The Chronicle

This week Junior 6 have linked their RSHE directly with mental health week on Wellbeing Wednesday (and Focused Follow-up Friday!)

Our topic in RSHE was sleep, so we looked in a little more depth at the benefits of sleep, not just from a mood and emotional perspective, but also from a mental health and wellbeing perspective. We explored how much sleep we should actually be having versus what we get. We also looked at both the mental and physical benefits of a good sleep, plus how we can guarantee that peaceful and restful night through a regular bedtime routine.

In addition, we explored the topic of connectivity and created paper chains to show the different links of connectivity. The children wrote words on each chain, firstly showing in what ways we can work to be connected (kindness, empathy, strength, compassion), then they wrote words that they felt make a good friend (loyalty, forgiveness, fun, listening), and finally they wrote words that could help to rebuild any break down in connectivity (smiling, saying sorry, forgiving). Next week, the children will link all the chains together to form a Year 6 Chain of Connectivity!

Finally, we spent some time with Mindfulness colouring to relax our processing mind and engage our creativity.

This week we have been talking about ‘Making Connections’ as part of Children’s Mental Health Week. It was fitting that Junior 5 made connections again with their French penpals through Teams meetings!

The children all asked three familiar questions and one ‘wildcard’ (unexpected) question to their French penpal. The French children did the same to us. Crackley Hall children spoke in French and Ecole Saint Pierre children spoke in English. They learnt a lot about each other! Amongst the French, Harry Potter, turtles as pets and sushi were all very popular! In Junior 5 we have many football fans, dog lovers and quite a few children who think that the food is one of the best things about our country ..with Yorkshire puddings being mentioned a few times!

The French children wanted to know more about the rules of netball and enjoyed seeing our smart school uniforms. Some Junior 5s asked if their penpals enjoyed doing homework and they were quite concerned about their longer school day in France. 

Our Crackley Hall children were enthusiastic, polite and displayed excellent communication skills…. as well as some very good spoken French!

Vous êtes supers J5!!! 

On Wednesday afternoon, Junior 4 were invited over to Princethorpe College, to watch their amazing production of The Addams Family. The production was outstanding and featured an impressive range of acting, singing and dancing, and it was so wonderful to see some of our past pupils in this production; Tom, Martha, Noah, Toby, Bella, Millie L, Millie H, Chloe to name but a few. Mr du Toit, the Head at Princethorpe College, also welcomed and addressed Crackley Hall, which the children enjoyed.  We were generously provided with a scrumptious Princethorpe College cookie and a drink upon departure. Thank you Princethorpe College for inviting us and we hope to visit again soon!

What an exciting week Junior 3 have been having! In Science, we have been testing the strength of different magnets and, after making our predictions, we busily set about testing how many paperclips each of our different magnets could hold. We recorded our results very carefully and were quite astonished to find that the largest magnet was not the strongest. We are looking forward to our next Science lesson when we will be testing a range of materials and metals to find out which are magnetic.

In History, Mrs Jackson-Mayne introduced us to the gruesome process of mummification, as we furthered our knowledge of the ‘Awful Ancient Egyptians’. After a fascinating explanation, we got to test out our skills in mummification on a …tomato! This messy and hilarious process really gave us a hands-on understanding, although we were mighty relieved that we were working with tomatoes and not actual dead bodies! We will have to wait and see what happens to our salt-packed tomatoes over the coming weeks.

We were very lucky to be visited by Mr Ellis this week, who came to talk to us about his experiences in China. We learnt all about food, housing and transport. Mr Ellis gave us all red envelopes and chopsticks to pick sweets up with. We soon became experts at using chopsticks when we were allowed to eat the sweets if we could pick them up! It was a fantastic way to learn about China. Did you know that for every five people in the UK, there are 100 people in China. The average size of an apartment in Hong Kong is 172 sq feet; a standard UK garage is 100 sq feet. Junior 2 were also fascinated by the foods that they eat - ducks' tongues, jellyfish and locusts! A big thank you to Mr Ellis for giving up his time to talk to us.

Junior 1 have continued with their topic of  Transport, and they are really looking forward to their visit to The Transport Museum next week. In Art, everyone has been working hard on their papier mache hot air balloons, carefully layering their balloon with glue and paper. As you can imagine, we are all really looking froward to popping them! Our new book has also been introduced this week and everyone is loving getting to know the story of Where the Wild Things Are. We have all been roaring our terrible roars, gnashing our terrible teeth, rolling our terrible eyes and showing our terrible claws with lots of enthusiasm! Our Maths work has also been lots of practical fun as we have been using the tens frames and base ten to make numbers with tens and ones. Great work, Junior 1!

This week the children have been preparing for their visit to the farm next week. They have been learning to name farm animals, both their adult names and their baby names. There was lots of new vocabulary to learn, including where each animal sleeps. In Maths this week we have been exploring numbers 6, 7 and 8. We have been matching, sorting and exploring different ways to represent each number.

Please click here for this week's nursery newsletter