Great Gaddesden CoE VA School
For Pupils Aged 3-11
As Autumn
continues, the pupils at Great Gaddesden school have been enjoying observing
the trees surrounding the school bursting into colour as the green leaves fade
to reveal their glorious golds and reds. They are enjoying playing in the vast
piles of accumulating leaves and hearing the leaves crunch underneath their
feet as they run about the playground.
Pupils
have been busy in the classroom too. This month Nursery and Reception have been
studying the Nursery Rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”. They took part in an “eggsciting” Science
Experiment to find out what material would make the best crash mat for Humpty
Dumpty. They tested paper, bubble wrap, wood, foam, plastic and cloth. After
their “smashing eggsperiment” they discovered that when Humpty Dumpty landed on
the hard material, it was impossible to put him back together again but when he
landed on the soft materials, Humpty Dumpty stayed in one piece!
In Years
One and Two there has been some fantastic writing going on based around “The
Gruffalo” and “Where the Wild Things Are”. This month Year One also took part
in a Multi-Sports Event against other schools at Sport Space and won! Pupils have
been working extremely hard to demonstrate this month’s school value of
“caring” and there were some brilliant examples of children in this class particularly
and across the school being kind and caring towards each other including
picking each other up when they fall over and considering the feelings of
others.
This month
some of Years Three and Four competed in a local Football Tournament and came
in joint first with another school. It was a very exciting game and all of the
children played brilliantly. As part of their RE Topic on Hinduism, the class
had a visit from the Hindu Temple in Aldenham. They learnt about the origins of
Hinduism, how to mediate, and took part in a Drama about the story of Rama and
Sita. The children all felt that they had a better understanding of Hinduism
after the workshop.
There
was a non-uniform day this month to raise awareness about Childhood Cancer and
money for Great Ormond Street Hospital where one of our pupils is currently
receiving treatment.. Children dressed in their finest gold (or yellow) attire
to support the cause. Years Five and Six organised some fantastic fundraising
activities in the afternoon including a cake sale, skittles alley and a target
game. They demonstrated wonderful leadership skills and ensured that the
activities ran smoothly for the rest of the children. The day raised over £200
for Great Ormond Street Hospital.
To celebrate
National Poetry Month our Chair of Governors Mrs Wilkinson, set Mrs Lilley our
Literacy Coordinator and each class a challenge. She asked each class to learn
a poem off by heart and recite it to the rest of the school and to the
Governors in our celebration assembly.
All of the
teachers and pupils readily took on the challenge and as usual, the bar was
raised much higher than expected by the performances.
Nursery and
Reception learnt “Yellow Butter, Purple Jelly, Red Jam, Black Bread” written in
1981 by Mary Ann Hobermann. The whole class led by Miss Ayres remembered the
whole poem and gave a wonderful performance. They also had some fantastic
actions to illustrate the poem and made us feel very hungry listening to it!
Years One and
Two took up the task of learning “How Doth the Little Crocodile” by Lewis
Carroll which appears in Chapter two of Alice in Wonderland. They made
crocodile masks to accompany their poem and performed the poem brilliantly in
groups using their best voices with lots of expression.
Years Three
and Four learnt and performed “The Night Mail” written in 1936 by WH Auden.
This poem narrates a documentary which details the journey of the London,
Midland and Scottish Railways mail train from London to Scotland. The pupils
recreated the pulse and rhythm of the poem by simulating the train racing
through the night with their arms and working in groups to read the poem. This
was a very long poem to learn but the children remembered all of it and their
performance was very dramatic and enjoyable.
Years Five
and Six gave a rousing performance of “Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred
Lord Tennyson which was written in 1854 about the Battle of Balaclava during
the Crimean War. This poem is especially pertinent this month as we remember
those who fought for their country on Armistice Day.
The children
recreated the battle as they recited the poem and had both solo and group
parts. They really took hold of the spirit of the poem and took us back to the
front line of war through their rendition. Many of the adults had goose bumps
when they finished as their performance was so fantastic and had so much
conviction in it.
After such an
amazing assembly with such outstanding performances it was decided that we
should make this experience a more regular occurrence as it was clear to see
how much the children had enjoyed expressing themselves through poetry during
the assembly.
Our pupil
School Council has been meeting regularly and this term would like to share
some of the things they have been doing with Parish News readers:
Some Words from the School Council
Written by Hattie (Year 5) and Eleanor
(Year 4) on behalf of the entire School Council:
Krysta (Year 6), Aidan (Year 3), Aaron
(Year 2) and Fallon (Year 1)
“As members of the school council we have
weekly meetings on Monday lunch-times to discuss anything we could do to
improve the school.
So far this year, we have done an
assembly on anti-bullying and we have discussed how we can improve parking
before and after school – we have a plan in place to try and improve this which
we will be sharing with the children/parents soon. We are going to try and encourage every child
to ‘Go Green’ by walking to and from school every day (or at least part of the
way!)
We
have also talked about e-safety and how to stay safe on-line and we have put
posters up in our class-rooms to remind us.
FOGGS have asked us to create a
‘wish-list’ of anything we think we could get to improve the school over the
next academic year.
Finally, we have now got suggestion
boxes in each class, so that every member of our school can contribute
suggestions to improve our school. The
suggestions will then be discussed in our weekly meetings on a Monday.
We are
anticipating a visit from Ofsted this month and look forward to sharing the
finalised report with the local community once available.
