Category : Year 3/4

In their final week of our scholarship programme, Y4 spent the afternoon developing their orienteering skills. The session started with some small-scale cone orienteering, following a basic map to follow a route through a grid of sixteen coloured cones. Next, children used their geographical knowledge and inference skills to discover common ordinance survey map symbols. Next children studied a map of the school, learning to orientate the map north, use the legend to identify familiar places and measuring to estimate distances.

The finals step was putting this together. To get to this stage would normally take a few weeks  of work but our sports stars met the challenge head on and, after a some early mishaps, learnt from their mistakes and managed to complete all of out short courses with some progressing further! This was another completely new experience for our children and was very well received with some now wanting the chance to complete the longer courses as a lunch time club.

Issy and Evie reading a cone map and gathering the corresponding numbers. 

Working together to match OS symbols with the correct description. A tricky task which requires a range of geography knowledge, inference and common sense! 

Ewan and Harrie did fantastic and were the only pair to progress to a long course. Well done boys!

C

Fabulous Mindful PE, practising our Yoga poses and breathing. We really enjoyed this as Lisel helped us to become more conscious of our feelings and creating positive head space.

After numerous set backs due to COVID19, our Sports Scholarship programme finally got underway this week starting with our Y4 gifted and talented sports stars. This is a brand new programme which we are trialling this year in partnership with Tigers Trust and has several key aims:

Aims

• To provide children with new sporting experiences and opportunities
• To allow gifted and talented children opportunities to apply and transfer their current skills to new sports
• To provide children with pathways into local sports clubs where they can excel
• To help children develop a deeper understanding of sporting values and how these can be applied to other areas of their learning.
• To identify and develop sporting skills to help children reach their sporting potential
• To show children how to live a healthy life and he a healthy sports person
• To develop children as young sports leaders and officiators.

Tchoukball

In this first session, children got a chance to transfer and apply their skills to a game which they had never played before: Tschoukball. This fast-paced, five-aside game requires speed,  agility and quick thinking to score by throwing the ball at  a special rebound net so that it bounces outride ‘the forbidden zone’ and hits the floor of the court. It is an advanced invasion game and there are a several complicated rules to understand. One rule which really challenged the children was the restriction on being able to intercept a pass. With this law of the game, children were forced to really rethink their previously learned tactics of defence!

Where to score?: In Tschoukball, points can be scored at either end of the court, making defending a larger area much more difficult. 

A new defensive mindset: Ewan can be seen here ready to catch the rebound to save conceding – intercepting the ball isn’t allowed!

We finished the session by challenging the children to come up with ways we could adapt one sport to practise and consolidate the skills of another. Together, we found the perfect solution: Kick rounders! Children were not allowed to pick the ball up (unless catching someone out) so had to practise their short, mid and long passes to get each other out. It was great to finally get out in the sun after a few weeks of poor weather!

Enjoying their outdoor session: Our Y4 Sports Stars

For the more than half of the children in Y3/4, today was their first day back at school since December 2020. What better way to start the week than with PE! This half term, children are continuing to have a 45 minute session of yoga, Qigong and Meditation with out well-being coach, Liesel Cobby. Since September, these sessions have proved very popular and are fantastic for children’s mental wellbeing.

Health Minds: Mrs Hebden’s class during their guided meditation.