14 September 2022

Starfish
 

Our story at beach school this week was ‘Starfish on the Beach’ by Lindy Schneider and Tom Schneider.  The story is about a little girl and her mum who find starfish on the beach drying in the sun. They try to save them by throwing them back in the water but get discouraged by how many need rescuing. The little girl sees that she can make a difference for at least one at a time.

We spoke about making a difference and how the little girl helped the starfish.  We then practised writing  ‘s’ for starfish on our whiteboards.

We went for a walk along the beach to try and find some starfish but we didn’t see any so we drew our own in the sand.  One of the children wanted to make a big starfish altogether so we helped each other and made a big starfish and filled it with seaweed. 

When we had our snack we thought that our banana skins looked like starfish!  After our snack we played a game and found out lots of interesting facts about starfish. 

In the afternoon we went up in the sand dunes to look for seagulls.  Our story today had lots of seagulls in it.  We looked at pictures of different seagulls and learnt some of their names.  We then took it in turns to describe one and the others had to guess which one it was.

At the beginning of the story the little girl collects different shells.  We collected different shells and also looked for starfish in the rock pools.     When we had lots of shells we sorted them in different ways, spoke about their differences and similarities and compared sizes.

Before we went back to school we practiced our balancing  on the big log.

Seal
Our first Beach School back as well as our first Beach School as Seal Class. We were lucky with the weather, which made it a nice setting for the day. We started off by having Worship by The Waves led by Mrs. Popay followed by Cross-Country with Mrs. Scott and The Orcas. The children had to create their own warm-ups with their partners before running 300m. The children all did fantastically well. We then moved on to making our own commemorative pieces to remember the Queen, with some of the children working together to make Buckingham Palace and The Gardens as well as her beloved Corgis. The children put a huge amount of effort in. We then had lunch before starting off the rest of our afternoon. We spent some time reflecting on our hopes and worries about starting a new class and drawing out or creating things in the sand to represent these things before sharing them with the class. It was a lovely way to finish off our first beach school together.
PUFFIN
 
What a day to begin back at Beach School!  The weather was kind to us this week.  We began Beach School with Worship by the Waves before heading off to do some writing.  We wrote sentences about the Sun; how it made us feel and what it was doing to the sea.  My favourite adjectives were sparkling and reflecting, as that is exactly what it was doing on the sea.
 
We had our snack before heading off for an adventure up the dunes.  We walked to the top and talked about what we could see and why the people down below looked so small.  We cheered on the Seals and Orcas in their PE lesson!  We came back and did some art; we had to find something on the beach that made us happy and draw it.
 
After lunch we went back down to the beach to do our science and PE.  In science we drew round our friends and identified different body parts.  We then played a game of Simon says.  For PE, we were practising our throwing skills.  We had to make sure we were looking towards where we were throwing in order for it to go in a straight line and for it to be accurate.  We tried hard and were becoming increasingly accurate the more we practised.