Blog by Jo Hurley

Over the last couple of Art lessons, Upper School have been preparing a space themed piece using a printed background using their own hand made print plate and then adding space themed details with a different media such as chalk, charcoal, pastels and pens. The gallery shows the process the…

The children really enjoyed watching and reading the next section of our book, The Arrival, when the main character gets off the ship and is taken into a registration building like the one on Ellis Island in New York. They role played the scene with one child being the immigration officer and one…

A massive thank you to all the parents who baked or bought cakes for our very special MacMillan Cancer Support cake sale. The children in Year 5/6 had great fun getting it all ready and then bought lots of yummy treats at the end of the school day. We had such a lot of cakes provided that there…

Today in English, the class began looking at chapter 2 of The Arrival. We discussed the story so far and the symbolism of the illustrations. Using the people on the ship picture, we created a freeze frame and then each character was ‘woken up’ in the picture to tell us who they were, where they…

The day has finally come when we can use our new and improved running track again! 
Year 6 were given the privilege of the first try on the rubber tarmac this morning with Year 5 following on close behind. The class were very impressed with how fast the path made them run and they can’t wait to…

In our Science lesson this afternoon, the children completed an investigation to observe what happens to shadows throughout the afternoon. The children set up rounders posts in the playground and whenever the sun came out, they were able to see the shadow it created. The children measured the…

Today the children in Upper School were introduced to a new graphic novel, The Arrival by Shaun Tan that we will be studying for the next few weeks. I did this through a display with items that the children discovered and discussed. We focused the learning through use of modal verbs in our…

The Upper School children have been using a range of materials to create some space images in their sketch books. These have included, pastels, pencils, colouring pencils, chalks, felt tips, paper and water colours. The class have really enjoyed using a viewfinder to help them observe carefully…

Today the children in Upper School learnt about how day and night occur on the Earth. It is such a difficult concept to get around your head (especially that the Earth is spinning at 1000 miles an hour) that they had A LOT of questions before we could go onto completing our demonstrations using…

The children in Upper School are studying Earth in Space this term and part of our topic is to look at space exploration in Art and Design. We have observed and discussed pictures from the past of what people thought the future would be like and what space travel could look like. Some pictures…

Over the past three weeks, at the start of all our computing sessions, Upper School have been learning how to be safe online. We have learnt good strategies to deal with cyber-bullying; identified secure websites to use for our work; and understood what information we should never share when…

The children did a brilliant job of role playing a scene from our novel today! Each group performed as characters from the book and tried to create the sense of confusion/fear/surprise in the scene. We then used the role play work to help us write a list of progressive verbs and abstract nouns…