

CONGRATULATIONS:
Well done to Tabbi for being chosen as pupil of the week – her involvement during class discussions have been excellent this week. Also congratulations to all of our readers, writers and mathematicians of the week: Mathematicians:
Isaac and Sienna

Writers:
Henry and Harrison

Readers:
Leo and Freddie

That’s it from Talland. We hope you have a fantastic 3 day weekend - YAY!

Signing off from Mr. Langley, Mr. Bishop and Mrs. Hodge.

This week has been a busy one!

We are writing up our explanation texts on the seven life processes in English, which is part of our enquiry into what all living things have in common. We have learnt so much so far, including just how amazing a plant's respiration is. I can't wait to read the finished pieces!

Mrs Butlin introduced Chaipel to keyboards this week in Music and we are looking forward to learning how to play a short piece in the coming weeks. 

SATs are fast approaching and so on Thursday, the Y6 girls were invited to a 'tea, cake and natter' afternoon with Miss Randle and Mrs Hillman. It was a lovely treat, looking at old photographs and reminiscing about their experiences together, both in and out of school. The Y6 boys will get their opportunity next week. 

The RNLI were in on Friday morning to remind us how to stay safe on the beach and in the water this Summer. We had fun and learnt a great deal at the same time.  Well done to Verity and Max who were our RNLI lifeguard and 'swimmer in distress'!

We were exploring Micro:bits in Computing this afternoon and although some of us are currently in The Learning Pit (Miss Randle and Mrs Clary also) we are excited to see how we will progress over the next few weeks as we build up to measuring and recording temperature, creating spreadsheets and representing findings in a bar chart, pie chart or line graph (depending on the nature of the investigation). 

CONGRATULATIONS to Chaipel's People of the Week, Noah and Max S for showing their Bridge 'excellent' value in their learning this week.

REMEMBER... it's a three day weekend so relax, enjoy and see you all on Tuesday!!

Miss Randle, Mrs Clary and Miss Gilbert.

A busy couple of weeks!

It’s all go with our new topic, ‘Did the Cornish do a Proper Job?’ The children have completed Geography lessons where they located Wadebridge on a map and explored its locality within Cornwall. They then looked at map symbols and used this knowledge to make their own maps of Wadebridge!

This week we have been Historians and explored the history of the railway in our local area. The children learned that Bodmin and Wenford Railway had a branch line that went through Wadebridge and into Padstow. They were shocked to learn that the Camel trail was once a railway, and is now used by over 500,000 cyclists per year! We then learnt all about Tin Mines and the Tin Miners - the children had to find posters dotted around the classroom to add facts to their Tin Min Fact File. 

In PE we have been fortunate enough to have DT Coaching leading our lessons. They have been working on the pupils Striking and Fielding skills. They will spend a few weeks working on catching and throwing skills before being introduced to modified Cricket and Rounders games.

We are nearing the end of our English unit about the story, ‘The Mousehole Cat’. The children have been busy writing their own versions of the story, and adapting characters and settings. They have been using the 'Boxing up' technique for writing and planning each paragraph before writing it. We are so impressed with their use of vocabulary, adjectives, adverbs and sentence structures!

In maths we are learning about time – a tricky concept at this age, but Year 2 are taking on the challenge! It has been wonderful to hear the children tell each other what time it is throughout the school day!

Please keep up with the reading and times table rockstars at home, it really does make a difference.

Thank you,

The Year 2 Team

St Cleer Well Dressing

We were really pleased to be invited by Cornish Heritage to join them in the St Cleer well dressing ceremony.  After last year, we were also pleased that it didn't chuck it down with rain!!

Our class had worked with a local artist to produce a fantastic collage of the well, and we were excited to process through the village to the well.  We took part in a small ceremony, laid flowers on the well wall and watched some traditional Cornish dancing.  We were interested (and a bit confused) that half of the ceremony was conducted in the Cornish language.  We agreed that we'd need a bit of practice before we could understand any of it! 

We'd like to say a big thank you to Cornish Heritage for all of their support in making the day a success.

Learning by questions

This week in maths we have been learning about perimeter and area of 2D shapes.  We learned how to calculate perimeter in different ways, and how we can use information we are given to calculate the length of any sides of the shape where the dimensions are missing.  We applied our understanding to regular shapes and also to rectilinear shapes.

Once we were confident with perimeter, we learned how to calculate the area of different rectangles and rectilinear shapes.  To apply our learning we used an adaptive teaching software called Learning by Questions (LbQ).  The children really loved the different types of questions they were asked and also that they had visual representations of the problems to help them master the concepts of perimeter and area.

We all wanted to use LbQ every day - which Mr H didn't allow!

Lanlivery Primary Academy were deeply saddened to hear the tragic news about one of our pupils, Dexter. He will be remembered as smiley, kind and caring; a great friend to all of his class and the whole school. He loved to play, learn and get creative and it is hard to envisage our school without him.

We will miss him dearly and our thoughts are with his mum, dad, siblings, whole family and wider community. We are working with professionals trained to provide the very best support for pupils, parents and staff at this difficult time.

April has been a short month due to the Easter holidays but we have still managed to pack in lots of learning.

In English we have been learning about stories by the same author, Lauren Child. We have been enjoying her Clarice Bean stories and are currently working on planning our own.

Maths has been all about fractions so far this term. We have learnt how to recognise and find equal groups, recognise and find a half, a quarter and three quarters of a shape and a quantity. 

Our big question this half term is 'Who was Francis Drake and why was he important?'
We have enjoyed finding out about his voyages and learnt some grisly facts about life on the 'Golden Hind'
Most of us have seen his statue in Tavistock so we know he is important locally. We are looking forward to our trip to Buckland Abbey to find out more.

Art has been all about Vincent van Gogh. We have been looking at his paintings and discussing what we notice and like/don't like about them.
We have learnt about tints and shades and have experimented with colours and patterns in his style. Next we will be trying to reproduce his 'Starry Night' painting for our art exhibition at the end of May.

Science has been all about plants. We had fun dissecting seeds and comparing them to bulbs. Then we planted some seeds with varying amounts of light and water and are waiting to see what will happen to them. 

Courage

At the start of our Shining Stars Assembly today, we were treated to hearing music performed by Oscar, Phoebe, Imogen, Hana and Merryn.

The theme this week has been ‘Courage’ and it was fantastic to see the children show this in abundance taking to the stage to play in front of everyone. We look forward to offering this regular slot in our Shining Stars Assembly for children to showcase their skills. I know many of the children are very keen to sign up.

Teachers also recognised other acts of courage this week across the school. It is something we will continue to remind children of and support them with; especially to speak up (politely) for what they believe in or where they see unfairness.

The range and quality of learning around the classes this week has been impressive. I’ve seen amazing letter writing ‘from the trenches’ in Year 6 to Year 3 writing their own version of the Sand Horse story. Equally impressive has been the amazing Modroc artwork in Year 5.

A special well done to our youngest learners in the school (and a huge thank you to the staff) as they began the process of moving classrooms, as we re-purpose our EYFS environment. They have taken these changes in their stride.

Next week, one of the areas I want to explore further is the experience our children have at playtime and lunchtime. It’s such a crucial part of our children’s experience at school that I’m keen to see what is working well and what can be improved. I’ll be following this up with a discussion with the School Council to get their invaluable feedback.

House Points

Congratulations to this week’s winners, Puffins, earning 439 points. Our overall leaders this year so far are Choughs with an impressive 10,301 points!

Donation

We are really grateful to the Padstow Harbour Commissioners for their generous donation of £1000! We will be considering how best to use this for the benefit of our children.

Events next week

Monday 6th May Bank Holiday (School closed)

Tuesday 7th May 14:30-15:15 KS2 Parents/Carers Coffee Afternoon with Mr Wathern (Hall)

Tuesday 7th May 15:25 Year 4 Porthpean Residential Meeting for parents (4B classroom)

Thursday 9th May 08:45-09:30 EYFS/KS1 Parents/Carers Coffee Morning with Mr Wathern (Hall)

Thursday 9th May 14:15-15:00 EYFS/KS1 Parents/Carers Coffee Afternoon with Mr Wathern (Hall)

Friday 10th May Year 3 Alternative Sports Day

Friday 10th May 08:45-09:30 KS2 Parents/Carers Coffee Morning with Mr Wathern


Have a relaxing long weekend and we look forward to seeing everyone back next Tuesday.

Best wishes,

Chris Wathern