October 2025

We have had another busy month in Year 4. We finished off our Geography topic on Climate Change by completing a piece of work which aimed to answer our question 'What is climate change and what can we do about it?' The children have really enjoyed learning about ways in which we can all do our bit to help reduce the effects of climate change. Many of them have worked with some of our school Eco-council to suggest ways in which we, as a school, can have a positive impact on the environment and the future of our planet.

In Science we completed our work on different habitats that are being affected by climate change and finished off the unit by designing our own conservation areas. The children researched the animals/species they would like to help protect and then thought carefully about all of the features their conservation area would need in order to be successful. 

In Literacy we read the book 'I can Save the Earth' and the children completed lots of work on persuasive texts before they wrote their own persuasive text to try and persuade people to help curb climate change. They also completed  poetry unit of work which saw them learn about simile and metaphor poems before creating their own.

In Maths we continued our work on times table whilst completing an addition and subtraction unit. In particular we focused on column addition and subtraction methods.

In Art we studied the comic book artist Dav Pilkey and the children created their own comic book strips in the style of him. They practiced lots of cartoon style drawing techniques before editing and refining their own work. 

PE this month saw the children completing lots of circuit activities before working as a class to create their own circuit training which they all thoroughly enjoyed taking part in. 

October 2025

October has been a busy month in Year 5!
We have launched into our WWII topic fully, learning about when WWII happened, why it started and what it would have been like living through WWII. We have especially focused on the life of Anne Frank in our unit on diary recounts. Year 5 have found the experiences of Anne Frank fascinating. They have been really intrigued about her time in the annex and what was happening in Europe at the time which meant the Franks needed to hide. As part of our history learning, we have been discussing whether the information we read about WWII is reliable or unreliable.
In PE, we have just finished our dance unit. Year 5 thought really carefully about how to express certain events through dance and produced some fantastic pieces in lessons. And in music, we have been learning to play notes on a keyboard using the correct five finger position and how to play simple pieces as a group and individually. We are very lucky to be joined by Mr Jane on a Friday to teach us!
In between all of that... Year 5 have found time to consider World Mental Health Day. We made 'Chatterboxes' to help us talk about ways to keep positive mental health. We also have been celebrating Black History Month by reading stories by black authors and learning about some of the incredible campaigners throughout history who stood up for equal rights for ALL people. Finally, we were very lucky to have Alice's mum visit us and talk about her faith and the celebration of Diwali which happened at the end of this month. WOW!

Week ending 17th October 2025

Mufti
Thank you very much for donating so many lovely items for the tombola and supporting this at the Harvest festival. We are going to put the proceeds of the tombola towards buying a gift for each child for Christmas.

Eco Council
You may have noticed this on our Facebook page, but we now have an Eco Council representing both schools. The aim of this council is to encourage everyone to reduce energy use and carbon emissions at a school level. We are also concerned with ensuring that the school environment is tidy and eco- friendly.  Look out on here and Facebook for updates.

Harvest Festival
We held our annual Harvest Festival at the Infant and Nursery school on Thursday afternoon. It was a great celebration filled with lovey Harvest songs and beautiful poems, courtesy of the Year 6 pupils.There were lots of family members who were able to join us and we were delighted ablout that. We are grateful for all of the generous donations of food that you sent into the schools. These have now been delivered to the Callington Foodbank and will provide valuable provisions for families in need.

Honey Fair Art Competition

Although Storm Amy prevented the choir from singing at Callington Honey Fair, the children still submitted art for the competition. I am delighted to tell you that we won 3rd prize overall. We received at £50 cheque and we are going to be presented with a goodie hamper on Monday during celebration assembly. We done to everyone who created lovely art work.

September 2025

We have had a busy first month in Year 4. They children have settled in and are getting used to the new routines and work load. This month we have been looking into Climate Change. This has run through our Literacy, Geography and Science work. The children have researched and recapped what climate change is and its affect on the planet and more specifically, in Science, different habitats within the various climate zones.
We read the book 'The bear in the stars' in Literacy and the children completed lots of work on word clauses and the structures of stories. They then re-wrote the story in their own words and wrote their own endings. After investigating the different climate zones the children picked an animal from three different zones and completed work on how climate change was affecting those animals and their habitats. 

In Maths we have started our daily times table work this month as well as completing our place value unit. We have covered number lines, rounding and roman numerals. The children particularly enjoyed learning our roman numerals song.

In Art, the children have completed lots of work on Climate change, creating art work that represents the planet both with climate change and what the planet would look like if we were able to slow the rate of it down. The children also created multimedia posters to help encourage and persuade people to help curb climate change.

In Music they have investigated what pitch, tempo, dynamics and rhythm mean and listened to lots of different styles of music to better understand the instruments involved. The children also listened to the 'Carnival of the Animals' and made notes about the animals they believed the music was representing, they then sketched these in the sketchbooks whilst re-listening to the music.

Week ending 3rd October 2025

Year 3 Half Marathon

The weeks continue to fly by. This week the Year 3 children have been running laps of the field during their break and lunchtimes. They ran enough lengths to complete a half marathon. Thank you to those of you who sponsored them in this endeavour. All sponsorship raised has raised money to pay for their upcoming trip to Wildwood. 

Bag 2 School

In the next week or so we will be sending home some Bag 2 School bags for you to fill with your unwanted items of clothing, shoes, towels, handbags etc. These bags need to be returned to school by first thing on 6th November. Thank you, in advance , for your support with this.

Honey Fair

Sadly, the choir's scheduled performance at Honey Fair on Saturday was cancelled, due to the weather conditions. Thank you to Miss Owen for preparing them - what a shame they were not able to perform.

Individual Photographs

The school photographer will be visiting the Infant and Nursery School on 16th October  to take individual and sibling photographs. If you would like younger siblings included in these photographs then you can bring them into school from 8.15am. These photographs will then be returned in time for Christmas as they make excellent presents!

Mufti

This Friday (10th October) is a Mufti day. Children can come to school in non-school uniform. We ask for a donation of a prize for either an adult or a children's tombola. Thank you.

September 2025

Year 5 have made a fantastic start to the year! We have built on our Maths learning about place value; using and applying what we have learnt in previous years to larger numbers - up to 6 digits. Rounding has proven a bit challenging, but we have persevered and definitely got better at it. In English, we began the year revising the eight main word classes and how three of them can be used to create noun phrases and expanded noun phrases. We have also been reminded how to accurately punctuate direct speech and have been using this in our narrative writing.

Art has been a big focus for the first couple weeks of term as we have been preparing our pieces for the Honey Fair art competition. The theme for Year 5 and 6 this year is Big Cats so we have been experimenting with different materials to create big cat fur patterns. Alongside art, we have been learning about how to use search engines and how to identify reliable sources of information on the internet. And in French, we have been learning how to introduce ourselves, ask and explain how we are feeling and what our name is.

Week ending 12th September 2025

We have made it through the first full week back at school.
It has been so lovely to see all of your lovely children again- haven't lots of them shot up during the summer!
They have all settled very well into their new classes and are getting to know the routines of the classrooms and their new teachers and teaching assistants.

Meet the teacher
Thank you to those of you who were able to visit your child's class on Wednesday. The beginning of the school year is always a great opportunity to find out what the children will be learning and to visit their classrooms. I hope that those who came found it useful.

Y3 Bake Sale
Year 3 raised over £120 in the bake sale on Friday to help to lower the cost of their upcoming trip. The children had great fun with Mrs Speare and Mrs Birkenshaw baking a whole range of delicious delights- they even made an apple cake with apples picked from the Reception class garden. Thank you to all parents who also donated cakes and supported the event.

Newsletter
You should have all received a copy of the latest school newsletter, via email last week. This gives you important dates coming up at school, including all term times and INSET days. There are paper copies available in the foyer of the school.

Holiday Requests/Absence
A reminder that you need to complete a holiday request form if you wish to take your child out of school during term time. Time off during term time is only authorised for exceptional circumstances and if you do take your child out of school this will be an unauthorised absence, If your child is absent for a period of 10 or more sessions/5 days within any rolling 10 school week period then a penalty notice can be issued. Unauthorised absences are also recorded for a child when a parent does not provide the school with a reason as to why the child is absent. There are leaflets in the school foyer with more details about penalty notices.

Mufti
The next mufti day is on Friday 10th October. Pupils do not need to wear school uniform on this day. We ask, in return, that they bring a tombola prize which would be suitable for either an adult or a child.

Welcome to Year 5!

We've had a fantastic first week back and have settled in to learning again after the summer break. 
Please see below for more information about what the future holds for Year 5.

Welcome to Year 4!

Please find below a copy of our class newsletter. 

Every month we will be posting what we have been learning in Year 4 on our class blog.

June 2025

This month we completed our Geography topic on Cornwall before starting our History topic on World War One. The children began looking into to the question 'Was Britain Ready for World War One?' The children started this unit by investigating when and why World War One started as well as exploring some of the main events during this war. The children also investigated which countries were involved in World War One and how. The children are currently learning about other aspects of WW1 such as soldiers, trench life, children, women and how technology evolved during this time all to help them answer our topic question.

In Literacy, we studied two books linked to WW1. We read and studied 'The Little Hen and the Great War' along with the story of 'Sergeant Stubby'. The children completed lots of work on both stories and then planned, wrote and edited their own short story which involved both the main characters of the above books meeting each other during the war.

In Maths, the children continued to work hard on their times tables before completing the MTC test. They also completed the White Rose statistics unit before carrying out some of their own class surveys and creating their own bar charts to present their findings.

This month we were lucky enough to take part in sports week which involved the children completing lots of exciting sporting events in order to help earn house points for their teams. The week ended with our traditional sports day.

Latest Head's Blog

We are now truly fully immersed into the second half of the summer tern. The Year 1 children have been assessed on their knowledge of phonics and the Year 4 on their knowledge of multiplication tables. If you are a parent of a child in these classes you will be told how they got on in the very near future.
On Thursday night we held our annual art exhibition in the hall in the Infant and Nursery school. It was really well attended and we had some lovely comments from families about the quality of the art work. Well done to all of the pupils and thank you to the staff for helping them to achieve such high-quality results. Thank you to Mr Day who played his keyboard some brilliantly at the event and to Mrs Hannaford who ran the craft table on the night. Last, but not least, a huge thank you to Mrs Wright, who organised the event  and displayed all of the art work and to Mr Wright who ran the bar and helped to put up the display boards. We made just over £200, which will be used to buy materials for both schools to support the development of the art curriculum. 
A reminder that next week is sport's week. You will have received a letter from Mrs Hannaford detailing what is happening each day. The main event is the traditional sport's day next Friday (20th June) Parents are invited top come to watch and support their children , joining us for a family picnic lunch. Year 6 will be running games and selling various items in order to raise funds for their end of term treats so please bring some extra pennies or even pounds to support them!
The school choir will be opening the St. Ann's Chapel fete tomorrow (14th June ) at 12.00 noon. It would be lovely to see as many of you as possible there. We also have an awesome adult and child's tombola thanks to your generosity on the mufti day last week- thank you. We will also be selling toys and books. I hope to see you there! Have a great weekend.

May 2025

On the 8th May, for the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we dressed in red, white and blue and headed onto the field at lunchtime. We decorated with bunting and shared a picnic together to celebrate the end of World War II in Europe and remember all those who didn't get to see the end of the war.

This month, Year 5 have also been enjoying developing their striking and fielding skills in PE. Towards the end of the month, we have started learning about the continents: North and South America, mainly labelling their countries and key cities so far. But, we have also started looking at a Brazilian artist called Tarsila do Amaral and started to experiment with working in her style by mixing tints and shades, understanding and trying to draw objects in a surrealist way and composing Cornish-inspired landscapes in her style. These are in preparation for our Art exhibition next month!

May 2025

This month we begun studying Cornwall. Our geography question being; ‘Where in the world do we live and how could we improve our local area?’ The children used maps and atlases to firstly look at the seven continents and after recapping that we lived in Europe the children began investigating exactly where Cornwall was located. They were able to tell me, using maps and atlases that Cornwall is in the South West of England which was part of the United Kingdom which is in Europe. They also used a local OS map to locate exactly where our local area of Gunnislake/St Ann’s Chapel is. During our next lesson the children spent time creating their own sketch map of Cornwall from a high view point. This required them to use observational skills to recreate the shapes of the coastlines. Next, the children compared local maps from the 1950’s to the present day to identify similarities and differences between them. This encouraged them to ask and answer questions about place, positions, patterns and processes whilst investigating the maps.

In literacy this month we began to read and study ‘The Iron Man’ by Ted Hughes. We completed lots of VIPER activities to help us learn more about what we were reading and the children spent time writing character and setting descriptions. They completed hot seating activities to help them think about the questions they may ask certain characters as well as how those characters may answer the questions. We completed work on fronted adverbials, expanded noun phrases and apostrophes to help us prepare for or final write. The children used a story plan to plan out the story of the Iron Man from his point of view. They used writing toolkits to make sure they were including all of the necessary features.

In Maths we finished our decimal unit whilst continuing to practice our times tables.

In Science the children have been learning about ‘Changing States’. They identified the three different states and learnt about their particle arrangements and properties. They looked at reversible and irreversible changes and melting and boiling points of different materials. They then planned out an experiment investigating the melting points of different foods.