End of week 2

This week we have continued to be explorers!  When we came to school on Monday some of our polar animals had been frozen! we had to work out how to free them and this was great fun. We used pipettes and warm water, and we soon got them out! We also explored painting ice outside it was so much fun! 

In outdoor learning we used a graded paint sheet and explored our natural area to see if we could match natural items to the sheet! 

In English this week Miss Hughes pretended to be a penguin whilst the children thought of brilliant questions to ask the 'penguin'. Once we had lots of questions, we then used different sources such as books, fact files, the internet and nature programs to answer our questions. The children thought of some amazing questions. 

In maths we have been exploring 'one more' the children have had great fun exploring this topic, especially when we played the bus game!! 

We have explored so much this week! 

Year 6 are steaming ahead!

This week, Year 6 worked with Rebecca Catterall, who is the Development Officer for the Devon & Cornwall Rail Partnership, in conjunction with the University of Plymouth. We took part in their 'Day Trips to Happiness' project.

We met Rebecca and Sally - with her wonderful pink hair and guitar - at Gunnislake train station and we took the train to Bere Ferrers. When we arrived in Bere Ferrers, we were met by a lovely gentleman named Chris, who owns much of the land down there.

Chris runs a B&B down there and has been collecting train memorabilia for decades! He allowed us to use one of his carriages to do some fun activities; we made 'parcel pets' edible poetry and Sally composed a song for us, which we sang together!

After lunch, Chris showed us the signal box and we all had a go at changing the signals - much strength was needed for this!

At the end of the day, we got the train back to Gunnislake and walked back to school along the back roads, exploring our local neighborhood - Year 6 were an absolute credit to their families and to us. A member of the public, who had been on the train while we were there, made a point of popping in to see Mrs Cox to tell her how wonderful the children had been!

Year 6 crack the code!

Year 6 were fortunate to have a visit from Robert Wiltshire, who is the Youth Programme Coordinator for Tech Cornwall. Mr Wiltshire showed the children how to use the microbits, connected to our Ipads.

We learnt how to write simple codes that would turn on and off various LEDs. We also learnt how to change the colours of the LEDs as well as alter their brightness.

Being able to do this meant that the children could then create patterns and shapes which would change and repeat on the microbits.

If the children want to practise at home and program for free, they can visit:

https://microbit.org/

Microbits can also be borrowed free-of-charge from your local Library.

For information about your nearest Library, please see below:

https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/libraries-museums-and-archives/libraries/

Happy New Year and welcome back to school!

It was lovely to see the children back to school today, refreshed and ready to learn.
Please see the newsletter attached to find out what we will be learning about this half term.

We really enjoyed December for many reasons but mainly due to performing our play 'Christmas with the Aliens'.
It was hard work and we needed to practise lots but it was a really spectacular performance enjoyed by many of our families and friends.
It built up our confidence with speaking in front of an audience and despite some nerves, we totally smashed it!

In Science we carried on learning about habitats and learnt about the creatures that live in polar and desert habitats.

In literacy we were learning the story 'The Elves and the Shoemaker'. We really enjoyed writing about what our naughty elves had been up to in school and at home. 

Finally, as a Christmas treat, we had our annual trip to the theatre to watch Raymond Briggs 'Father Christmas'.
Some of us had never been to the theatre before and it was a wonderful, magical experience. We even had snow!

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and look forward to seeing you all again in 2025!

November was another busy month!

Our new question was 'What festivals happen around the world in the Autumn?'
We have located different countries and continents on the map and had great fun exploring atlases and maps.

We learnt about Diwali and how this is celebrated in many countries. We linked this to our healthy eating in DT and made mango lassi. We really enjoyed making and tasting this!

We also learnt about the Gunpowder Plot and discussed how it is celebrated in the UK. We made some great firework pictures on the I-Pads learning how to select different colours and different sized brushes.

In Science we started to explore different habitats. We learnt about oceans and rainforests and thought about how the creatures that live there adapt to living in that environment.

We also completed a local history project which helped us to find out why we decided to change our name to Copper Valley Academy.
We explored maps of the local area and looked at pictures of locals towns and villages that we know, mainly those linked to copper mining.
We created some amazing watercolour paintings of these places.

NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2024

We had a really busy half term learning about rocks and soils in science, volcanoes and other natural disasters in geography, learning how to design, make and evaluate lanterns in DT, the Holy Trinity in RE, how to name some verbs in French and write reports on volcanoes based on the book Escape from Pompeii...phew time for a couple of weeks' rest!

Spring term 

Sorry we have got a little behind on our class blog during the last term but plan to be better in 2025!

This term we are continuing our work on the Greeks in History, animation in computing and living things in science. 

In Literacy we have read the story of Azzi Inbetween to inspire our speeches about refugees. We are now on week 1 of spring term for spellings and our class book for the Spring is Wonder.

In maths children will be starting new units on Fractions or percentages.

Last week, in art, children started to mold pots inspired by the Greeks. We used the pinch method to build our pot shapes and then looked at adding features such as lids and handles. 

On Thursday, Mrs Butlin was back for our music lessons and we started to learn different rhythms we could play on the drums. 

A Busy First Week Back!

This week, Talland have been developing their oracy skills within lessons. This is to enable them to speak and communicate clearly and confidently.

In science, we have started a new topic 'Living Things and their Habitats'. We were introduced to the classification of living things. We practised creating classification keys using liquorice allsorts, then had a go at classifying some Alpine animals (linking in to our new Big Question). I would like to say that no liquorice allsorts were harmed during this lesson...but I cannot!

In English, we have begun studying the traditional tale of Hansel and Gretel. After story-mapping it and analysing the features of traditional tales, the children were tasked with getting into the role of some of the main characters. During our 'hot seating' lesson they had to put themselves into their character's shoes and answer questions, that the rest of the class made up, in role. The children really got into the challenge and spoke with great thought and clarity. There are definitely some future theatre stars within Talland class!

Maths

This half term we will be focusing on multiplication and division and fractions. If your children would like some extra practise/activities to do at home please see the links below.

Multiplication & Division (we will be covering all these topics at school so any extra practise at home will be very beneficial) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zqbg87h 

Fractions (we will be covering all these topics at school so any extra practise at home will be very beneficial) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/z3rbg82

Topmarks Daily 10 (mental maths quiz) - https://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/daily10

Times Table Rock Stars - https://play.ttrockstars.com/auth/school/student

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Fun in the snow!

This week in our PE lesson the children LOVED this invasion game called Pirate's treasure. The aim of the game is for the islanders to steal the treasure which is in a box behind the pirates. The pirates could freeze the islanders to stop them from stealing the treasure and fellow islanders could crawl under them to unfreeze them.

I think we had to play this at least 6 times they enjoyed it so much!

Science

This half term we have been looking at everything to do with life cycles in our science lessons. We started off by exploring the human life cycle by naming and describing the 5 major stages. 

Then we moved onto learning about the life cycles of different animals such as a butterfly, chicken and a frog. We found out that these animals go through metamorphosis in their life cycles! The children then worked in groups to make a butterfly's life cycle out of play dough. 

English

This half term in our English lessons we were learning to write a story based on the famous children's text, Where the Wild Things are. The children absolutely loved this story and their creativity was unmatched! They made changes to the original story by changing the characters and what they did to make it their own. It was great to see the children using their imagination!

Geography

This half term we have been exploring our local area in our geography lessons. The children started off by learning about aerial photographs and we used Google Earth regularly to view St Cleer from above. The children were intrigued by Google Earth and we did spend some time exploring other places too.

We then started to understand what maps were and how they are use. The children got to use resources from all around the classroom to make messy maps of the room whilst working in groups.

Elf Day 2024!

Thank you for all your generous donations towards the Alzheimer's Society. The children looked fantastic and really got stuck in with all the activities! They also had a mysterious video from Mistletoe the Elf who was be very cheeky with the school photocopier!

w/e 10.1.25

Welcome back, Daymer class! We were thrilled to try some cave art to introduce our topic (see last blog post) and were 'wowed' by our toilet roll timeline to demonstrate prehistory and how long ago this was!

We have started our new English sequence of learning around 'Stone Age Boy' and the children can retell the story really well whilst using tier 2 vocabulary from the book.

Year 3 have started to work with multiplication and division and Year 4 continue to do so.

In PE, we started our dance unit with the theme of weather. We did our wind section and the children were wonderfully creative with their ideas and performances.

In science, we learned about the water cycle and have made mini ‘worlds’ to watch the process in action! 


Homework:
New maths homework is now on Anton.

Reading 5x a week and Reading Records to be signed each time as we give out rewards and take note for our KS2-wide book trail.

Please rehearse times tables weekly. 

Welcome back! I hope you've all had a lovely Christmas. Please see the newsletter for this term below.

Happy New Year! Spring Term has well and truly started in Landaviddy class. 

On Tuesday, we started the first of two units we cover in PE. With Mrs Phillips, we enjoyed our first Dance lesson and today we began exploring Net and Wall games. 
Polite Reminder: Please can you make sure your child has their PE in school, as we had quite a few without a kit this week. Thank you. 

On Wednesday, we concluded our enquiry from last half term 'Who were the Ancient Egyptians?' and had a go at writing down everything we could remember. This meant we were ready to launch our new enquiry question for this half term, 'What is Light?'. We were amazed by the questions the children came up with; How is lightning made? How was the Sun made? What are the Northern Lights? 

In English, we have been consolidating our ability to punctuate speech accurately. After lots of practise, we have become more confident with this now. We then moved on to redrafting a section of our Egyptian Little Red Riding Hood stories. We had some fantastic pieces of writing from this and the children all worked so hard as bring their ideas to life. We have edited and next week with finish writing up our final copies. 

In Maths, Year 2 have been looking at vertical and horizontal lines of symmetry, using symmetry to complete shapes and sorting 2-D shapes into groups. Year 3 have explored the 4 and 8 times tables this week.

Congratulations to Iylah, Evie, Alfie and Nevaeh for being chosen as Landaviddy's People of the Week. 

Next week, there will be the opportunity for the children to change their library books. Please make sure to bring these in for Thursday. 

We hope you have a wonderful weekend and look forward to seeing you on Monday. 

Mrs Wilkie, Mrs Phillips, Miss Bowden and Miss Colton

A warm welcome back and Happy New Year to you all.

We have been following in assembly the amazing progress of the Oars of Thunder team who visited our school with their boat in October.  They are currently over three quarters of the way through their 3000 mile row across the Atlantic as part of the World's Toughest Row. They left La Gomera on 11th December and are currently in 1st Place in Mixed Class, 5th in boats of 4 and 7th place overall.

The children have settled into their learning quickly this week and have started their class enquiries as follows: Penhallow Class – Why Aren’t Spaceships Made of Jelly? Landaviddy Class - What is Light? Talland Class - Do all Living Things Need a Home? Chaipel Class - What Natural Resources do I Depend Upon?
 
Clubs will be resuming week next Monday, 13th January as follows:
Monday: After School Football Club (Mr Langley) for years 3, 4,5 and 6
Tuesday: Lunchtime ECO Club (Miss Randle) for years 3 to 6, some places by invitation After school Dance Club (Mrs Phillips) for years 3-6
Wednesday: Lunchtime Mindfulness and Art Club (Mrs Wilkie) for years 2 to 6
Thursday: Lunchtime Music and Singing Club (Mrs Fitzsimmons) for years R, 1 and 2
Friday: After School Running Club (Miss Bowden and Mrs Turnbull) for years 3-6. This club is open to anyone who likes running however it will not run when the Cross-Country League races are on – next races 17th January and 7th February. Pupils do not have to race in these events. Clubs are the same as last half term except for the addition of Dance Club on Tuesday. Please inform us by email or phone call, if there are any changes to the clubs you wish your child to attend, by midday on Monday 13th January. If we do not hear from you, we will assume that your child will be attending the same clubs as last half term. For all clubs, once signed up children will be expected to attend every week unless they have written parental permission not to, or are absent. This applies to both lunchtime and after school clubs.

Cornwall Parenting Courses and new Podcast Please find attached information from Cornwall Council’s Together for Families about Parenting Courses which are accessible online or in person, and Empowered Parenting Podcasts. New episodes will be released each week, bringing you top tips and guest speakers to discuss a range of topics relating to your parenting journey. Upcoming topics include: Back-to-school, Praise and Encouragement, Routines, Boundaries, SEND Navigators, Brain Development, and many more.

Mental Health in Schools Team - Parent /Carer Workshops Please see attached details of Parent/Carer Workshops which are set to run from January 2025. These are one-off, one hour long, online workshops with Mental Health Practitioners. They are open to everybody; people do not need to have a mental health need to join. If you are interested, please click on the relevant link: Behaviour Workshop - https://forms.office.com/e/1PwGDXSQ40 Sleep Workshop - https://forms.office.com/e/7ac7qHLPhc A Teams link will be emailed to you from MHST for each workshop prior to the workshop taking place.

Cornwall Youth Badminton Children in years 5-8 are invited to try out playing Badminton in a fun event and coaching session on Sunday 12th January. The event is free and will take place at Treviglas Sports Hub, Newquay. It will be run by Cathryn Bick - a Badminton England level 2 coach and Cornwall Youth Badminton chairperson. Please see poster attached for further details.

Have a great weekend.

Mrs Hillman