17 September 2021

Starfish

We began beach school today with Worship by the Waves.  We thought about how we need to be good listeners and then heard the story about Samuel.  Samuel was a boy who listened very carefully to God.  We also sang ‘Allelu, Allelu, Alleluia. Praise ye the Lord’ which sounded fabulous!

After worship we listened to our story of the week ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’ by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury.  At the front of the book there is a picture of a beach and we compared it to our beach.  There were lots of similarities and the only difference we could see were the seagulls in the book but not on our beach.  We then carefully sketched our beach making sure we had the sand, sea, sky and rocks.

As we love this book we decided to create our own version.  We walked along the beach and found various things that we couldn’t go over, or under but we would have to go through them.  We went through Orca class, through the river, through some seaweed and through the sand dunes.  We even saw some footprints which we thought might belong to a bear!  Luckily we didn’t find a real bear!

For our maths today we sang ‘Ten bears in a bed’ and did lots of counting.  We need to remember to touch each object as we count so that we don’t miss any out or count too many.  We also looked at some numbers in the sand and collected the same amount of shells, stones or feathers.  Some of us then wrote our own numbers in the sand.

On the way to the golf course for lunch we helped Mrs Cotton carry Seal’s and Orca’s hockey sticks which were in the trolley.  We pretended they were all sorts of things: broomsticks, horses, oars and strimmers!

After lunch we went up into the dunes and made maps of the bear hunt story.  We glued on different types grasses, sand and seaweed to represent the things in our story.  We used our maps to retell the story.

To end our beach school today we made caves for our bears using buckets!

Puffins
After Worship by the Waves we quickly got down to our writing task.  The weather was quite different to last week, so we had lots of new things to write about.  After writing we moved on to PE where after a few games of 'Stuck in the Soft Sand' we practised throwing a beanbag straight up into the air and catching it again.  We had to concentrate hard to make sure that we were releasing it at the right point so that it went straight!  Next we did some RE, thinking about what is good about belonging to Puffin Class.  We worked in pairs and then recorded our thoughts.  As we had a few minutes before lunchtime, we decided to have a bit of calm time, watching the waves and the gannets diving into the sea.  The tide was almost right in, so we sat on the bank and watched the waves crashing in front of us.
After lunch we spent the afternoon doing some science.  On our way back to the beach we looked at the different surfaces that we walked along and thought about whether they were easy to walk on, and whether they were easy to pull the trolley on.  When we got to the beach we learnt about how John Loudon McAdam improved the road system by layering different sized rocks, and using ditches for drainage.  We then used resources on the beach to make our own roads in groups.  We showed each other our work, talking about why we had used particular resources.  On the way back up the hill we looked at the tarmac roads and could see the small bits of rock in the the tarmac.
Seals
We started our Beach School Day with Worship by the Waves with Mrs Popay leading us. It was lovely to have our first Worship down by the Waves with the whole school again. We then went off to the Wall to look at our science learning. We discussed what Voluntary and Involuntary Muscles are. What is the difference between the two, as well as how could we create an experiment that would use them. We then did some simple exercises that tested the use of our Biceps, Triceps and Hamstrings. After that, we tested our hearts by working out our resting heart rate and then doing some exercise to see how our heart rate changed. It was very exciting. We read some more of our Beach Book 'Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman' and discussed the revelation of who the School Bully was. We also acted out how we would have felt if what had been said, was said to us. By this time, we were ready for lunch, so we went to enjoy our lunch at the Golf Course. We finished off our Beach Day by practising our dribbling and passing skills and then finished off with a hockey match. We were very enthusiastic and have to remember only 1 v 1 when tackling. That will be our challenge next week.