Bridgewater School – Prep. Department

Would you believe your eyes if you came face-to-face with a dragon in the forest? On Safer Internet day, our Reception children saw that Digiduck had found some amazing animal facts online but then saw how he was surprised to discover they may need checking. Searching the internet for information can be tricky, so Wise Owl swoops in with a plan to put everything right.

Reception used the third story in Childline’s Digiduck® series to focus on reliability of online information. They were encouraged to start thinking about online content, and Digiduck and Wise Owl helped them to understand that what they read or see online might be true, untrue, or someone’s opinion.

And, of course, to be an internet detective, they turned themselves into Detective Digiduck!  Can you work out who is behind the mask?

For this Safer Internet Day on 9th February 2021, we have been encouraging everyone to think about reliability online.  Using our weekly assembly slots, we have been looking at how we can know what to trust online, and how we can support young people to question,
challenge and change the online world, using the theme ‘An internet we trust:
Exploring reliability in the online world.’

We hope you like some of our children’s ideas about #An Internet We Trust.

Lockdown has thrown up several challenges to the learning of our children, but has also seen our teachers find new and interesting ways to try and engage the children while they are at home.

Introducing KG’s very own Bake Along: simultaneous classroom and home baking, ably demonstrated by Miss Armstrong (move over Nigella!), copied by the children at home and in school!  It’s just a shame we do not have virtual smells through the internet yet, as the cooking smells wafting from KG’s biscuits were delicious!

30 days of fitness challenge

Click on the link above to find attached a health and well-being idea that we would like to share with you and hopefully provide families with a daily fitness challenge to do together.

The Bridgewater 30 Days of Fitness can be started at any time during the current lockdown period, with the challenge being to complete the work out for each day in the correct order. There are activities that involve family fun activities outside, in line with Government recommendations, core workouts, exercises challenges and YouTube HIIT sessions. Each day Bridgewater Prep will Tweet the activity of the day to aid motivation and we will organise awards for anyone who completes the full 30 Day Fitness Challenge.

It is important to have a health and well-being focus during these testing times and hopefully, the challenge will provide a fun and engaging activity for all the family to focus on for 30 minutes in the day. If you want to change an activity on a day that you feel is more suitable or beneficial then that of course is totally fine too. Please share your results with us on Twitter on our Bridgewater page and also here on the Prep Blog, and if you have any questions or suggestions to improve the challenge, then please contact Mr. Altodorf via email at altdorfi@bwslive.co.uk.

Prep III’s Jensen has taken Mr. Rooney’s Rainbow Challenge a step further during lockdown by creating this wonderful rainbow dog.  Using painting by numbers as to guide him, we’re sure you’ll agree it’s an absolutely fabulous piece of work.  Well done Jensen!

One thing that many of us are struggling with during lockdown is the inability to travel to places that we would usually love to visit – and that’s the same in school as well, as we are obviously preventing from undertaking our usual educational trips and visits.

We are grateful to Prep V’s Raj, whose grandfather is a volunteer at the Welsh Mountain Zoo and brought to our attention a series of informal educational visits that the zoo is running which they say are suitable for children  from 6 upwards.  Details of the sessions can be found by following the link below.  The zoo says, “We are running these sessions to help support home education during lock down. We hope that participants will in turn support the Welsh Mountain Zoo, which is currently closed due to a National Lock Down. Please support us by providing a donation for the session, donations will go towards the running of the zoo, and care of our animals.”

You can find details of the sessions here:

Welsh Mountain Zoo Educational Events

Prep II have been learning how to create digital artwork using a computer, learning how to use pens and brushes, paint fills and other edits.  We think some of these are fantastic!

Prep III were given the challenge of creating a 3D volcano this week. Some of the children drew pictures of volcanoes and some of them created ones using papier-mâché. Here are some examples of their brilliant work.

You may recall Mr. Rooney issuing a Rainbow Challenge to our children. Here are some of those that we’ve received – although there is room for plenty more!

We’ve even had a rainbow cake – well done to Reception’s Theo!  It looks delicious!

All of our children should have seen and listened to Mr. Rooney’s assembly today, and if you have you will have heard the “The World Made a Rainbow” story that he read.  You may recall that Mr. Rooney referred back to a post on this blog earlier in the year when children were drawing/painting/building their own rainbows for display.  You can see that Share Your Rainbow post on this link.

He has now challenged you to create new rainbows, and we’d love to see them.  You can send them to Mr. Rooney or Mr. Suter at school and, if we get enough, we’ll post them here on the blog.