5 October 2022

Our story at the beach this week was ‘Jo Jo and Gran Gran at the beach’ by Laura Henry Allain.   JoJo and Gran Gran are taking a trip to the beach to build a sandcastle. But when JoJo’s sandcastle gets trodden on, she feels sad. Gran Gran shows JoJo that even if their sandcastle doesn’t last forever, making memories together is what matters most.

After we listened to the story we spoke about how the tide goes in and out.  We put some feathers and sticks at the tide line and checked on them during beach school.  We could tell that the tide was coming in today as our feathers and sticks got washed away.

We matched pictures from the story with words.  We used our knowledge of letter sounds to help us read the words.  Next we went up into the dunes to do our writing.  We then wrote some words to match the pictures thinking carefully about how to write the letters

In the story JoJo makes a sandcastle that gets knocked down by a ball.  We made some sandcastles, trying to make them look like JoJo’s.  We put some flags in the top and then knocked them down with balls!

For our maths today we looked at the stripy sandcastle flags that JoJo had and made some repeating stripy patterns using marram grass and seaweed.   JoJo used three stones to decorate her sandcastle, we practised out subitising skills using shells (as we couldn’t find any stones today!).  It got a bit windy and rainy so we used the parachute as a tent.

Seals
This week at Beach School, Seals had disappeared and had been overtaken by Roman Soldiers that had travelled back in time to 43AD. We started by discussing what group of Roman Soldiers we could be with our size numbers and who could lead our Roman Army based on the rules that they had to follow. We started by building Hadrian's Wall, we used our knowledge from Vindolanda to help us with it. We discussed why it isn't a straight line and where it started and ended. The children built forts and watchtowers along their wall to strengthen their defences. We then had a well-deserved snack before starting our Roman Army training. We started by marching in one line with our shields and spears before changing formation into the Testudo formation that Legionaries used. We found this a little bit more difficult to keep together at the same time. Miss Scott made an impromptu attack that caught us by surprise and made us rethink our defences. We then had a Romans VS Scots Battle at Hadrian's Wall. Both sides tried to cross the wall. It was clear they took their battle cry seriously and both sides did an amazing job of trying to hold their ground. We then spent some time designing our Roman Shields in the sand before finishing off with learning some Roman Numerals. After lunch, we headed back to school where we became the Emperor of Rome and had to make important decisions about the Populace, Senate and Military whilst trying to remain Emperor. The children did a fantastic job and managed to keep everyone happy but found out how difficult it was to make these decisions and balance these things all at the same time.