School and Nursery News May 2022
Peaslake School
Another roller-coaster half-term for Peaslake, with Covid still looming, the challenges of staff and pupil absence persisted. However, the children’s adventures in learning carried on regardless with lots of exciting activities and experiences.
Starting with coming to school one morning and finding that someone had stolen all our tricycles! This warranted a full-on, CSI style investigation. Our detective children worked hard to find clues to lead them to the stolen vehicles and made wanted posters to help locate the culprit(s) and bring him/her/them to justice!
We had great fun celebrating World Book Day, in fact the whole week centered around sharing and reading our favourite books and we were lucky enough to have some volunteer parents come in and share their favourite stories at the end of each day. Then there were the costumes of favourite book characters, they brought colour and vibrancy to the school day. I think there must be some highly creative dressing-up boxes in Peaslake as some of the costumes were amazing!
Science week brought further enthusiasm and excitement into the classrooms: we had Mars Day, where we learnt how to be space cadets, build rockets and investigate the best material to fix a space glove. A visit from a doctor, who showed us how to use a stethoscope to listen to our heart rates before and after exercise; how to use a syringe and how to bandage a wound. We had fun practising with those, but best of all he told us how long our intestines were! A science roadshow, from Penthorpe School, enthralled the children by demonstrating different chemical reactions and built a volcano with real lava flowing. And finally, a STEM ambassador who talked about being an engineer and how to conserve and treat water.
Our Mother’s Day celebration was glorious in the sunshine. It was the first Mother’s Day celebration since lockdown and the children treated their mothers to riddles, paintings, songs and tea and cake! It was a lovely afternoon enjoyed by everyone.
Our end of term Easter excitement culminated in an egg hunt in the woods: we didn’t quite have the glorious weather of previous weeks but the desire for chocolate helped overcome the cold spell and helped keep the children warm! In the afternoon, one of our Reception children shared a traditional Serbian Easter game involving cracking each other’s decorated egg, the egg with the fewest cracks wins. It’s always so lovely when children want to share experiences of their different cultures. Finally, it just wouldn’t be Peaslake without our traditional egg-rolling competition. Being on a hill has its advantages when it comes to rolling perfectly boiled eggs down the drive at varying degrees of speed!
Sadly, we said a fond farewell to Mrs Strachan who is retiring to go travelling. Heather has been the music teacher for Peaslake School for over 25 years. During that time, she has taught music to several generations of Peaslake School children, and they will all remember her energy, enthusiasm, and passion for music. She taught our children to sing songs way beyond their expected age range and even the most reluctant performers in Reception were singing solos and taking leading roles by the time they reached Year 2. Music and drama are so important for developing confidence and self-belief and Heather managed to encourage all the children to trust her and take part in many varied musical activities and performances over the years. This is a very heartfelt thank you from all of us for all the amazing work and creative ideas she brought into school, not to mention her talent in playing so many different instruments to the children. There are so many happy, funny memories.
We hope you all had a wonderful Easter break and we’re looking forward to another busy term.
Sara Dangerfield
