November 26th, 2021

⚠️ PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING ⚠️

Chagford primary school has piles--

Of leaves that is!

Autumn is well and truly here, I have been wishing and urging it to arrive for the past few weeks- cursing every time the temperature has been above 15 degrees and walking around castle drogo every weekend, hoping to see a patchwork quilt of autumnal hues down the valley.

With russet crisps, spiked balls and auburn jewels littering the playground floor, playtime games have involved lots of collecting, hiding, and my personal favourite: swirly spiralling showers of orange. This year, if you haven’t already, I highly recommend kicking a big pile of leaves as high as you can- I promise, you feel like autumn itself, but instead of leaves it’s your aged years that drop off with every kick.

We have switched our focus in English this week to a beautifully illustrated picture book: A River by Marc Martin. It is a simple book that tells the story of an imaginary trip along a river. Throughout the excursion, we are immersed in a number of settings as we travel from the acrid city, through patchwork farmlands and dense vibrant jungle before we end at the expansive ocean. Check the book out on Google classroom. We looked at how Marc Martin used prepositions and strong verbs to take us on this journey, before replicating it in our own writing.

A River is also a really fantastic example of different sentence constructions. The class have done some excellent work this week identifying conjunctions to determine which type of sentence structure Martin has used. It is brain scrambling grammar at times, and we have been so impressed with the perseverance and determination of everybody to get their heads around FANBOYS and ISAWABUB! (Ask your kid for a an explanation). Next week we look forward to seeing the class use and apply these different structures, and be able to articulate which sentences they are using.

During maths, we have been continuing our module on measurement. This week we have been looking at perimeter. The main focus has been working out efficient strategies and tricks to calculate the perimeters of rectilinear shapes.

Everyone has got on really well with it and we have been impressed by the understanding everyone has shown.

We are very proud of the title- easiest class to clean- given to us by the hardworking Shirley (cleaner, chef and staff confidant). I’m afraid we lost that title this week when in science, we investigated the properties of non Newtonian fluids! If you were wondering what those white powdery stains were on your child’s clothes, it was cornflour, which we used to make Oobleck. The kids had a great time slapping a liquid to see it behave like a solid. They did manage to write these observations down which will eventually get marked once I’ve picked the oobleck from the page!

Woah busy week- enjoy your weekends- go jump in a pile of leaves!