Blog by Jo Hurley

What a fantastic afternoon we had today when Middle School and Upper School came together to perform a musical concert for the parents! 
The children have all worked hard to learn several songs and to play instrumental accompaniments on glockenspiels and ukuleles. The audience were also treated…

We had a visit from an award winning author this morning (and also husband of Mrs Hurley)!

It was a real treat to meet Andrew Michael Hurley who has written the award winning novel, The Loney and more recently, Starve Acre which has been turned into a BBC Film. 
Mr Hurley talked to the class…

More pictures from our adventure!

Year 6 had an amazing day at Hothersall Lodge! We began the day on canoes in lovely warm sunshine and enjoyed learning to paddle, to work together and competed in fun canoeing games. After that there was only one thing to do…jump in the lake and cool off! 
After our yummy packed lunches were…

On our final week at the curling rink, Upper School enjoyed playing in teams of three against each other. One player was ‘skip’, one was a ‘sweeper’ and one throwing the stones. The success rate was much better this week with many of the children’s shots going into the ‘house’ (target). The…

Today Upper School learnt about biodiversity and how important it is. We also went out into the school grounds and conducted our own biodiversity study (minibeast hunt) to see how biodiverse our field actual is…

Altogether, we found 8 different species but our grassland key that we were using…

This week’s curling lesson involved a short recap of how to launch the stone and then we were quickly organised into teams for some curling games. 
In teams of 4 or 5 the children were given roles such as ‘skip’, ‘sweeper’ or ‘lead’ and everyone had a go at trying to get their stone into the…

As part of our D&T work, the children have had the opportunity to explore and create mechanical models using Lego and K’NEX. They used levers, pulleys and gears to give movement to their models. Iain and Thomas even added a motor to their gear system to be able to pull things along.

Mrs…

This week, Upper School’s curling lesson was all about balance and coordination. The children worked on moving along the ice with a curling stone and also played some fun games without the stone like collecting the cones without falling over. 

After some successful (and not so successful -see…

This week was all about research and designing a product.

We watched NASA videos showing the Mars rovers such as Curiosity and Perseverance and the jobs that they are carrying out on the surface of Mars. We then looked specifically at their design and what sorts of mechanics were used to make…

Upper School had another brilliant session at the Curling Rink today! We continued to practise sliding across the ice with a stone and also trying to keep our balance with a beanbag on our heads! We ended the session with a brilliant game where two teams tried to get the curling stone as close to…

Following on from last week’s lesson when the Upper School children learnt about and made a pulley system, the children this week explored mechanical gears. We learnt about what they do and how they work. After that, they made their own gears using card cogs and split pins. 
Two groups of…