Last Day of term

Today was the final day of the Spring term. Children were excited at the thought of having a holiday. Dillon was excited about moving to Australia. Secretly the class had made him a lovely 'good luck' card and Mrs Bell got him a book with a character named Wilf. We thought that would remind him of 'Biff and Chip' books he had learned to read from at William Shrewsbury.
In class the children finished off a science investigation, did an assessment and even made Easter baskets with Mrs Godfrey. Mrs Bell was busy doing performance management meetings with two teachers.
The afternoon included a long merit assembly as so much good work had been produced by the pupils. Mrs Bell explained to the juniors about Dillon leaving and Daryl and Beth presented the card and gift. Dillon seemed a bit sad at this point but cheered up in class when he was sharing his sweets with his friends. The class gave him three cheers!
Happy Easter, everybody. Have a good holiday and rest up well.

Finale!

Friday 23rd was the final session of 3B's family learning. It was also the day the group met to talk about the previous weekend when they had all had a wonderful time at Pendrell Hall. Everybody was in agreement that the whole weekend had been great. Emilia has been telling people that she has never seen her Nanny like that before! Mrs Bell reminded the children that adults, like children really enjoy having fun. The residential family learning has been a lot of fun and we all hope the the school will get another opportunity to do it.

Today the children read an example 'thank you' letter by Mrs Bell before writing their own. The pupils had to manage their distractions as some of the mums were busy discussing events from last week and even planning what they might do next week! Luckily with our new Building Learning Power skills, the 'Thank You' letters were soon done. Children used interesting words to write detailed paragraphs of the things they had enjoyed. David Evans, Mrs Hunter and Mrs Bell will get a lot of pleasure from the letters.

The session finished with an evaluation. Mrs Pearson, on behalf of the pupils and parents thanked Mrs Bell for her time and organisation of the whole Family Learning and particularly for giving up her weekend last week. Mrs Bell added her thanks to the children and parents for being a great group to work with. It has been an enjoyable experience for all of us. Thank you, everyone for your participation and enthusiasm.

Mothering Sunday

Sunday began with children giving their hand-made cards to their mums. Mothers were pleased with the beautiful designs created by their artistic sons or daughters.
Mrs Bell and Mrs Hunter gave David a card to say 'THANK YOU' for all his hard work towards making the weekend so successful. They did not stay for the workshops this morning as they had to go and see their own children for Mother's Day.

Today's sessions were making musical instruments and then playing them with the help of Mrs Pearson, Wil's mum who is one of the Year 1 teachers at William Shrewsbury School. As a KS1 music subject leader, she was very happy to help the children to become creative with music.

Dinner Party

After some peaceful games with Mrs Hunter, everybody went back to their rooms to prepare for dinner. The girls were looking forward to dressing up, the boys were looking forward to the food!
The ladies looked very grand and happy and didn't seem to be missing the rest of the family very much. A wonderful home-made tomato soup was served as starter before the main course of chicken with fresh vegetables. The children decided to sit with Mrs Hunter and Mrs Bell whilst the mums had a peaceful meal. Lemon meringue pie finished off the meal beautifully.

Pendrell Hall serve delicious food. For Mother's Day lunch, they are expecting over ninety people, thirty four of those will be the party from William Shrewsbury.

After the meal, we had 'Play your cards' right and 'How well do you know each other?'. It appeared that the children knew their mums better than the mothers knew their children! But it was only a bit of fun. These games were followed by the story reading. Each child read their own story starter to the audience, who were amazed by their ability to write and read in public. Well done, children.

Mrs Hunter read out the parents' imaginative story starter. They had used powerful adjectives and described the setting very well indeed! Mrs Hunter had used a beautiful, wooden, ornamental box as a starter for creative writing, whilst Mrs Bell has used a muddy, brown boot. The results were amazing! Well done, potential authors.

Afternoon sessions at Pendrell Hall

After dinner, Mrs Hunter took the adults for a creative writing activity whilst Mrs Bell worked with the children on Design and Technology. As it was Mother's Day the next day, we made lovely pop up cards as a surprise. Children enjoyed using a variety of resources to create excellent cards. An hour went by so quickly, we had to send a message to the adults - they were given permission to have a cup of tea. Joshua came back saying, "They are all worn out!"

Children next had the task of showing how they write a setting for an imaginative story. They wanted to go out in the woods to get more ideas. Good try, Lewis, but Mrs Hunter was having none of that! Despite a slow start, we had eight fantastic pieces of writing by the end. Mums with their new found skills were able to help their children. There was evidence of paired discussion and use of powerful language. The stories were read out in the evening to a spell-bound audience. Even Mrs Bell was speechless with the high standard of work produced by her class, and she knows how good they are!

After all that brain work, David suggested making kites and flying them. What fun we had! There was laughter all around as the children, followed by the adults had a race. Emilia's Nanny was grateful when Mrs Bell asked if she could do the race for her.

Workshops at Pendrell Hall

The day dawned with the children trying hard not to wake up Mrs Hunter and Mrs Bell, who had been heard giggling and 'quietly' creeping around very late the previous night! Feeling hungry, everyone arrived for breakfast at 8.30am. There was a delicious aroma of food in the dining room.

Breakfast over, it was down to the serious business of morning workshops, which began with a tour of the grounds. David was keen to share valuable information about the main building, which was built in 1860. The Gaskell family who lived in it all those years ago had seventeen servants to look after them!

The tour was very enjoyable. We learned lots of things about nature as well as the interesting history of the place. This led onto Mrs Hunter introducing the alphabet collage. Mums/grandma and children set with great enthusiasm, looking for items beginning with specific letters as well making a collection for the collage.

The collages were brilliant - each one different, but it was the working together and discussion that impressed the staff.


There was little time for a break before it was the next activity - the number trail. It was important to fit in as many areas of the curriculum as possible. David explained the tasks and set them off. Mrs Hunter helped by guiding children around, from a sunny spot in the beautiful gardens. Pupils and their adults were running around looking for clues and doing fun maths.

Lewis and his mum had to look hard for clues as some questions had more than one answer.

We were all very impressed with Emilia's Nanny, who was smiling as she tried to keep up with her grand daughter. It was soon lunchtime! We were hungry again by now, and tucked into a superb buffet. Mrs Hunter enjoyed her small slice of pudding! Some of us went for the slighter larger portions though.

Arrival at Pendrell Hall

It was 4pm, and all the children were buzzing with excitement waiting for the bus to arrive. Just as Mrs Bell thought she'd have to ring the bus company, the coach arrived! Everybody went over to get their cases in the boot and ready for the off. The bus driver had a map route but seemed unsure of his destination so a quick photocopy of the directions and some discussion took place. Mrs Bell felt sure the driver would get everyone there safely and quickly, even though he said,"See you there at midnight!"

Luckily, it was nowhere near midnight when the full party was gathered together and comparing bathroom size! This was the boys! Mrs Bell was nearly speechless when Wil cheered at the thought of sharing her 'bigger' bathroom. There are limits, Wil!

Dinner was in a beautiful room, where two long tables were laid for the party. Fish and chips!Yummy! You should have seen the size of the puddings! David Evans assured us all that there were NO calories in any of the foods we were eating. We were all so relieved!

After dinner we had some wonderful games. There was much laughter and hilarity as we got to know each other better. Very soon it was time for story. Mrs Hunter produced a big box of chocolates to share. Then, Mrs Bell spoiled all the fun by saying it was bedtime! (She really only wanted to get to the bar!)

Everyone slept soundly, some dozed off sooner than others! There were star points and chocolates to be won by the person/s who went to sleep first. The decision is too hard, so it's star points all round!

ICT in school

Today's session (16th March 2007) began with all the parents being given a map from Mrs Hunter with the directions to Pendrell Hall. Although we are all travelling by bus, the rest of the family are meeting us for Mothering Sunday lunch and will need to know how to get there, and back again. We discussed agenda for the evening. All the children will be leaving at 2.30pm so that they can change before we catch the bus at 4pm.

This was followed by an ICT lesson. First we looked at the class Blog. It made interesting reading. Mrs Bell insisted on everyone commenting on one of the pages so far. This was to show parents how children can word-process and also how important it is to be honset in a polite way.The children then went on to sending an e-mail to some-one. Emilia's Grandma learned a lot about using the computer from Emilia.

After this the children were all keen to have another go on the Crystal Rainforest simulation game that we are using in our unit of work this half term. Al too soon it was time to pack away the laptops and have a quick biscuit before saying 'bye' to parents.

Mrs Bell reminded all the children it was important to remember over the weekend that they were still part of William Shrewsbury School and to be on their best behaviour. With a buzz of excitement, pupils returned to their maths sets.

Later this evening, we will be having a meal, some rules and regulations and games. Mrs Bell and Mrs Hunter, with the help of Miss Painter have collected a lot of resources for the weekend. It should be fun.

Maths learning and Teaching

Today, 9th March saw the parents meeting up for a mathematical session. Mrs Bell began by explaining how an Interactive Whiteboard in each of the classes has enhanced learning in all subjects. However, as there was no interactive whiteboard in the large study room, we managed with the old fashioned board and pens!
Before the pupils came for the lesson,the adults looked at the agenda for next week's residential at Pendrell Hall. The coach has been booked for 4 o'clock so everyone will need to be at school at that point. If it is convenient and parents want to take up the option, pupils may leave at 2.30 to get ready. The activities are all scheduled in, a clothing list has been given out and all we need to do is look forward!

After this quick chat, the pupils arrived for the maths lesson. As always we started by counting. The warm up activity was to make 2 and 3 digit numbers with the digits given. Mrs Bell explained the need to use 'Thinking Skills' to ensure that all possible answers had been found and that time was used efficiently. As the learning objective was quickly achieved, the group managed to move onto 4 digit numbers too. Beth used her logical thinking to work out how many 3 and 4 digit numbers we could make. Well done, Beth.

The main lesson was to use and apply mathematical knowledge to solving real life word problems. After talking through the steps of problem solving, the children worked with their parents to deal with the questions. Children in the higher set recorded beautifully, and worked out the answer to the first word problem. However, they needed reminding to use what they already knew to be more efficient. This reminder and the challenge to complete as many as possible got them working much faster! Some excellent speaking and listening went on during the session. James is a real star; he has made so much progress. His mum was heard to say, "Oh, alright, you do it your way." Good idea mum, as James has a number of different strategies that he uses for different types of activities.
There were different operations needed to solve the word problems as Mrs Bell wanted to share how children think with the parents. She thinks the lesson was very successful. Next week, we shall use laptops to look at the Pendrell Hall website and have a go at writing up the Blog as a group. That same evening we shall go for the residential family learning.

Science Investigation

Today (2nd March 2007) eight pupils and parents from 3B met in the large study room for the first curriculum workshop. Mrs Bell explained the methods of a Science investigation to the parents and how she would run this session. As soon as the children joined the group, the learning objectives and success criteria were shared. Our investigation was to find the strongest paper towel from a selection of four. Children and parents discussed what strongest meant and then felt the papers to predict which might absorb the most water.

A child noted that the word 'absorbed' was also a word we use in our Building Learning Power methods. Well noticed! More talking was done on how we might test the papers. Mrs Bell had taken in some resources and she made some suggestions. Fair testing was talked about before a quick recording exercise. Two of the four paper towels were predicted as being the most absorbent. Our task was to prove this theory.

Parent and children worked together, dropping coloured water onto to the paper towel to find out how many drops it would take before it leaked through. We were amazed to find that all the papers appeared to be very absorbent! As time was whizzing by, we decided to look and talk about the data collected so far. The results were interesting and perhaps not all that accurate. We talked about reasons behind this.

The plenary was to see how much of each paper would be absorbed by 5ml of water. This seemed to be a fairer test. The group were left thinking about how they might record these findings. Due to the fact this was only a one hour lesson, the full investigation was not completed. However, children went back to their maths lesson, claiming to have had a wonderful science lesson. Parents, too enjoyed helping and watching their children. Mrs Pearson said, "I did not realise my son was so confident."

Mrs Bell was left feeling proud of her class. Well done, everyone!