For the first half of the Autumn term the children in Class 1 have been visiting Wolsingham Comprehensive School on a Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon for orienteering and DT work. They have received a free lunch on both of these days, courtesy of Wolsingham. The children have had a fantastic time and have learnt lots of new skills.

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On Friday 14th October, our whole school went to St Philip’s and St James’ Church for our Harvest Festival.

The children had really enjoyed learning new Harvest songs and sang them beautifully in church.

The speakers said their words really clearly and spread the message well about Harvest.

Thank you to everyone who helped us to walk down to church and who attended our Harvest Festival Service.

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Years 1 to 6 enjoyed our first multi-cultural celebration day of the year. They learnt about the birthday of Lord Ganesh (Ganesh Chaturthi) and how Hindus celebrate it all over the world.

In some places the festival is celebrated for ten days and is a joyous event and regarded as a public occasion. In other places it is simply celebrated at home and hymns are sung and offerings made to Ganesh. Sweets are also distributed because in Hindu legend Ganesh liked them.

Class 4 created artwork related to the birthday of Lord Ganesh with coloured sand and Class 2 created a statue model of Lord Ganesh himself out of clay. Class 3 learnt about the Hindu Gods and Class 1 made postcards celebrating the festival.

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The whole school joined in with celebrations for what would have been Roald Dahl’s 100th Birthday. Children (and staff!) across the school dressed up as characters from Roald Dahl books and enjoyed a day of Roald Dahl related activities.

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Artist Alison Diamond made a series of visits to our school over the Summer term 2016. She worked with pupils to develop designs inspired by themes representing the history, ecology and diversity of their local community in and around Tow Law.  Alison helped the children develop their ideas to create motifs which the children could screen print on to canvas with Alison’s guidance. The colourful and innovative banners will take pride of place in our school hall for all to enjoy.

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In the Summer term 2016 the year 6 pupils enjoyed the chance to work with historians from Durham’s Oriental Museum.

The workshop started with a hands on practical mathematics lesson inspired by ancient Islamic tiles which required a good deal of cooperation, organisation and negotiation for each group to design and complete their own set of tiles. This was followed by a literacy lesson of creative writing inspired by themes from Arabic poetry. Finally, the children had great fun developing their technology skills by working out how to program robot trucks to navigate a course around obstacles in the classroom – without causing too much mayhem!

All thanks to the ancient Chinese whose mathematical principles helped evolve the binary code behind today’s computer programming.

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We had a wonderful time on our visits to Hall Hill Farm to round off our Summer Topic. The children were very caring with all the animals and it was lovely to see them transfer their knowledge from our learning in school. We look forward to continue this learning further, with the arrival of chickens in the Autumn Term! 

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Our football team enjoyed their matches in the 2015-2016 year. They played in the central venue league at Parkside Academy in Willington on the astroturf. Thanks to all parents who came to support us. It is a tough league with some very experienced teams from local schools. There were 7 teams in the league and the children played each team twice resulting in 12 matches over the year. The children improved drastically throughout the year and managed to win one match and draw two after some initial defeats.

Happily the football team have continued to train for the new season and started on Friday 23 September so if anyone would like to come to training please come and get a club letter and join us. They will continue to train on a Friday night after school and the matches will start on Wednesday 9th November. This year we are in a league with 8 teams which means there will be 14 matches to play.  Anyone who comes to training will be considered to play for the football team.