Bridgewater School – Prep. Department

“Learning outdoors creates lasting memories, helps build a greater awareness of the environment, provides more opportunities to think independently, and gets children feeling challenged and excited by learning. Children are more active when they play outdoors; It is essential for their healthy development and enjoyment of childhood.” (outdoorclassroomday.com)

Begun in 2012, a handful of schools in London started an outdoor classroom day.  By 2015, 600 schools in 15 countries took part.  This year, the event went global with an Outdoor Classroom Day on 18th May.  While we missed that, we registered and agreed that we would hold an outdoor week where we get as many of our children as possible outdoors.

Prep V started us today – using naturally found objects (and the odd bit of rubbish left lying around – which our children cleaned up afterwards), the children worked in teams to create their own images of Stig of the Dump in the woods.  We’re sure you’ll agree they were pretty impressive!

Last Thursday in the MFL lesson Sid and his assistant (his Mummy) talked to the class about India. We learned a lot of information about the geography of this very large Asian country, Sid told us that he visited India in the monsoon season, there were lots of trees and grass and he even saw a snake!

Prep III walked into Worsley village as part of their local study in Geography. We worked hard looking at land use, conducting a traffic survey and sketched places of interest. We were pleased that there was a little time to play on the village green too! Our teachers were very proud of our impeccable behaviour.

With the Prep. Times Tables Challenge taking place soon, we thought it would be an excellent opportunity to highlight this online site.  Not only is it brilliant for times tables games, there are also a number of other Maths activities that are extremely useful for our Prep. children that are differentiated for different abilities.

Yesterday, Jack travelled as part of a six-man Bridgewater team to the Alexander Stadium, Birmingham as part of the North athletics team to compete in the ISA Nationals.  Against a very strong field, Jack threw a 3kg shot a whopping 7.59 metres – try it, it’s not easy!  Unfortunately, he was a mere 21cms off a medal position, but this is a new personal best for Jack and, for someone who is relatively new to the shot, a great achievement.  We hope he’ll be back in a medal winning position next year in Year 7!

As part of our Healthy Eating Week, Prep II have been preparing healthy snack boxes – which they then displayed on the biggest apple ever seen in Prep.!

What a fabulous time was had in Scarborough – here is the last of our galleries from the trip.