What has been happening in Blwyddyn Pump this week?

14.03.25

This week, Year 5 have been working tirelessly to research, draft and digitally redraft biographical writing about a range of different ‘Wonderful Welsh Women’. The children have selected individuals from Monmouthshire’s present, such as Laura Pollock from Lower House Farm; women from Wales’ past such as Betsi Cadwaladr and globally renowned Welsh women including Jade Jones and Shirley Bassey. The effort they have put into this project has been impressive, including designing their own writer’s toolkit for the task and combining all their digital skills to create visually impactful, informative biographies that we will be exhibiting at our ‘Wonderful Welsh Women’ event later in the term. Alongside this, we also took inspiration from another impressive woman, Amelia Earhart, through our Science and Technology and Health and Wellbeing activities this week, with the children being set a significant problem solving task. They had to use limited equipment to build a walking model of a plane, which included all their team-mates, in order to transport cargo and then launch it into a target zone…all whilst staying physically connected to each other. Their ingenuity and problem solving skills really came to the fore! Next week, we can look forward to a visit from Connor Allen, a recent children’s poet laureate for Wales.

21.03.25

This week, Blwyddyn Pump have again shown how well they can collaborate when learning. We started the week with the challenge of building a collaborative digital database of different bird species. This involved everyone in the class working on one shared spreadsheet, into which teams needs to organise their research to match the fields of information we had agreed on as a class. There was huge potential for disaster with such as complex task but they worked together brilliantly, resolved any technical issues that emerged and the end result was a brilliantly detailed and useful database that we can now use to develop our searching and enquiry skills. Building on this collaboration, they also worked expertly (in some cases with restrictions placed on them to only use non-verbal communication) to gather information, physically move through a space using limited equipment to communicate what they had learned and then construct a model – all part of our problem solving activities within PE. It was great to see all the teams being successful! Our visit from the former Children’s Poet Laureate for Wales, Connor Allen, provided an opportunity for the children to further develop their creative skills, as they developed their own ‘I am…’ poems, reflecting on what is important to them in their lives. It was lovely to her the children so openly and eloquently communicating their thoughts, as well as speaking passionately about the importance of diversity, acceptance and challenging stereotypes.

28.03.25

This week, Blwyddyn Pump have had a week filled with collaborative challenges and activities. To start the week, we continued to develop the plans we have for our ‘Wonderful Women’ event, which we will be holding next week for a range of wonderful women in our own lives. We also managed to stay largely dry when challenged to transport water from one area to another, with limited equipment and without any verbal communication. It was impressive to see the creative solutions the children developed to both carrying the water and creating alternative means of communicating. We also started to design and make our own board games, intended to teach the players about the astonishing migration of swallows from Africa to Wales, as well as including information about the growing impact that human action has on this epic journey. A stand-out moment from the week has been the excellent range of homework that we have received inspired by our study of ‘The Woodcutter and the Snow Prince’, demonstrating creativity and supporting our in-school story writing activities.

04.04.25

This week, Blwyddyn Pump have been busily making the final preparations for our ‘Wonderful Women’ event. This included adding the finishing touches to their biographies of ‘Wonderful Welsh Women’ to be exhibited, devising board games to enjoy with their guests (whilst also teaching them about the wildlife in our local area) and creating a nice surprise gift for their guests. They also helped to prepare a range of sweet treats for the guests to enjoy, as well as serving the drinks. Besides the hard work of the children, the event was only possible thanks to the support of members of our PTFA who worked with the children on the baking, as well as Monmouthshire Food Partnership who funded our ingredients and Morrisons Abergavenny who donated a selection of food items that we were able to share. Beyond this, the children also experienced a bird-spotting workshop with a visiting member of the RSPB team and also started to further develop their financial literacy by learning how to budget. This is a great preparation for next term, as we have just had news that we have been accepted onto the Virgin Money Grow £5 young entrepreneurship challenge. Next week, we will be ending our very productive term with some STEM and Expressive Arts immersion days.

10.04.25

What an end to the term for Blwyddyn Pump! We have been able to combine much of our learning from across the term into a number of immersion days this week. Through these experiences, the children have shown independence, responsibility, initiative and excellent team working skills. We have constructed weather-proof nests, as part of a science investigation, with the challenge being to only use tweezers as simulated bird beaks - no hands allowed! The results were amazing and very robust, even after a wet and windy assault from Storm Bowen! Teams also constructed excellent wooden framed bird feeders to be used around our pond area, using the hacksaw and joining skills that they developed in the Autumn term. We have also taken on a kite design challenge, with the goal of discovering which features of the sled-kite structure have the biggest impact on the amount of lift impacting upon the kite. Finally, we spent time reflecting on our personal responses to music, creating our own pieces of artwork and composing our own musical pieces in response to 'Night on a bare mountain' by Modest Mussorgsky. 

01.05.25

This week, Blwyddyn Pump have made an outstanding start to the Summer Term. I have been impressed by the way in which the children have engaged with mature, thoughtful and critical discussions around equality, equity and race as we launched our ‘Undefeated’ theme with an immersion day on Monday. It is encouraging to work with such as positive group of young people, who genuinely believe in respecting others and making positive change, as they will be our future leaders and active citizens. Through our humanities we have also had amazing discussions about the origins of our human species and the common African ancestors we all share, leading to the children independently querying why ‘people keep fighting each other and being mean to each other when we are really one big family’. At the same time, the children were also able to respectfully discuss how different people might have different views about the origins of our species, depending on their belief or faith; in particular, we discussed how a scientist who has a religious faith might make sense of the world in relation to their scientific knowledge and religious creation stories. A really profound first week! We have also now officially launched our Grow £5 social action challenge, with the children devising their own entrepreneurial efforts to (hopefully!) turn a profit which will then be donated to a charitable cause. To round the week off, we also spent some quality time in the outdoors planting up different areas of the school grounds with sunflower seeds as part of a long term science investigation.