French Olympics

On Wednesday, a team of 12 Y5 children, along with teams from 4 other local primary schools, travelled to Bushey Meads to compete in the French Mini-Olympics. The children - Isabella, Zoe, Madison, Hamsy, Vamsi, Mel, Haya, Hilary, Ted, Connor, Pola and Kitty - spent the day participating in a variety of sports-based French activities, topped off with a very welcome ice cream (ordered in French of course!) The children demonstrated excellent team work and enthusiasm by the bucketload, and tried very hard to use their French. The secondary school teachers commented on their initiative and leadership skills, too; the children really did the school proud. Their efforts were rightly rewarded with silver medals, which the children treasure greatly. Bravo!

Y5 visit to Guardian News and Media

Last week, all three Year 5 classes were lucky enough to visit the Guardian News and Media Education Centre in London, for a workshop based on the Victorians, our theme for this half term. The children spent the day in the Guardian newspaper office building, creating Victorian newspaper front pages following the real newspaper production process. A variety of resources such as books and real Victorian archive material were used to research news stories ranging from the marriage of Queen Victoria to the Great Stink in London, and the children worked in pairs to write their stories, before subediting their copy and adding headlines and pictures. The workshop was highly successful and all children were able to take home copies of their completed front pages. Education Centre staff were highly impressed and full of praise for the children’s behaviour, application to the task and standard of writing – which they said was better than that of many of the older children they work with! Our budding journalists were a real credit to the school and the day was a great introduction to our new theme.