19 April 2024

Orcas

 Happy first Beach School of the summer term, we began with Mrs Popay leading Worship by the Waves where the children learned about the Modern Saints, the children teamed up with younger ones and drew and created their own shield.

After that, Orcas were off on their litter pick, as part of our Young Leaders Award the children are required to help support their community through different activities. This is our second community challenge as we have previously made thank you cards for the golf club we will also be taking part in the North East Children’s Cancer Run. This half term we completed a litter pick from Embleton to Low Newton along the beach and then back through the dunes, whilst on our way back we popped into the bird hide and discussed the different birds we could see, and then we discussed the ratio of one type of bird to the other. The children then drew what they could see.

Mrs Brealey then had a discussion PSHE lesson with the Orca class.

Coming back to the Golf Club the children continued with their litter pick after lunch we then made our way back to school – via the play park, back at school the children then completed their next part of their Young Leaders Award and completed a presentation about a specific UK charity explaining its purpose.

 

 

Puffins
At beach school today we started off with some music.  This half term we are learning about some traditional British songs.  We started off learning about sea shanties, and learnt 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean'.  Arthur told us about some of the big ropes on the ship that he was on, and we sang our sea shanty whilst pretending to pull on the ropes.  Next we did some maths. We are looking at positions on a grid and made big grids in the sand and talked about which positions we were standing in.  After snack we did some PE.  This half term we are learning some yoga moves.  It was great to have some sunshine to do a sun salutation to!  After PE we did some writing, thinking about what we could see around us, and trying to start our sentences in interesting ways.  After lunch we lay in the sunshine listening to the crashing waves as it was almost high tide before starting our science.  This half term in science we are learning about different animals and plants and their habitats.  First of all though we thought about what it meant to be a living thing, and what characteristics they shared.  Next we did some work to support ICT by thinking about composition and 'one best picture'.  We made view finders with our fingers before working in groups to take pictures with the ipads.  When we got home we chose 5 pictures that we especially liked - you can see them above.  What do you think?
Starfish
 

Our story at the beach today was ‘Once Upon a Tide’ by Tony Mitton and Selina Young.   In this rhyming story an unnamed boy and his older friend Bess build a boat to sail to the place where the sea meets the sky and find buried treasure. They have an adventure then return to their home shore to grow older singing songs of far-off seas with children sitting round their knees.

After listening to the story we looked at the page ‘where the sea meets the sky’ and spoke about the ‘horizon’.  We then sat and looked out to sea and saw where the sea meets the sky from our beach. We used our beach sketch books and different shades of blue and grey pencils to sketch the horizon.   When we had finished we compared our drawings to the picture in the book.

In the book one of the pages says ‘Bess got the biscuits.  I made the tea.  We both had a sit down by the sea.’ so for our snack we had biscuits and made some tea! On another page in the book the two characters stitch up a sail, it would have been a bit tricky for us to do some sewing on the beach so we did some weaving.  We looked for long pieces of seaweed and marram grass and weaved the into our weaving frames.

In maths today the Reception children used teen numbers and did some sharing talking about odd and even numbers.  This week the Nursery children have been learning about sequencing so they talked about how to make a sandcastle and what you needed to do first, second and third. 

After lunch we went back to the beach for our RE.  We heard the traditional Muslim story ‘Seven New Kittens’.  The story has the message to encourage people to treasure the natural world and reflect on the beauty and wonder of the world. 

There were some huge foaming waves this afternoon so we spent some time reflecting on the wonder of the waves before we went back to school.

Seals
This week at Beach School was our Roman Army training day. We were transported back to the Roman Days, with Emperor G at the helm. We started with Worship by the Waves, which was linked to the Northern Saints and with a focus on St George. We were able to share our shields with the rest of the school. We then walked to the wall and Mrs G did a lot of litter-picking to make sure we had a clear area to learn in. We then had a go at walking down the wall before starting our Roman Army Training. We learnt how to stand to attention, turn and salute before rotating from left to right. We then marched up to the Golf Club and had lunch. Before heading to the Quarry to practice our Roman Army Shield formations. We then went to school to read Escape from Pompeii and watch how Mount Vesuvius erupted. We then had our very own Roman vs Celts battle before making our news reports to report the Battle and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.