SMSC

This week the reception children have had such a great time getting to know their ‘Buddies’ in Year 6. After the initial meeting, the Year 6’s have been finding their new younger friends on the playground and helping them around the school.

On Friday afternoon, the children were together in Oak Class for a play session and then the older children helped the reception children to read their books and enjoyed the responsibility of writing in the reading record book!

This group of Year 6 children were one of the best teams of Buddies that we have ever seen at Chiddingly. It was a pleasure to see such responsible and kind children making our youngest pupils feel so happy.

Safer Internet Day was held on Monday 4th February and was an overwhelming success! The company ‘Perform For Schools’ who came in to hold the workshops for KS1 and KS2 delivered an excellent range of drama-based activities in which the children learnt engaging ways to remember how to keep safe online. They learnt a rap about how to ‘Zip It, Block It, Flag It’! They learnt about cyber bullying and what this looked like and then did freeze-frames to dramatise this. The children also had questions answered about some of their own experiences online.

Kung Hei Fat Choi! Happy New Year! This week we have enjoyed learning all about China in our afternoon sessions. This was linked to the Chinese New Year celebrations.

Each class has taken part in a range of learning, linked to China. Throughout the school, children have been preparing and tasting Chinese foods. Sycamore Class created some very tasty vegetable spring rolls that they shared with their parents and teachers.

There was lots of Geography taking place, learning about where China is located. Willow class learnt how to write Chinese symbols and presented their work beautifully, as well as learning about the giving of red envelopes with money as a New Year gift.

As 2018 is the ‘Year of the Dog’, Beech Class designed and created their own dog masks. Oak Class enjoyed using ‘Google Translate’ to learn how to say some Chinese words as well as making their own Chinese Lanterns and writing detailed instructions to explain how to do this.

Many thanks to all of the staff for planning such exciting activities for the children and to all of the parents and carers for coming into our celebration of work at the end of the day.

This week, we have enjoyed our latest International Day, learning about Mexico. Oak and Beech Classes joined together and Willow and Sycamore also worked together to learn about different aspects of life and culture in Mexico.

During the day, the younger children made traditional Mexican paper flower art and decorated their own sombreros and ponchos. They also used Google Earth to find Mexico and talk about what the weather might be like there by looking at the land. Alongside this, there were a selection of Mexican foods for the children to taste and then describe. There were lots of different opinions on which was the tastiest!

In Key Stage Two, the groups carried out work about the Day of the Dead Celebration and designed some pieces of art. They also developed their culinary skills by making their own guacamole and salsa which they ate with Nachos! Factfiles were also completed following research online.
It was great to see the learning that took place during the day and good to listen to the children sharing their opinions on the different activities that they tried.

“I loved making the giant Mexico flag with the paper,” said Sienna Rose.

“I really liked trying the foods. I loved the Mango and the two sauces but I didn’t like refried beans. The inside tasted weird!”

On Monday 20th February, the Pioneer Federation celebrated their second International Day of the year with a focus on the country of Syria.

With so much attention being on Syria in the media at present, it was really lovely to learn about the country from its people. We were very lucky to have some visitors from the Syrian community, who spent the day with us.

Each class got to spend some time listening to Syrian music and also enjoyed listening to the Syrian children singing some of their traditional songs. They were so brave to stand up in front of all of us! The group then shared some Syrian dance moves and we all joined in with this!

Alongside this, each class took part in their own learning about different aspects of Syrian culture. Oak Class very much enjoyed tasting some middle eastern foods. Beech Class looked at Syrian Art and then created some of their own images. Willow Class made the school smell amazing by preparing and serving their own Syrian style salads and sharing them with the visitors to our end of day celebration. Sycamore Class really impressed the adults by joining in with the dancing and chatting so openly with the visiting children, sharing their own songs and some interesting moves! They then learnt about the Islamic religion and told us all about the ‘Five Pillars of Islam’ and created some posters about this.

It was wonderful to watch the enthusiasm and share the learning in the celebration assembly at the end of the day. Many thanks also to so many of our parents and carers for coming to share this with us.

Thanks also to Tom Serpell from the ‘Village of Sanctuary’ charity who inspired us to hold this day and used his contacts to arrange our visitors. Also thanks to Nadine Strasman from the Sussex Syrian group for her role in the organisation.

Sycamore spent Friday 27th January celebrating Chinese New Year, furthering our learning based on our topic of the Shang Dynasty of Ancient China. We looked at how different cultures celebrated Chinese New Year around the world and then spent the morning doing activities. We split into our year groups and, spent half the morning creating crafts (like Chinese lanterns, fortune tellers and Chinese zodiac posters) and the other half preparing and cooking an amazing vegetable stir-fry! We then tried our best to eat the food with chop sticks…but it wasn’t very successful and most of us ended up eating with our hands!

In the afternoon, we picked a name out of the hat of someone in our class and we made traditional ‘money’ wallets and put sweets in them to give out at the end of the day. We didn’t know who had made our envelope until the very end of the day when we couldn’t keep the secret any longer!

Thank you to Mr Dowling, who came in to help for the morning and brought us some much needed supplies of red and yellow card!

On the 20th October Chiddingly and East Hoathly Schools celebrated their first International Day with a focus on India. We enjoyed many activities in our classes, learning about the country and widening our experience of other cultures. We were very grateful to Mrs Fox  who visited us and shared her experiences and photos from her charity visit to India. All of us learnt about how life in India is very different and enjoyed the interesting talk.

Activities in classes were really hands on, with food tasting, observing Indian artefacts, painting gods and goddesses and Rangoli Patterns.

In the afternoon, each class had so much fun learning Bollywood Dance routines with the ‘Bollywood Belles’. We really enjoyed performing these to the parents and carers in the special assembly at the end of the day.

Many thanks also to all the parents who brought in items from home to support the learning.

Well done everyone for a fantastic last day of term!