w/e 10.1.25

Welcome back, Daymer class! We were thrilled to try some cave art to introduce our topic (see last blog post) and were 'wowed' by our toilet roll timeline to demonstrate prehistory and how long ago this was!

We have started our new English sequence of learning around 'Stone Age Boy' and the children can retell the story really well whilst using tier 2 vocabulary from the book.

Year 3 have started to work with multiplication and division and Year 4 continue to do so.

In PE, we started our dance unit with the theme of weather. We did our wind section and the children were wonderfully creative with their ideas and performances.

In science, we learned about the water cycle and have made mini ‘worlds’ to watch the process in action! 


Homework:
New maths homework is now on Anton.

Reading 5x a week and Reading Records to be signed each time as we give out rewards and take note for our KS2-wide book trail.

Please rehearse times tables weekly. 

Welcome back! I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas. Please see the newsletter for this term below.

Happy New Year! Spring Term has well and truly started in Landaviddy class. 

On Tuesday, we started the first of two units we cover in PE. With Mrs Phillips, we enjoyed our first Dance lesson and today we began exploring Net and Wall games. 
Polite Reminder: Please can you make sure your child has their PE in school, as we had quite a few without a kit this week. Thank you. 

On Wednesday, we concluded our enquiry from last half term 'Who were the Ancient Egyptians?' and had a go at writing down everything we could remember. This meant we were ready to launch our new enquiry question for this half term, 'What is Light?'. We were amazed by the questions the children came up with; How is lightning made? How was the Sun made? What are the Northern Lights? 

In English, we have been consolidating our ability to punctuate speech accurately. After lots of practise, we have become more confident with this now. We then moved on to redrafting a section of our Egyptian Little Red Riding Hood stories. We had some fantastic pieces of writing from this and the children all worked so hard as bring their ideas to life. We have edited and next week with finish writing up our final copies. 

In Maths, Year 2 have been looking at vertical and horizontal lines of symmetry, using symmetry to complete shapes and sorting 2-D shapes into groups. Year 3 have explored the 4 and 8 times tables this week.

Congratulations to Iylah, Evie, Alfie and Nevaeh for being chosen as Landaviddy's People of the Week. 

Next week, there will be the opportunity for the children to change their library books. Please make sure to bring these in for Thursday. 

We hope you have a wonderful weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday. 

Mrs Wilkie, Mrs Phillips, Miss Bowden and Miss Colton

A warm welcome back and Happy New Year to you all.

We have been following in assembly the amazing progress of the Oars of Thunder team who visited our school with their boat in October.  They are currently over three quarters of the way through their 3000 mile row across the Atlantic as part of the World's Toughest Row. They left La Gomera on 11th December and are currently in 1st Place in Mixed Class, 5th in boats of 4 and 7th place overall.

The children have settled into their learning quickly this week and have started their class enquiries as follows: Penhallow Class – Why Aren’t Spaceships Made of Jelly? Landaviddy Class - What is Light? Talland Class - Do all Living Things Need a Home? Chaipel Class - What Natural Resources do I Depend Upon?
 
Clubs will be resuming week next Monday, 13th January as follows:
Monday: After School Football Club (Mr Langley) for years 3, 4,5 and 6
Tuesday: Lunchtime ECO Club (Miss Randle) for years 3 to 6, some places by invitation After school Dance Club (Mrs Phillips) for years 3-6
Wednesday: Lunchtime Mindfulness and Art Club (Mrs Wilkie) for years 2 to 6
Thursday: Lunchtime Music and Singing Club (Mrs Fitzsimmons) for years R, 1 and 2
Friday: After School Running Club (Miss Bowden and Mrs Turnbull) for years 3-6. This club is open to anyone who likes running however it will not run when the Cross-Country League races are on – next races 17th January and 7th February. Pupils do not have to race in these events. Clubs are the same as last half term except for the addition of Dance Club on Tuesday. Please inform us by email or phone call, if there are any changes to the clubs you wish your child to attend, by midday on Monday 13th January. If we do not hear from you, we will assume that your child will be attending the same clubs as last half term. For all clubs, once signed up children will be expected to attend every week unless they have written parental permission not to, or are absent. This applies to both lunchtime and after school clubs.

Cornwall Parenting Courses and new Podcast Please find attached information from Cornwall Council’s Together for Families about Parenting Courses which are accessible online or in person, and Empowered Parenting Podcasts. New episodes will be released each week, bringing you top tips and guest speakers to discuss a range of topics relating to your parenting journey. Upcoming topics include: Back-to-school, Praise and Encouragement, Routines, Boundaries, SEND Navigators, Brain Development, and many more.

Mental Health in Schools Team - Parent /Carer Workshops Please see attached details of Parent/Carer Workshops which are set to run from January 2025. These are one-off, one hour long, online workshops with Mental Health Practitioners. They are open to everybody; people do not need to have a mental health need to join. If you are interested, please click on the relevant link: Behaviour Workshop - https://forms.office.com/e/1PwGDXSQ40 Sleep Workshop - https://forms.office.com/e/7ac7qHLPhc A Teams link will be emailed to you from MHST for each workshop prior to the workshop taking place.

Cornwall Youth Badminton Children in years 5-8 are invited to try out playing Badminton in a fun event and coaching session on Sunday 12th January. The event is free and will take place at Treviglas Sports Hub, Newquay. It will be run by Cathryn Bick - a Badminton England level 2 coach and Cornwall Youth Badminton chairperson. Please see poster attached for further details.

Have a great weekend.

Mrs Hillman

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It's been a very productive first week back for Chaipel Class. We began with immersing ourselves with our new enquiry, "What Natural Resources Do I Depend On?" We have completed a pre-knowledge Kahoot quiz and thought about what we wanted to find out, over the next few weeks. We will be investigating the UK's natural resources, the use of fossil fuels and how bridges are constructed in order to transport goods from place to place.

ENGLISH
We have begun to write up our formal, persuasive letter to The Warden at Camp Green Lake and will continue to write, edit and best copy create next week.

MATHS
We have been adding and subracting mixed numbers over the last few days and are finally making headway! We will wrap up this section of Fractions on Monday and then move onto Multiplication and Division (Y5) and Ratio (Y6). 

WIDER CURRICULUM 
We have begun to learn Bhangra-style dance in PE this week. It is a fun, uplifting style which is used a lot in celebrations across different faiths and communities. In Geography, we have been investigating the regions of England and then locating the seas, channels and oceans which surround us. We will move onto finding out about the physical and human features of the UK before identifying our country's natural and man-made resources.

We ended the week by writing down everything that we have learned in our previous enquiry, 'HOW DOES OUR BODY WORK?' It's amazing what new knowledge we have in such a short period of time! Joel was completely absorbed in  his work!

Congratulations to JOEL and SIENNA for being our PEOPLE OF THE WEEK, demonstrating our School Values and to MAX S for being 6 questions away from achieving his PLATINUM badge in 99 Club: keep on going, Max!

That's all from me so have a lovely weekend!

Miss Randle, Mrs Clary, Mrs Hodge and Miss Colton.

Terrific Tregantle 

What an exciting start to the spring term we’ve had! It has been absolutely wonderful to welcome the children back into school and see them settle back into routines so quickly. Our EYFS children are getting stuck into their learning about cold weather. They have done a brilliant job learning an extract from the story, ‘The Gruffalo’s Child’ and adding their own actions to tell the story. We have all embraced the colder weather and enjoyed investigating the ice that has formed in our garden. The children were brilliant scientists when trying to find ways to melt the ice or try and keep the ice. Our new ‘clothes shop’ role play area has been a massive hit. It has been great to see the children using their maths and phonics skills in here: counting out the correct number of items for each area and making and signs and receipts for the shop floor!
The Year 1 children have been very enthused by their new topic – ‘What was school like in the past?’ They have been finding out about the many differences between how school is now and how it was at different points in history. They have decided that they are very lucky to be going to school now and not a long time ago! The new Year 1 English story is ‘Harry and the Bucket Full of dinosaurs.’ Tregantle Class absolutely loved using our story sack to find out more about the story and use real objects to explore the characters’ feelings. We are all developing our speaking and listening skills with our whole school oracy focus. The children are getting used to standing and speaking ‘loud and proud’ during class discussions. A great start to 2025!

TALLAND'S BLOG 10.1.25

Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had the most magical time during the Christmas holidays.

It's been a great start to 2025 and the children of Talland have brought with it their fabulous energy and creativity! Creativity is the value Polperro will be focusing on this term. Therefore, I can't wait to see the spectacular things the children come up with! The homework grid will be coming out on next weeks blog - I will try my best to think of some fun and creative ideas for you and your child to get your teeth stuck into!

Maths:
Year 4 have been continuing to multiply and divide. Mostly focusing on division skills. They will be completing this unit next week.
Year 5 have also been focusing on division problems, including using remainders. We've found the bus stop method to be helpful when solving these problems.
It would be fantastic to have a try of some division questions with your children to continue to build their confidence. Why not try out these and similar questions:
488 divided by 4 =
629 divided by 4 =  

English:
We have planned our persuasive letter and are ready to independently write our letter next week. Can they convince a Greek citizen to fight for either the Spartans or the Athenians?

Science:
We've experimented with sound this week and helped Justin Bieber out with a tweet he made. He thinks that having a larger pinnae (ear) will mean that you can hear more clearly. We put this to the test. Why not ask your child about the results...

PE:
This term, Talland will be performing dance and playing tennis (perhaps not the Wimbledon weather you would hope for but good fun all the same). 

That's all from Talland this week. We hope you have a brilliant weekend and can't wait to see you all on Monday.

Signing off from Mr. Langley, Mr. Bishop and Miss. Colton. 

Happy New Year!

This week, we welcome Mrs Lister to Penhallow class. She will be working with us every Friday. She also teaches at Trenode school and has experience at teaching all Primary age groups, and brings with her lots of experience and enthusiasm. Please feel free to come in and meet her, or to ask any questions that you might have. 

This week, we have launched our new enquiry question: ‘Why aren’t space ship’s made of jelly?’ The focus of the topic, is based around different materials and their properties. 

This week, we explored the story of The Three Little Pigs during our English lessons. We learnt the story and practiced reciting our own version of the story with actions. We also sequenced the story with pictures, and built models of the pig’s houses in our construction area. We practiced our phonics writing skills by drawing plans, writing lists and labelling our models. 

In art, Year 1 began to learn about the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. We watched videos about how he creates his work, and found out about the natural materials and techniques that he uses. We sketched the shapes that his sculptures make, so that next week, we can create our own designs and sculptures outside, using natural materials. Reception enjoyed making collages of the three pig’s houses, mixing colours to paint pig masks, and using junk modelling to build models of the houses. 

Have a lovely weekend!

From the Penhallow team

This week the children were introduced to a new story in English - Harry and the Bucketful of Dinosaurs.  I thought a cleaner had left a bag of rubbish in the class but it was clues to the story...

In Science, the class sorted living, dead and never alive objects - this led to lots of interesting discussion about how 'never alive' some items were.  We are trying to improve out oracy skills as a school so this was a great chance to use some sentence stems to support our discussions.

This has been a fantastic week in Seaton for oracy. We started off by using our story maps of Hansel and Gretel to practise retelling the story. We used sentence stems to help structure our sentences. Please ask your child to retell the story at home.

Following this, we worked in groups to practise asking and answering questions from other students based on the characters from the story. This helped us when we were put into the hotseat and pretended to be the actual characters. The masks helped us get into character and we found the lesson a lot of fun. 

Next week we will be starting to write our own versions of the story but with a twist...it will be set in the alps with a house made of cheese and a yeti instead of a witch. 

In maths, we have been learning about percentages and how they link to decimals and fractions. 

In DT, we have started to design stuffed toys based on animals that can be found in the Alps.I was impressed with the sketches and templates I have seen so far. Next week, we will be learning blanket stitch which will help us to sew the fabric together and assemble to toy. 

In PE, we started our gymnastics unit by creating a sequence of partner balances using apparatus. The children enjoyed filming their sequences on the IPads to help them improve their tension and timing. 

What a busy week we have had, enjoy the weekend!

Miss Burton

Weekly Blog 10th Jan 25

Firstly, a very Happy New Year to you all! I hope you all managed to have a good Christmas break with friends and family. I hope you all managed to stay well too with all the flu and winter viruses around. The children have loved telling us all about their Christmas fun from skiing, visiting friends, sleepovers and exciting adventures to meeting Father Christmas. It has made us all jealous! It may only have been a four-day week but what a week it has been! Class 2 had their first session for their "Eden Sustainability Lunch" challenge on Wednesday. They will be working with each other to design a healthy and sustainable packed lunch that could be taken to the Eden Project. This is the second time the school has entered, and we won a prize last time! The children are keen to keep up their winning streak. Our school council spoke very eloquently about their learning to a governor on Wednesday. I was blown away with their answers and reasons and made me proud to be a part of Darite. They spoke very positively about school and both Mrs Richardson-Calladine and I were very impressed with their understanding. Thank-you to the school council and to Mrs Richardson-Calladine for giving up her time talk to the children. Having their voice heard is so powerful. I am sure you all shared our disappointment with the necessity to cancel the pantomime trip yesterday due to concerns around safety of pupils and staff because of the snow and ice. I am sure you understand that such decisions are never made lightly and without careful consideration for alternatives. Thank-you for the kind messages of understanding with this difficult decision. Despite this, the children who were able to make it to school had a great day - Class 1 made the best snowman I have seen in many years and Class 2 brought the pantomime to Darite with their performances in the afternoon! We definitely have some future Oscar winners in school! Mrs Norris has already been looking at other opportunities for a trip soon. Last, but by no means least, I would like to welcome Mrs Nel to school. She is covering Miss Bawden’s maternity leave in Class 2 and lunchtimes. She is a familiar face in school, having volunteered last term but it is lovely to welcome her formally. Of course, we wish Miss Bawden well with her maternity and when we hear from her, we will let you know! This half term is short but full of activities so please keep checking the diary and website for details. Thank-you from all the staff at school for your continued support of Darite. Have a lovely weekend and we will see the children back on Monday.