It’s been another very lovely week in Birch class full of angles, electricity, ancient civilizations, papier Mache, Beatles singing and marathon completions! But I what I really want to share with you this week is Luca’s superbly surreal writing about an island he created that had us in stitches when he read it to the class.

‘200 miles off the east coast of California, lies a desolate island with everything Italian except the language the inhabitants speak. They speak Japanese which is very strange. It was first discovered by a custard cream in 1634; Sir Custard Biscuit Boy. Off the east cost of the island lies a leaning tower of pizza that is made entirely from the finest pizzas. The pizzas are cooked by a chef who isn’t actually Italian. He is a German exchange student who died after making this sculpture.’
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Have a great bank holiday weekend! Mr B

Welcome to the Summer Term! I hope you all had a fantastic two-week break. We’ve been blessed with the amount of sunshine we’ve had these past few weeks; I’ve spotted a number of queen bumblebees busily collecting the first pollen and nectar of the season as well as the first Orange Tip and Speckled Wood butterflies and there’s just a hint of colour in the hedgerows now – spring is truly here and we can all look forward to brighter and warmer days.

We’ve been connecting with nature a fair amount this week in Birch Class. Whether reading by the big Oak tree and listening to the blackbirds sing and the lambs bouncing around in the field next door or when running our daily mile! Can you believe we’ve now completed mile 23! Only 3.2 miles left and we will have run a marathon together. We've also been dving deep into the wonders of Archipelago - a fantastically illustrated book, full of imaginary islands and in maths we've been getting to know protractors quite well as we measure and draw angles (not angels Charlie). 
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We’ve also been having some fantastic (and pretty deep) conversations in class. Ember got us all thinking when she proposed that life could be a simulation, Maisie started a passionate debate on the importance of maths and Ottie wondered why my knees look like owls. I’ve missed these brilliant insights!
Have a great weekend, Mr B
 

How fortunate we are to have yet another week of beautiful, warm weather! We’re blessed with our school grounds here at Chagford and we have made the most of getting out and enjoying the good weather by having our Reading sessions underneath the big, old oak. It’s the perfect setting for a bit of quiet reading, sat amongst the daffodils and occasionally catching a glimpse of the lambs in the field next door. Perfect!
We’ve spent a lot of time this week trying to understand self-confidence, self-esteem and the way in which our minds work. We’ve looked at the process of our actions from trigger to thinking to feeling and the behaving. They made me laugh last week – before we went to assembly, we were reflecting on ‘change’ and how best to cope with it in our lives. They gave some very wise and sage answers before heading out to assembly and then being confronted with the sight of Year 4 and 5 children sitting on benches! That’s a hard-fought, Year 6 privilege at Chagford – there were some strong emotions! It served as the perfect case-study to use the cycle above to unpick how we went from trigger to behaviour and how we could have reacted in a more positive way.
I hope you all have a well-earned break, and the weather is just as kind to us over the next two weeks as it has been recently. Fingers crossed! See you in the Summer Term! Mr B