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Headteacher
Chris Coyle-Chislett

Email the Office
secretary@penpol.cornwall.sch.uk

Telephone Number
01736 753472

Follow us on Twitter
@PenpolSchool

Our Address
2 St George’s Road, Hayle,
Cornwall, TR27 4AH

“Penpol pupils are curious, creative and courageous learners. Our school community believes in authenticity as the foundations of deep-rooted learning. Through our rich and relevant curriculum, we nurture community-minded, forward-facing international citizens of the future.”

Healthy Choices on the Menu at Penol

Earlier this week, we were visited by educators from the Council’s Healthy Cornwall team who worked with all of ur KS2 pupils . The idea for this session was the empower our children to make their own healthy choices when choosing what to fuel their bodies with. The Healthy Snack Family Challenge is attached below.

The session included 3 different activities: the tasting of different healthy snacks including, beetroot, dried apricot, sugar snap peas and humus; what a balanced diet looks like and how it contains lots of different food groups in moderation; and finally, shattering the myth that healthy food have to be expensive. The children all tasted different foods, with many doing so for the first time.

The children learnt all about the ‘Eatwell Healthy Plate’ and discussed how different food groups serve different purposes and how each are individually important to the growth, development and maintaining of a healthy body and mind.Our Year 5 and 6 pupils also took a more in-depth look at the calorie content of different foods, both healthy and unhealthy and took a closer look at the monetary cost vs nutritional output of each food.

They were particularly shocked at the sugar content of some their favourite drinks! With one even commenting “that’s why were encouraged to drink water!”

All children in KS2 then were gifted a free water bottle to celebrate their participation in which  was some  information to share with parents and a healthy snack challenge, all of which is included below. It has been wonderful to see so may children making healthy choices with their snacks continuing to celebrate the learning they have undertaken in science, PE and PSHE around health and wellbeing.

 

Proud to be Penpol

Many children grow up wondering where they fit in the world. This is especially the case for those subjected to misunderstanding or prejudice because of who they are. During our Free To Be Me day, the children of Penpol did something amazing in celebrating the uniqueness in all of us. Every child has the right to grow up feeling proud of who they are and who their family is and our pupils demonstrated this today by creating a humungous rainbow on the school field, sharing songs, flying flags about themselves and enjoying some activities on the theme in class.

We are very grateful to be joined by Eliot and Eliot from Cornwall Pride who talked about the work they do in supporting everyone in Cornwall to be proud of who they are. What an incredible day – well done and thank you to all involved! 

Being Kind

The reception classes were lucky to be invited into assembly to see an amazing speaker called Bereford Lee with the local Tri Service Safety Officer Adrian Hart.

Beresford has formed a group called Rice and Peas which is a community project in Cornwall which promotes acceptance, inclusion and cultural diversity throughout the county.

The children were captivated as Beresford talked about the importance of being kind to each other regardless of where you come from, your nationality or the colour of your skin.

It doesn’t matter who has different coloured skin, you should be kind to people of different skin – Jasper

Beresford explained that sometimes some people have been unkind because of the colour of their skin, we know this is wrong.

He also told the children that we need to be friendly to all and show respect for one another which fitted in beautifully with our Penpol School Values of Friendship and Respect.

It’s fine if you have black or white skin you have to be kind to everyone – Frida

Adrian was on hand to tell the children all about the law and what could happen if people are unkind to each other.

 

Beresford explained how being unkind to each other can not only hurt the other people, but can hurt yourself too therefore you have to be kind to everyone, including yourself.

He spoke about kindness, you have to help people get up and not push them over. It doesn’t matter about other peoples skin you still have to be nice – Maia

 

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got black or white skin or any colour even rainbow, you have to be kind to everyone – Freya

The children really loved listening to both speakers and commented on how they were all going to be kind to everyone when they left the assembly.

Thank you so much for the interesting and inspiring assembly. Please come and visit us again very soon.

An Inspiring Afternoon for Pupils at our Careers Fair

On Wednesday the 6th of April, Penpol held its second careers fair after the first, which was held back in 2019. 
 
This year, over 30 different job sectors came into school to talk about their job and potentially inspire the next generation. There were a huge range of jobs on show, from a doctor, a vet, the police and fire service, to potters, carpenters, jewellers and florists, with even the horticultural department at The Eden Project making an appearance. 
 
There was a real buzz amongst the students and exhibitors alike and, even if it only inspired one child for a potential future career, that is a job well done. Research shows that young people who have a possible understanding of what they may want to do in the future are far less likely to fall out of education and not have a job in the future. There is a saying that ‘You cannot be what you cannot see’ and this event, with Penpol being the only primary school in the South-West to hold such a thing, will hopefully have opened a few eyes to future prospects. 

A huge thank you to those who gave up their time to talk about their careers and if you might be interested in joining next year, please do get in touch with our Careers Lead, Mr Pollard by emailing him at mpollard@penpol.cornwall.sch.uk 

Penpol Pupils extend Be Internet Legends with their own ideas

This half term we’ve been revisiting our learning on E-Safety and reminding ourselves how to stay safe online using the five sections of the Google Be Internet Legends scheme.  We’ve dived into each of these five areas, had some fascinating and honest conversations and we’ve managed to ensure we all know how to stay safe when using the internet.

But towards the end of the sessions lots of children started asking about other elements of Online Safety – areas which perhaps weren’t covered in the Google program.  This got us thinking…

“What would we add to Be Internet Legends if we were Google?”

We explored this question and quickly realised that we could enhance the Be Internet Legends program by adding even more valuable and important information of our own.  Each child made a plan of what they’d like to include along with an idea for the Inter-Naughty (baddie!) who would play against the character of Legend in the game.

Using Keynote and the shapes tool, the pupils then created their own Inter-Naughty characters using triangles and clever colour shading to try to mimic the unique style of the other characters.

With an idea and a fabulous character in hand, the children then set about using a Keynote template to create their own poster, designed to fit into the current set of five made by Google.  They considered colours, key words, messages and style and ended up creating these absolutely stunning posters which wouldn’t look out of place next to the real things.

It’s been a really enjoyable project learning about being safe online this half term, made even more so by the children taking their imagination and creativity to new heights by making their own posters and lessons for others.  Many even designed the level of the Interland game along with sketches of the island itself.

It’s been great to see so many brilliant ideas and terrifying Inter-Naughty characters and these new posters will remain on display in the Mac Suite for the whole school to see.

What Makes a Super Strong Password?

For our third week of E-Safety lessons this year we’ve been looking at what makes a strong and secure password.  Each class in Key Stage 2 has had discussions about what passwords are, why they are important and how they can protect our digital stuff.

It's very important to make sure passwords are strong, otherwise anybody can get into our accounts.

We’ve explored a great website called Dinopass which helps us find secure passwords, but they aren’t always the easiest to remember. 

 Instead, we’ve taken the formula that Dinopass uses to create strong passwords and have used it ourselves by breaking it down into a four step guide.

Below are some of the year sixes explaining how the four-step process works. (Click on an image to view it full size)

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

frog

flyingfrog

flyingfrog43

flyingFr0g43

How can we Recognise Fake News?

‘Fake news’ is a huge topic at the moment and believable but untrue content online has become more and more commonplace.  Luckily, this week in our E-Safety lessons we are learning all about being Internet Alert, which means recognising what is real and what is fake, as well as being able to develop strategies to keep ourselves safe from false and misleading information.

To start our sessions the children were issued a research task, to learn as much information as they possibly could about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.  If you haven’t heard of this rare animal then I wouldn’t be surprised, especially as it’s completely made up.  In a sneaky twist, the children were actually researching from a fake website, trying to learn how some octopuses can live in trees when the children all know that they actually live in the sea.

This proved an excellent introduction to the fact that, sadly, not everything you read online is true.  This particular website was made many years ago as a way of teaching children this very lesson.

The children then explored the concept of mis-information and fake news further, discussing how photographs and even videos can be misleading and not always what they appear to be.  We discussed how this related to the idea of phishing too, which we learnt all about in our E-Safety lessons last year.

"I thought the tree octopus was very convincing because all of the facts sounded pretty real and the picture looked very convincing. It showed me that not everything that looks convincing is actually real."

The children have once again shown themselves to be very aware of how to stay safe online and also able to hold sensible and mature conversations with their peers about how they can help each other to protect themselves online.

"I learnt that not everything that we see online is real. And that we should always watch out for scams and fakes."

We finished the sessions this week with a game of Reality River on Interland as a way to recap our learning and to ensure we are all making the right choices when it comes to understanding what is real and what is fake.

What is our Online Persona?

We are spending this half term focusing on the internet and how we can keep ourselves safe whilst online.  Over the next six weeks we’ll be looking at online safety from a variety of different aspects, starting with looking at the information we choose to share online.

We’re basing our work on the Be Internet Legends project from Google, which builds on the lessons the children had last year.

To begin with we are looking at our ‘Online Persona’.  This is how you appear online to other people, based on the information we have chosen to share.  We’ve talked about the risks of over sharing our personal data and also the way other people might see what we’ve shared and draw conclusions about us.

This learning has been very thought provoking for the children and has seen us address lots of really interesting topics in whole-class discussions.  A particularly interesting activity has been to ‘create a persona’ for a made up person, by giving them loads of personal information and then choosing what should and shouldn’t be shared online with the world.

Below are several of the characters that have been created this week, along with lots and lots of personal information.  This information could range from general facts like their favourite colour right down to specific details like their date of birth and their phone password.

The children have then used the highlighter tool to mark green any information which they would feel safe sharing online with the world, or red for any information which they think should stay private.  We talked about how information can be changed from red to green later on, but can never be changed back from green to red as when it exists on the internet, it can never really be deleted.

“You should never share really personal information online, even with just your friends.  Always tell a responsible adult at home if somebody is asking for personal information that you don’t want to share.” – Zara

“I have learnt that sometimes when you post something other people can get sad or upset if I’m not careful.  So in the future if there is a photo I want to share I will go to the people in it and make sure they are all right with me sharing it.” – Ethan

“I have learnt about keeping myself safe on the internet and learnt to always tell your parents or teachers or family about it if something silly comes up on Youtube.” – Poppy