3 May 2024

Starfish
 
We continued our learning at beach school with the story 'Once Upon a Tide' by Tony Mitton.  In the story the two characters meet a whale.  After the story we looked at a non fiction book about whales.  We found out some whale facts.  We learnt that some whales have barnacles stuck to them, the heart of a blue whale is as big as a small car and that some whales can make a sound louder that a rocket taking off!  We then all drew a whale and the Reception children wrote some whale facts. 
After that we made some maps in the sand showing the journey of the characters in the story.  The tide was quite high today so some of us decided that we would dig a trench to see if we could stop the waves coming any further.  We sat and watched the sea for a while but the waves didn't come up as far as our trench.
We then used the scoops and balls in PE to practise our throwing and catching.  It was really fun and we needed to make sure that we watched the ball all the time.
Further along the beach we noticed some coastguard and we wondered what they were doing.  When we asked them they told us that someone had reported a dead porpoise.  They then said that all dolphins and porpoises belong to the King and when they get washed up on the shore they have to be measured and the information recorded.  They let one of Starfish try on their hat and hold their radio!
After that we looked at some plastic whales and dolphins and made representations of them in the sand.
In the afternoon we went back to the beach for our RE special story.  This week we heard a Christian story all about Joseph.  Christians believe that this story shows them about compassion and forgiveness.
Seals
At beach school, we started with Worship by the waves led by Mrs Popay. We have continued to look at the Northern Saints in this. This week, we completed an English lesson. We were given the mission to create a 3D design of their research beetle from our English term book. We had to make sure to include good patterns and use the materials around the beach to design our beetles. In PE, we were learning about how to jump over hurdles safely. We participated in partners to ensure that we were safely jumping over obstacles.  We then made our high jumps to practice with building the sand up to be of different heights. After lunch, we headed back to school to do a bit of vocabulary work and descriptive thinking on the field.
Puffins
At the beach today we started off by doing some maths.  We collected some different items on the beach and then sorted them to create graphs.  We thought of different ways we could sort them.  We then refreshed our memories about tallies and practised drawing some tally charts for different numbers.  After snack we did some science, adding the beach habitat to our list of different habitats.  We realised that the beach had a number of different types of habitat - the sand, the dunes, the sea and the rockpools - and discussed how some creatures and plants were better suited to different parts, and why that might be.  After that we did our yoga session.  We are gradually increasing new moves each week, and we are also focussing on making sure that our moves are controlled and stable.  Before lunch we did some writing in our journals, creating sentences about the beach.
After lunch we learned about Amelia Earhart and what she did in her life, as part of our history work on flight.  We then learned how to make paper aeroplanes and flew them to see whose went the furthest.  Just before we came back up to school we recapped some of the songs we had been doing in music, and added London's Burning to our list of traditional British songs.