European Languages Day

We celebrated with a French Day, with workshops including art (French artists), music (including the can-can!), French and DT (building French landmarks).

 

Pigeons!

Our Chair of Governors, Mr Blair, paid us a visit this morning with some racing pigeons! we watced him release them at playtime – what a treat!

Season of Creation

To celebrate the season of creation, we have been creating textile art depicting some of God’s amazing gifts.

Eye Spy

We have been inspired by artist Lucy Pass this week and had a go at drawing eyes…. watch this space for our work on dragon eyes next!

CAFOD Big Lent Walk

Liquorice Allsorts Classification Keys!

Our Science learning this week involved devising classification keys… and what better way to do this than to sort liquorice allsorts! It was trickier than we expected – but the reward of finishing off the pack of sweets was great motivation!

International Day of Happiness

Our Diana Award anti-bullying ambassadors planned and led a fantastic day packed full of games and activities with a focus on kindness and happiness to celebrate International Day of Happiness. Everyone was asked to wear their brightest, happiest coloured clothes! Our mbassadors started off by leading an assembly with the important message of being kind to oursleves as well as others. They led a whole school ‘Happy Breathing’ meditation then led some great activities at lunchtime including parachute games, kindness bingo and circle games.

Careers Week

We welcomed lots of visitors into school for careers week… vets nurses, police officers, a vet tech and farmer, electrician, beauty therapist, fabric designer and a street pastor! We asked lots of questions about career paths, what inspired them and what makes their job special.

World Book Day

Curling

Habitat Corners

As part of our Science learning about evolution and inheritance, we have created our own species with specific adaptations that allow it to survive in its habitat.We designed their characteristics then created them using Modroc… aren’t they fantastic?!

Camouflage Art

We have also been taking a closer look at camouflage in the natural world and used pastels to experiment with creating different textures/patterns

Safety Week 2024

We have immersed ourselves in learning about staying safe this week! We learned some vital first aid skills thanks to our paramedic visitors, presented dramas to the rest of the school about using our voice to say no in various risky situations and learned about water safety.

 

Oliver!

We’ve rounded off our English unit on playscripts and historical settings with a performance of Oliver!

Remembrance Day art and poetry

Extra-terrestrial visit?!

Well, what an exciting week we have had in Beacon Class! We received a memo from NASA asking us to investigate a possible UFO crash site in our school grounds! We were also given exclusive CCTV footage of a UFO hovering over the playground. We got to work collecting forensic evidence then with our journailstic skills, wrote newspaper reports about our findings.

Mosque visit

We had a fabulous visit to a mosque yesterday, finding out lots of interesting information about the Islamic faith. Imam Adil made us feel so welcome – we were treated to some food to help us understand fasting during Ramadan, presented with our names written in Arabic and we listened to a moving call to prayer sung in the prayer hall.

Creation textile art

Here are some of our finished creation pictures in response to our learning about the story of creation in the book of Genesis. We delved into some great discussion about how the belief in God as creator of all things can be compatible with our knowledge of the scientific evidence of evolution. We also learned more about Pope Francis’ plea in Laudato Si to care for our common home. We chose something we wanted to thank God for in his wonderful gift of creation and created these beautiful images for our RE display.

Space Week entrepreneurs!

In response to this Space Week year’s theme, ‘entrepreneurship’, we have been busy designing and creating spacecraft with a specific purpose. We had rockets designed to take tourists into space, rovers to find evidence of life on other planets and shuttles to send humans into orbit! We presented our ideas to the whole school in our celebration assembly.

Little Way Week fundraisers

We launched ‘Little Way Week’ with a whole school fundraiser to support the Red Cross in their mission to support families who have suffered due to earthquakes in Libya and Morocco. We look forward to our continued efforts this week and beyond, including our harvest food bank collection and our MacMillan coffee morning, when we will also be raising funds to support our friends in the Shalom Academy in Irovo, Kenya. We have sent letters to our penpals there and can’t wait to hear back from them! Our friend Olive collected the letters and she will be personally delivering them very soon! After a chat with Olive, we have decided to try and raise enough money to buy some swings and footballs for the school.

Autumn term 1 topic: Earthlings!

Weaving our seascapes

We have created weaved wall hangings of seascapes using a variety of threads including some recycled plastic bag strands! We were inspired by Isatou Ceesay – the queen of recycling from The Gambia, who led a recyling initiative to empower women in local communities to make sellable products from old plastic bags.

Fleetwood Museum Trip

We had a great morning at Fleetwood Museum this week, learning about Victorian seaside holidays. We dressed up in Victorian costumes, learned about how steam trains work, served tea in a Victorian guest house, made pebble art and finished with a Punch and Judy show!

 
Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition

We had a meeting with marine biologist Delia this week from the CPPC, who shared lots of thought-provoking information with us about her work. We have been inspired to do our bit and are putting ideas together to try and reduce plastic waste both in school and at home. we are looking forward to carrying our our own beach clean-up after the half term break!

Coronation rosettes

We had lots of fun putting our sewing and design skills to the test on Friday, creating rosettes to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles.

Seascapes

We have been inspired by a selevtion of seascape art to create our own mixed media paintings with elements of collage. We used seaglass and other recycled items on cardboard canvases, painted to create gorgeous results!

Seaside topic launch

To launch our topic about the seaside (Victorian seaside holidays and looking at threats to our oceans today), we started to think about how plastic pollution is affecting sea animals. We created a turtle using plastic waste and discussed our role in protecting our oceans and their inhabitants.

Judo

Our first judo session took place this week!

Inventors & Inventions

We have come to the end of our latest topic ‘Inventors & Inventions’. It has been lovely to see the children inspired to create their own inventions at home and test out our learning on forces by creating a vast array of catapult, glider and parachute designs! We wrote letters to showcase our learning about the Islamic Golden Age and created PowerPoint presentations about some early inventions to come out of the amazing round city of Baghdad.

Cobble Hey farm visit

Year 5 visited a local farm this week to observe seasonal changes and were even fortunate enough to watch a lamb being born!

Science Museum Visit

Science Week

We have been investigating forces this week for Science week – how they work together and against each other. We investigated the effect of air restistance and gravity on parachutes we designed ourselves. We went on a frction hunt around school, made paper helicopters to find out which variable affected the speed of the fall and had some fun trying to pull books with interlocked pages apart!

Mother’s Day Art

Look at these gorgeous pieces of art we created for Mother’s Day cards! We used watercolour pencil and pen to create beautiful wild flowers. I hope our lovely recipients enjoyed them as much as we enjoyed creating them.

National Careers Week

We have been thinking about our future selves this week and gaining inspiration from some visitors who joined us to talk about their careers – a paediatrician and an artist!

World Book Day

We celebrated World book day dressing up as our favourite character, taking part in a book-tasting cafe and reading with our nursery friends!

Storyteller visit

A healthy meal on a budget

We designed a healthy, balanced meal using the Eatwell plate. We were allocated a budget and were given the task of shopping for ingredients. Evaluations of the finished dishes proved everyone had done a fantastic job!

Safety Week

We welcomed a paramedic team into school for Safety Week. We took part in a first aid workshop, had a look around the ambulance and asked them lots of questions about their amazing work.

We also devised some drama sketches to present our learning about health villains (drugs, alcohol and smoking) to the rest of the school in our Safety Week Showcase.

We learned about water safety from two RNLI representatives.

Music – composers hard at work!

Chinese New Year & multi-cultural stories

We have written our own version of the story of the Chinese zodiac ‘The Great Race’. Some of the children narrated their story whilst the rest of the class dramatised it for a mesmerised audience from Year 1&2!

Learning about Judaism – the Seder plate

 

Portraits of real-life heroes

We have been thinking about what qualities a real-life hero may have this week and then chose a special person to write an information text about. We then learnt about proportions of the human face and drew portraits of our chosen hero. Can you guess who they are?

Christmas jumper day

Watercolour penguins!

We have used watercolours to create our own unique Christmas card designs. Aren’t they gorgeous?!

Children in Need

The children in Beacon Class have written blogs to explain how we have been fundraising for Children in Need and how your money helps. Here is Penelope’s blog (more to be published on our blog page soon!)

Today at St. Francis it is a sea of onesies, oodies and fluffy pyjamas! We brought in £1 and pennies for a huge yellow felt cut-out of Pudsey.

Let me tell you more about Children In Need…

Children in Need is a charity that raises money for thousands of other charities in every corner in the UK. The money goes to different families with children that are either mentally unstable, disabled, or have a medical condition. You may just think that they only support children like that but they also support families who can’t feed their kids because of poverty.

There’s a very brave young man I would like to tell you about: his name is Riley and he has an interstitial lung disease. He was diagnosed with this disease when he was a little baby. His mum noticed he was struggling to breathe and the doctors diagnosed him with this lung problem. Children in need helped Riley’s family send him to a day care centre called Ty Hafan. Ty Hafan takes in children with disabilities or problems and gives them a place to feel safe and have fun. Riley has to take an oxygen tank everywhere he goes inside or outside. He would have never been able to do what he is accomplishing today without the support of a special play therapist (Anna) that children in need payed for. Before Riley had Anna he had trouble accepting his condition and was questioning why it is me with this disease? Why do I have to have it? His family had to adjust their home so Riley had access to oxygen at all times and if he didn’t for five minutes he would get really out of breath and his fingers and nose would go pale. Riley’s family have improved by Ty Hafan and Children In Need and most of all Anna for helping Riley with his confidence. It has made him feel like he is like the other children even though he understands he’s not. On the video his mum said they would be a completely different family without children in need and Ty Hafan.

 So on behalf of all the children of St. Francis I would like to say a big thank you to all the families who have now supported children like Riley. We have raised £120.92.

Thank you

By Penelope Spinks.

Remembrance poetry and poppies

We have had a week of reflection for Remembrance. We made textile poppies to sell at our family mass on Sunday. We learned a poem called ‘Poppies’, performing it for the rest of the school following a 2 minutes silence; it was very emotive. We also wrote our own remembrance poems using examples of figurative language.

Fencing

We have completed our first fencing class in PE!

Canal Field Trip

In Geography, we have been learning about human and physical geographical features in our local area. We put our mapping skills into practice with a field trip to Lancaster Canal in Bilsborrow. We drew maps of our journey, adding Ordnance Survey symbols. We spotted some amazing wildlife too: herons, swans and ducks to name a few!

Diwali

We have been learning about the Hindu festival of light, Diwali. We made Diwali sweets and have produced some fantastic double-page spreads to present our learning.

Black History Month

We have been celebrating the many amazing talents of some black athletes, musicians, politicians, scientists this week. we have also learned about the Windrush and some of obstacles and injustices the Windrush generation have faced. We learned a song by Lord Kitchener who was on the Windrush ship: ‘London is the Place for Me’ and perfomed this for our MacMillan Coffee Concert.

We produced mixed media artwork to showcase some of our learning and added some inspirational quotes:

Space Week:  Sustainable satellite solutions

We have been setting our sights high and coming up with design solutions to tackle the issue of orbital debris! We designed satellites with various design feature to collect debris whilst in orbit.

Who were the Anglo-Saxons and where did they come from?

We have been out and about playing the part of the Romans, The Britons, The Picts and the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, finding out who the Anglo-Saxons were and what was happening in Britain in the early AD400’s.

Birds nested in its branches…

We have sewn birds for a display representing the parable of the mustard seed. We talked about how Jesus used this story to describe the Kingdom of God and wrote our own responses on leaves. Our lovely tree will be on dispay in church this Saturday 11am-2pm as part of a harvest celebration.

Our finished dragon eyes

From human eyes to dragon eyes…

We have been practising our drawing skills this week, focusing on drawing human eyes. We were inspired by the work of artist Lucy Pass, a portrait artist who has a passion for drawing eyes. We then used pictures of reptile eyes to design our own dragon eyes. We have been reading legends from around the UK, writing about mythical creatures including dragons, so it has been great to see our artwork bring these to life! The next step in our project was to make clay sculptures of our dragon eyes – they are looking fantastic and ready for painting next week!

Sept 2022… Welcome back!

Here is our topic booklet for this half term. We are looking forward to learning about some weird and wonderful legends from around the UK and improving our Geography knowledge. We have a very exciting art project coming up too!

We have been saddened to hear of the death of our lovely monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. We have been reflecting on some special memories of the jubilee celebrations and have held a very emotive 2 minute silence on the playground.

Curling Tournament

Our year 6 curling team finished a very respectful 2nd place in the interschools curling tournament at the Flowerbowl – 1 point off the winners’ score!

Shakespeare Rocks

Our end of year production was amazing! Year 5 and 6 pulled off some fantastic performances in ‘Shakespeare Rocks’, whilst learning so much about the great bard!

Olympics Day!

To finish off our topic about Ancient Greece, we held our own Olympic Games, including an opening ceremony with inspirational speeches with a nod to the Greek Gods!

Cricket

We have a cricket coach working with us this half term, teaching us about batting and fielding techniques.

Science week

This week, we teamed up with our buddies in Reception to carry out a bug hunt in our Millennium forest area! We then made compostable seed starter pots and planted sunflower seeds ready for our big sunflower growing competition!

Author Visit

We welcomed author Dan Worsley into school today. He entertained us with a fantastic performance storytelling assembly, followed by a fantastic writing workshop, where he shared some of his secrets to great story writing.

Viking Visit!

Yes, you read correctly… we were paid a visit from a real Viking! He taught us all about Viking weapons, battle strategies and eating habits. He also showed us some amazing artefacts, for which we had fun guessing their uses.

Lego Coding Training!

Some of our technology experts from year 5 and 6 have been sharing their skills in Lego Coding with Reception class this week…

World Book Day 2022

We have had great fun today dressed as our favourite book characters! We shared stories with our buddies in Reception class and made our own books about the day our character came to school!

Sweet classification!

We have been learning about classification keys in Science. After using keys to classify some newly discovered amphibians, we created our own keys for Liquorice Allsorts!

Fairtrade Fortnight

Today we welcomed Fairtrade expert Michael into school to talk to us about the importance of Fairtrade. Beacon Class took part in a Fairtrade workshop, where we learned all about Fairtrade cooperatives and how farmers receive a fair deal for their crops.

Creepy Crawly Roadshow!

To launch our latest topic on animal classification, we welcomed John and his Creepy Crawly Roadshow into school. We learned so many fascinating facts about minibeasts and even got to hold some including a Madagascan hissing cockroach, Brian the giant land snail, Sammy the Royal python and a tiny stick insect!

VR experience

This week we took a virtual trip to the Amazon Rainforest, where we saw lots of amazing animals in the different layers of the rainforest, including capuchin monkeys, a tarantula and ants around our feet!

Mars Rovers

We have been designing, creating and programming Mars Rovers! The brief was to design a rover to collect scientific information and samples from the red planet.

Abstract Art Jackson Pollock style!

We loved getting messy with abstract art this week, applying paint with a variety of things including spray bottles and spoons! It was great to experience art on this scale – in true Jackson Pollock style!

Looking to the future

Our school council organised a ‘Future self day’ today, so we all came dressed as our future selves in our chosen career paths! From artists to architects, entomologists and sports champions, we are certainly reaching for the stars!

Aliens?!

Well, what an exciting week! On Monday, we were handed CCTV footage of a mysterious UFO hovering over our playground at the weekend! We investigated further and found metal debris scattered around a possible crash site in the Millennium. We put our expert forensic team to work, collecting evidence and interviewing staff to find out what had happened!

Martian Soil Investigation

We tested three soil samples found at our UFO crash site to find out which was the most likely to be from Mars. We used processes of dissolving, evaporating and filtering to check for properties that would give us clues about its origin.

Safety Week

We have had a very busy week, learning some basic first aid, a visit from paramedics in an ambulance, Online safety and water safety.

Alston Observatory

We visited Alston Observatory, where we took part in a Space workshop and were lucky enough to see two huge telescopes – one of which is among the biggest in Britain!

Solar System Maths!

We have been trying to get our heads around the scale of the planets in our Solar System this week! We measured the relative distance between each planet in relation to the sun, and using various sized spherical objects from chocolate sprouts to footballs we made a human solar system on the playground! We then made accurate scale drawings of the planets (200 000 000 times smaller than the real thing!).

Starry Night advent artwork

We have been working on a piece or art for a virtual advent service with other local schools. Our brief was ‘joy’ so we have depicted the joy of the birth of Jesus in the style of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We created swirls in the Impressionist style of Van Gogh using a limited palette of blue, purple and yellow, then displayed these with some 3d elements and a light to represent Jesus. We’re really pleased with the result!

Oliver!

In English we have been studying Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and this week we staged our very own performance!

Maths in the sunshine

We took advantage of some rare winter sunshine in maths with a division codecraker treasure hunt!

Van Gogh Alive!

We had such an amazing time at the Van Gogh Alive exhibition this week! It was so mesmerising and emotive to see Van Gogh’s life in paintings brought to life on huge screens all around us. We have been inspired to create some brilliant descriptive writing by imagining we had ‘dived into’ Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting.

Children in Need

We have been busy fundraising for Children in Need today. We wore our pyjamas and filled a huge Pudsey bear with pennies!

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Gymnastics

We have been practising different balances in gymnastics and creating our own sequences…

Gymnastics Champions!

Well done to our amazing gymnastics team who soared to victory in a competition this week… 4 gold medals, one silver and one bronze! They were also overall champions in the small schools league. Amazing performances!

Blackpool Zoo

We had a fantastic day at Blackpool Zoo – the perfect end to our Survival topic. We even got to feed nectar to the amazing rainbow lorikeets! It was great to see so many animal adaptations in real life.  Thanks to expert Bex for her guidance and patience in answering our many questions!

Survival Displays

We’re very proud of our class topic displays to showcase our learning about survival. We have crammed so much into this half term!

Our Habitat Corners

We have designed and created our very own species, giving them adaptations to help them survive in specific habitats. We wrote documentary scripts, sculpted our animals using modroc and made habitat corners for them to live in. Using the Puppetpals animation app, we filmed our own documentaries that I’m sure even Sir David Attenborough would be proud of!

Space Week

The focus for this year’s space week was women in space. We researched facts about many of the amazing influential women who have made their mark in the field of space travel and astronomy. We produced pop art style images inspired by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and presented our findings in a class video.

Finished artwork!

We are so proud of our finished pieces of art to round off our project on animals and camouflage!

Camouflage in Art

This week we have been working on some camouflage art using a variety of techniques. We looked at creating texture using different pencil grades, pastels, paint and collage. For our final piece we chose our favourite media and created some amazing animal and camouflage art. Watch this space next week for our finished pieces!

Autumn 2021

What a great start to the new school year! We have launched our new topic, Survival, with some fascinating learning about animal adaptations and evolution of species. Our new art topic about camouflage is well underway and we can’t wait to show you the finished results… watch this space!

Longridge Environmental Group Celebration

A group of children from Beacon Class were invited to Longridge Environmental Group’s Celebration of their ‘Plastic Free Town’ status yesterday. As part of our own Plastic Free School status award, Lucy had distributed newsletters to her neighbours, informing them of the plastic crisis. One of these was delivered to the ex mayor of Longridge, who consequently sent us the invitation to be part of this special event. Well done Lucy! We went along with some of our amazing work on display and presented to an audience of like-minded campaigners. What a fantastic privilege – the children did us proud with their heartfelt poems, speeches and confident presentation of our work.

Amazing Automata!

Today, we built some complex electrical circuits with LED lights and resistors to add a light element to our automata. We persevered in stripping wires, adding connector strips and using fiddly screwdrivers; it was so worth it… the results are fantastic!

Sports Day!

Automata designs

I have been blown away by some of our automata designs in our latest DT/ science project! The children have designed and created automata using cams mechanisms to bring moving parts to life. Then next plan is to add LEDs using our knowledge of electrical circuits to turn them into something worthy of Blackpool illuminations! Watch this space for the finished results…

Crochet Masterclass!

One of our year 5 pupils, Melody, has been sharing her love of crochet and teaching her classmates how to make chains, magic circles and even egg cosies! She has set up her own lunchtime club and has even taught Mrs Rossall (very patiently) some basic skills! 

Shakespeare Workshops

We have been lucky enough to have Lucy’s mum – our very own Shakespeare expert! – running some fantastic Shakespeare workshops with us. We have had a fascinating flavour of some of the bard’s plays, we got to grips with some tricky archaic language, acted some scenes and even hurled Shakespearean insults at one another!

Virtual Reality!

Wow, what an amazing day we have had! We took part in a Virtual Reality workshop and experienced life under the sea with a 360 degree view of some amazing ocean scenes! We saw dolphins, whale sharks, seals and even set foot in a shark cage! We also saw the impact of climate change, viewing changes in our polar regions, forests and views of the Earth from space.

History Day

We had a visit from Ruby Slippers this week, who took us on a tour of British history, from the Stone Age through to WW2! We became Stone Age hunters, wives of Henry VIII and World War 2 evacuees. We also took part in a Shakespeare Workshop, where we took on some key characters, posing in freeze frames to convey key characters and shapes to represent the seven ages of man speech from ‘As you like it’. What a great way to consolidate our History learning!

Photography – plastic in nature

We have been looking at some of Tracey Williams’ photography of Lego and other plastic washed up on beaches in Cornwall and were inspired to try our own!

Lytham Beach Clean-up

We had a very productive morning picking up litter along Lytham Beach. We found a surprising amount of plastic waste.

Weaving Seascapes

We have been creating some beautiful weaving art – transforming our seascapes into textile wall hangings. They are looking stunning!

Move over Greta Thunberg!

Beacon Class have been so inspired by young climate change activist Greta Thunberg and her speeches, they have written their own… and they are amazing! Some of them delivered their speeches in an assembly via Teams and advised the younger children what they could do to help the fight against plastic pollution. The children have also written letters to our local MP asking for his support with our Plastic Free Schools campaign.
On Monday we welcomed Delia Webb from the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition into our classroom via Zoom. What a fantastic insight into the world of a very passionate marine medic and biologist. She was very impressed with our knowledge and enthusiasm – we look forward to letting her know how we get on with our beach litter pick next week.

Rock Pool Experience

What a fantastic day we had learning about and holding some amazing creatures found in our rock pools! Starfish, anemones, crabs and mermaid purses to name a few. Many thanks to Lee from Aqualease for his expert knowledge and patience!

Plastic-free Schools Trash Mob!

We are on a mission to become a certified ‘plastic-free school’ and this week we carried out a ‘trash mob’ litter pick around the school grounds. Thinking we would come back with nothing, we were astounded to fill two sacks of plastic and non-decompostable waste! From plastic carrier bags buried in hedges to disposable face masks. We have also been writing persuasive speeches inspired by Greta Thunberg, which we are looking forward to delivering to our peers next week to persuade them to help us in our mission!

Sea poetry

I have been amazed by the thought-provoking and emotive poetry that has been created this week in Beacon class! We looked at figurative language and imagery in some sea poems then wrote our own. Some children decided to incorporate their feelings about plastic pollution – our ‘ethical thinking’ topic for this half-term.

Seascapes

We have been exploring and creating seascapes this week, using paint and collage techniques. In English, we have ‘dived into a painting’ and written some fantastic setting descriptions to depict our chosen seascape painting.

Parachute testing!

We tried out our parachute designs to see which was the most effective. We discovered that the bigger canopies slowed down the effects of gravity, but they only worked well if they were well-balanced!

Designing parachutes

Our latest DT project was to design a parachute that will safely carry an egg to the ground, making use of air resistance to reduce the force of gravity!
We chose suitable materials for the canopy, decided on the shape and size of the canopy and thought carefully about how to attach strings and a basket.
Next week we will be testing how effective they are… I wonder how many eggs will survive?!

Hockey Skills

In PE we have been developing our hockey skills. We have practised dribbling and jab tackling. We definitely have some budding hocking players in our class!