The Chronicle

This week, Junior 6 have been enjoying some well-earned alternative activities after their exams last Saturday. Some of the highlights have been the games on the sports field on Monday, where the children learned some very different hockey skills and commando crawled through the mud, making sure they also caught the flying eggs!  On Wednesday they became experts in all things heart related as they dissected lamb hearts and explored the structure of the heart. They also had the opportunity to observe an eyeball dissection and learn about the optic nerve, the retina and the lens. What superb fun!

Junior 5 have had a lot to celebrate this week. The children continued to work hard in their lessons and we have enjoyed spending time completing puzzles and activities for Maths Week England. Today we ate a treat of a doughnut, popcorn or apple, thanks to our PTA. We are simply enjoying life! Some J5L pupils kept themselves busy during half-term, designing and creating a planets project. Our Space Investigators have clearly worked their socks off to make their displays; they are stunning, and we are very proud of them.

Pick it! Boil it! Taste it! This week has been filled with persuasive language and the children have enjoyed using emotive language, rhetorical questions and many other persuasive features, to create their very own tea boxes. They all produced some wonderful work, with ambitious vocabulary in abundance. We have also been learning to read and write in French. So far we have studied how to introduce ourselves, giving our names and ages, and greeting people appropriately at different times of the day. This week we focused on the skill of reading and putting together a jigsaw puzzle by matching French and English sentences.  Excellents enfants!

Junior 3 have had such a busy week and all the children have worked incredibly hard, finding new skills in maths – arrays and repeated addition work that will help us as we move through the syllabus. Mahnoor even managed to bring in some birthday mini-cakes arranged as an array. Maths has never been so delicious!

In other areas, pupils have been investigating and analysing African musical instruments as part of our Kenyan topic. We have found out about the materials used and the sounds made by the different percussion instruments and are now at the stage where we are making our own in Design Technology. Pupils learned today how to create the basic design and are beginning to use a ‘papier-mache’ technique.

All-in-all a very busy week, with our minds on ‘Remembrance, Reconciliation’ and the Famous Five!

Junior 2 have clearly enjoyed all of their lessons this week and there has been a real buzz of activity in the classrooms. Everyone has been working on their independence in our Maths lessons, accessing lots of different resources to find the answers to addition and subtraction calculations using the column method. There is always so much to remember, so we learnt how important it is to break the stages down! This week, we have embedded our understanding, so that everyone is able to swap tens for ones and show this in their books. This week we have also learnt about the importance of Remembrance Sunday. We learnt why the poppy is so significant and why it is still important today. In Geography we have been looking at the town of Marazion in Cornwall, learning all about what geographical landmarks are there. We also learnt what a ‘key’ is and added our own to the map of the town. Next week we are hoping to visit Kenilworth in readiness for our comparison study.

We had some wonderful poppies made for Remembrance Day, some in our Art lessons and some very creative ones at home. We took time to think about why we wear poppies and the significance of them at different times during the week. In Forest School we respectfully stopped for the two-minute silence. In PE we had a go at various yoga poses and stretches – some were easier that others and some took a lot of balance and skill! In Maths we helped to celebrate Maths Week England by listening to the daily mathematical stories and after hearing Spinderella, we played a game called Incey Wincey spider with a partner, a counter and a die, to see who could get out of the drainpipe first!

Reception have had a lovely week learning about Remembrance Day. We learnt that many people wear poppies as a reminder of those soldiers, sailors, and members of the RAF, amongst others, who gave their lives to help us live in a more peaceful world. Mr Luis, our Caretaker here at Crackley Hall, visited us and explained his important work in the services, and we loved making split pin poppies too. In Maths we have been investigating circles and triangles and enjoyed taking part in Maths Week England – ask us about our shape hunt around school, we were super ‘shape detectives’!