Yesterday, the Junior Gardening Club issued a challenge to all the children within our Prep Department. Working industriously, the gardeners packaged up seed packets of sunflower seeds that they had previously saved from flowers grown in the Prep garden and issued a pack to for every child.
The challenge? To see who can grow the tallest sunflower over the next few months! The seeds can be started off indoors now in small pots or containers, or planted out directly into the ground in a couple of weeks when the risk of final frosts have passed. Mr. Suter would love to see your seed’s progress, so please email him any pictures of your sunflowers growing to suterl@bridgewater-school.co.uk
Sunflowers should flower in August, so we’ll look forward to measurements of your giant sunflowers then!
Prep III have used their desk top publishing skills to design posters to advertise the challenge – we hope you like these too.
As a culmination of our study of the Easter Story, Prep V set out for the woods on Tuesday afternoon to gather materials to make resurrection gardens. We returned with our small bags bulging with moss, twigs, ivy leaves, bark and small stones. Back at school, we took over the quad, where we started to make our Easter gardens.
Firstly, we filled our foil trays with soil – some of us were lucky enough to have a worm or two for extra realism – then we added a small flowerpot on its side to represent Jesus’s tomb. We covered the pot with more earth and then got creative with our treasures from the woods. Soft moss was used to look like grass, and we used small pebbles to make winding paths up to the tomb. A large stone was placed to one side of the tomb to show that Jesus had risen and was no longer inside. Next, we carefully planted a viola in our gardens, gently teasing out the roots before pressing it firmly into the soil. Some of us added daisies that we found on the school field and artificial flowers for a splash of colour. Finally, we used garden twine to tie out twigs to make wooden crosses which we positioned firmly into the soil.
Everyone was pleased with the results of their hard work. Eni summed the afternoon up by saying, “I enjoyed this because we could be extremely creative and add anything we liked.” Kevin said, ” I really like my garden, and I also enjoyed finding all the materials in the woods.” Elissa was pleased with, “How it looks realistic,” and Tommy Jack enjoyed that he could, “Explore and have an adventure!”
Well done to Prep V for their imagination, creativity and enthusiasm, and their excellent behaviour in the woods. We are enormously grateful for the gardening expertise of Mr Suter, who guided us through the task so patiently. A special mention must also go to the under-gardener Hamza Ahmed, who helped tidy up so conscientiously afterwards. Thanks too to Mr Rooney for accompanying us on our woodland adventure.
Reception have continued to hone their photography skills today – using the skills learned last week, we took the cameras out around school to find signs of Spring, reinforcing our classroom learning. There are some (and some not quite) wonderful images that the children have taken here. We hope you like them. They are developing a good eye for an excellent photography shot!
It is no eggsageration to say it has been an eggstremely eggciting day here in Prep. Mr. Altdorf hatched an eggcellent plan for all classes to shellibrate Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day by organising the Red Nose Relay – classes were eggspected to eggshibit eggstraordinary and eggsceptional skills to complete as many lengths as possible through the eggsilarating course while eggsercising with an egg and spoon in their hand.
Actually, it was a Comic Relief nose, not an egg, so enough of the puns! What is excellent, is that £153 has been raised for Comic Relief’s causes. Thank you so much for contributing, and well done to Mr. Altdorf for organising the event.
According to his stats, each class covered the following distances:
KG 575m
Reception 800m
Prep I. 925m
Prep IV. 2050m
Prep II. 2125m
Prep V. 2525m
Prep III. 2700m
Prep VI. 2725m
Total distance covered 14,425m, which is just over 9 miles.
Ella (Prep III) and Leo (Prep V) stood out as top egg n spoon speed stars with Prep III outstanding as a team!
As part of our Computing lessons, our Reception children have been using digital devices to capture images, using each other as models. We learned what devices we could use to take photographs with, how to take a good photograph with a camera, and also the importance of making sure the person whose picture you want to take is happy for you to do so.
One thing we didn’t have to teach the children is how to pose!
As part of their geography unit on mountains, Prep V have looked at the artist Katsushika Hokusai, whose most iconic and recognisable piece was probably The Great Wave off Kanagawa, an illustration of a crashing wave, three boats, and the peak of Mount Fuji in the distance. This piece was part of his series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which Prep V have been using as a basis for their own Hokusai collages. Using magazine pieces, the children have sketched their Hokusai versions onto paper and are in the process of using the magazine pieces to colour their drawings. It’s a messy process, and it’s not finished yet, but we are looking forward to seeing the final product. Watch this space!
Our Prep children have responded wonderfully to Miss Gill’s virtual World Book Day challenges this week – this video compilation that she has put together has captured perfectly the essence of the activities children were involved in. If you’re ready for a good story, plump up those cushions, press play, and settle back for a jolly good read…
You’d have been mistaken if you thought you had walked into a living library this morning, with the variety of book characters on show, both in the classroom and at home on virtual classroom Meets. Our children today have imaginatively brought their favourite book characters to life as part of this year’s World Book Day.
In fact, we have been enjoying a week of book related activities thanks to Miss Gill’s creative approach to this year’s World Book Day – watch out for her video montage of the results of those challenges, which include recreating a favourite book cover, finding inventive places to ‘Get Caught Reading’ and also sharing a story with some of the younger children in school. We can’t wait to see that!
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.
