What a wonderful and busy start to our new school year! We have all settled in well into our new classroom and school routine. As part of that routine, we spend a lot of our time outside doing all sorts of interesting and fun things to challenge us in different ways and keep us active.
We have enjoyed having classes outside in Cadoc Wood and the muddy mover space. In the woods, we have been learning to make dens, starting with a den big enough for a teddy bear then progressing to building a den big enough for a member of our team using canes, ropes and plastic sheets. We also did some artwork outside by making mud faces on trees. In the muddy movers area we made obstacle courses which needed a lot of teamwork and challenged our balance and jumping skills.
The school will be receiving a donation of over 400 trees to improve our outdoor space further. We have used this as an opportunity to apply our measuring and design skills. We used metre sticks to measure the playground and then created a plan for the tree planting so that each tree has enough space to grow.
We have also spent a lot of time outdoors doing PE. At the start of the year we did a bleep test to find out our base fitness level, many people surprised themselves by reaching level 10! We learned a new game called Salt and Pepper which challenged our listening skills, tested our speed and worked on our ability to dodge. We then used this game to test our knowledge of 2D and 3D shapes. We really enjoy playing team games too, Kickball Rounders and Capture the Flag both need teamwork and communication to create and use different strategies to try and outsmart the other team. We are hoping that all these games will improve our stamina and endurance for another bleep test later in the year.
In Health and Wellbeing we have started a new program called Jigsaw. So far we have thought about what it feels like to be excluded and what we can do to help people feel included and identified the different jobs people have that work in our school and how they help us. Most recently, we have discussed the rights of every child around the world and learned about some of the responsibilities we each have to make sure that we don’t affect the rights of others. In every lesson we do some meditation to settle our minds and bodies, we have to listen for the end of the chime and it seems to go on and on.
We always finish off our week with art. At the beginning of the year we created self portraits that celebrate how we are all unique. Recently, we have been following step-by-step instructions to draw realistic animals. It’s a fun way to practice our listening skills and improve our art skills too. Each day we also try to complete some mindfulness colouring which helps us work on our concentration and get focused for learning.
