07 June 2024

Starfish
 

World Ocean Day takes place every year on the 8th of June. It's a day to come together to think about the importance of our oceans and how we can protect them. The day has been celebrated for more than 30 years, and today countries all over the world take part to raise awareness.  At beach school day Starfish listened to the story ‘Harry Saves the Ocean’ by Sylva Fae.  In the story Harry the mouse meets a whale who is in trouble. The whale then tells Harry about the growing problem of plastic pollution, and decides to do something about it.

We made posters to remind people to put their rubbish in the bin to help keep the oceans clean.  What a fabulous job the Reception children did with their writing!

We also spoke about how fish can get tangled up in old fishing lines and get caught up in discarded nets.  We had some toy animals that needed to be saved!  We helped to save the sea creatures.

In maths the Reception children used shells and made sandcastles to show their understanding of odd and even numbers and the Nursery children practised subitising using the sea animals. 

Our PE today was a chasing game.  Some children were the litter pickers who had to catch the rubbish (the other children) which was blowing about in wind and put it into the rubbish bin. 

 

 

Puffins
Our worship theme this week is 'justice'.  In Worship by the Waves we learned the story of Jeremiah in the well before digging our own wells and thinking about fairness.  When we split off into our classes, Puffins decided to walk to the other side of the beach to try and find some shelter from the wind.  Once we were there and refuelled with our snack, we did some geography.  We started off this half term with some mapping work, labelling the different countries in sand maps of the UK and then putting sticks in where the different capital cities are.  We then had to move around the different nations on our giant maps. Next we did some PE.  This half-term's theme is athletics and we started off by practising our accurate throwing skills.  We talked about how we could help accuracy by thinking about our arm position when releasing the beanbag, and about how far away from a target we were.  Next we did some English.  As it was World Ocean Day, the Year 2s did some descriptive writing about the sea, whilst the Year 1s did some phonics.  Unfortunately it started raining as we were doing our English so we had to abandon it!  Instead we started RE.  This half term we are looking at the Christian and Jewish Creation Story.  We tried to see what we could remember of the story from when we last looked at it in Starfish Class.  With a little prompting we remembered most of it!  We are going to go on to think about how the story shows what God feels about his creation, and how he expects humans to take care of the world.  It tied in nicely with World Ocean Day!
As the wind was continuing to build we retreated to the golf club for lunch, which we managed to eat without too much blowing away.  Sadly we then took the decision to come back up to school as the flying sand is not much fun to learn in!
Seals and Orcas 
 
Today Seals and Orcas combined for the day. We started with Worship by the Waves led by Mrs Popay which was looking at the theme of Justice. We looked at a story about Jerimiah and then we had to build a well. We then split off for an hour. Orcas concentrated on sustainability which tied in quite nicely with World Ocean Day. We learnt about ways to protect the environment. We then read the secrets of the sun king. The Seals were looking at setting descriptions in English. We were looking at vocabulary to discuss different settings specifically fairy tales. We then looked at each having to use a different word to discuss different settings and had to listen carefully to different ones so we didn't repeat them. We looked at Edinburgh, sheep farms, the Stadium of Light etc. We then walked along to the river to discuss the water cycle the importance of our oceans and how we can look after them. Sketching out ideas in the sand or our journals. We then headed up after lunch to take part in dodgeball and rounders.