15 March 2024

Starfish
This week is science week so we have did some science investigations on the beach.  Our book at the beach was ‘Ada Twist Scientist’ by Andrea Beaty.  Ada Twist’s head is full of questions. Ada has always been endlessly curious. Even when her fact-finding missions and elaborate scientific experiments don’t go as planned, Ada learns the value of thinking her way through problems and continuing to stay curious.   We then wrote about our favourite part of the story.  Lots of us wrote about when Ava went to put her cat in the washing machine!

Next we used magnifying glasses to look closely at the sand.  We noticed that some grains of sand were bigger than others and there were also stones in the sand.  After that we used sieves to identify and sort the larger fragments from the finer sand that came out the bottom.  We did lots of shaking and decided that the Taylor Swift song ‘Shake it off’ would be a good song to sing while we did this!

We used some of the sieved sand to make sand timers.  We carefully filled some bottles and taped them together.  We then turned them over and watched the sand run through to the other bottle. 

Our last investigation was to find out whether wet sand, damp sand or dry sand made the best sand castles.  Lots of us already knew what the best sand to make sandcastles was but we were able to talk about why and we looked at the difference in the three sandcastles.

We had a very wet walk back up to school but it was great fun stamping in all the puddles!

Seals
Our day started with a worship by the waves, where we thought about the importance of forgiveness. This was followed by a recap of our numbers to 10, colours and classroom instructions in French on the beach. This was a great opportunity for the children to practice their language skills in a real-world context. After that, we played a game of multiplication splat to recap our multiplication recall. The children had a great time working together to solve the problems and improve their mental maths skills. Later, we made a Roman soldier in the sand, which was a fantastic way to combine history and art in a creative way. The children worked collaboratively to design and build their soldier, and they were all very proud of their creations. Unfortunately, it was too wet to do hockey, so we did box ball and endzone ball in PE instead. The children had a great time playing these games and developing their physical skills. Finally, we ended the day by creating presentations about Mary Anning in science, which was a fantastic way to round off our British Science Week activities.
Puffins
 

Beach school this week began with a lovely sunny walk down the hill.  Once we had made it down to the beach we had Worship by the Waves which made us think about forgiveness then we practised our throwing and catching skills before heading into a game of rounders with the Orca’s.  I was really pleased with all the children as some of them had never played rounders before so didn’t know the rules.  Also the improvement from the year 2’s from last year was amazing.  We finished our game of rounders then had a snack and a drink and we were just about to get our journals out to write our acrostic beach poems when it started to rain!  So instead we just got in to groups and thought about our poems orally.  We then tried to recite our poems to the rest of the class.  We finished off the morning with a play time before heading up to the golf club to try and dry off slightly before a rather damp walk up the hill back up to school.  Once back at school we thought about ways in which we might prepare for a special visitor then talked about how Jesus was a special visitor in the Easter story and arrived into Jerusalem on a donkey and everyone waved palm leaves at him.  We also talked about the different seasons and weather over the course of a day, week and even a year to tie in with British Science Week.