Year 5 from Sedgeberrow C of E First School came out today and their topic was crime and punishment. We started the morning with the children telling me what they had learnt about their topic so far. They gave me a list of rather horrible punishments such at the witches dunking chair, the rack and the village stocks. Their teacher found it interesting to listen to the children telling me about their topic. 

I then gave examples of pieces of legislation that I have to adhere to which include; staff safety, food safety and animal traceability. The children looked at the chainsaw safety equipment, a milk tanker pick up ticket and a cattle passport. I then told the children various stories about rural crime that we have suffered over the last eighteen months. They had some good ideas about how I could prevent my quad bike from being stolen. 

We then went for a farm walk and looked at where the wire had been cut by hare coursers and the drain dug by German prisoners of war in the Second World War. 

The children went into the den building wood and built things connected to their topic. One group created a witches pool, another a rack, two groups built stocks and another group built a prison. 

After lunch they enjoyed the Autumn feel of the play wood 

A lovely boy came to the farm for his fifth birthday party. He loves dinosaurs and so part of the party was spent in the den building wood building ‘dino dens’ for my dinosaurs. The autumn leaves on the floor proved to be great camouflage material. 

Following from a school visit, a lovely girl asked me to do a stone age themed birthday party for her. The children had great fun crushing wheat with stones and drawing on the cow shed walls with blackberries, oil and charcoal. Once the messy hands were cleaned up, the children went on the tractor and trailer ride to the pond. Stone age man were hunter-gatherers who sometimes ate insects. The children went pond dipping to see which insects they could find in the water, strangely they didn’t fancy trying a waterboatman for their lunch….

 

This weekend I had the pleasure of hosting three birthday parties for three very lovely children. For each party I asked the children to make balloon animals as we waited for all the guests to arrive. Here is a sample of what the children made including a frog, cow, pig and duck. The children showed such great imagination. 

I was asked to create a team working activity based around the term topic of Aesops Fables. The class was a mix of Year 4 and 5 and the teacher wished to give the children an opportunity to mix outside of the classroom at the start of the school year.

The children were split into groups of four and given a lump of modelling clay, a long piece of rope and any natural materials they could find in the wood (some nerf gun bullets left over from a party proved very good chimneys for ‘town mouse and the country mouse’). The rope became a ‘story rope’ and the children had to depict a Fable along the length of the rope. The activity worked out far better than I could have imagined. The children were really engaged with the topic and were extremely creative with most teams working well together.  A great day.