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Headteacher
Chris Coyle-Chislett

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

Telephone Number
01736 753472

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 foundation of deep-rooted learning. Through our rich and relevant curriculum, we nurture community-minded, forward-facing international citizens of the future.”
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Year 3

Computing Speed Challenge: Musical Robots!

This week Class 8 had an unexpected Computing Speed Challenge with the Lego WeDo 2.0 robots.  Their task was to design, build and then code a moving robot which makes noises using just the Lego bricks.  No sound effects allowed!

To make this even harder, the children only had 45 minutes from start to finish, including tidying up time.  The race was on and the children were eager to make the noisiest robot they could.

Here we have Oskar and Henry showing off their robot:

 

And here are Finley and Lucy with their design:

 

Finally, here is the robot that Brodie and Patrick built:

Huge Medal Haul For Our Super Swimmers

Over the last couple of weeks our swim teams have been competing in the Penwith Swimming Gala’s at both Year 3 & 4 and Year 5 & 6. As always, it was a pleasure to travel with these children to represent the school alongside 18 others from the area. All children took part in their individual events including, front crawl, back stroke, breaststroke and butterfly (Yr 5 & 6), as well as the relay events. Many of our children placed 1st or 2nd in their heat and qualified for the finals.

Penpol School were very well represented in the finals, present in 23 of the 36 finals collecting many medals in the process.

Year 3 & 4 results

Both Joe and Ronnie picked up Bronze medals for the boys in the front and backstroke with Amber collecting Bronze in the Yr4 girls front crawl.

Out of the 18 teams present our Year 3 girls and Year 4 boys both finished 3rd in the team competition.

Year 5 & 6 results

I returned from the year 5 & 6 gala with a pockets bursting with Penpol winning 14 medals.

Miranda and Zara both won silver medals for their front crawl and backstroke whilst Freya won bronze in the breaststroke. Emma was not to be left out either following up her 4th place in the butterfly with her part in a silver medal relay performance bringing the year 5 girls total to 7.

The year 6’s collected 3 individual bronze’s  through Jude, Finn and Eva before the Year 6 boys collected a bronze medal each for the relay.

Overall our Year 6 boys came third for their age group and the Year 5 girls came second and qualifying for the Cornwall School Games in June.

The results of the combined competition proved how success the gala had been for Penpol School as we came in 3rd behind the very competitive teams from St Ives and St Uny. However, 3rd placed out of 18 teams is an outstanding achievement.

 

Well done everyone, and good luck to the Year 5 Girls team at the school games!

 

Penpol Languages Survey- We Value Your Feedback

With the final term at Penpol School almost upon us, it’s the perfect time to reflect and evaluate on the year so far.

All students here at Penpol have one hour a week of French, as well as the opportunity of attending after school language club on Thursdays. Year 6 are currently involved in an email exchange with Octave Cazauvieilh, a primary school situated on the outskirts of Bordeaux in the South-West of France. We also celebrate students achievement in languages by awarding a Star of the Week badge in both Infants and Juniors.

As a way of evaluating languages at Penpol, please would you be so helpful and spare a moment to complete this short questionnaire below.

Click Here

Your opinion is very valuable and you can be assured that your completed questionnaire will be totally anonymous.

Many thanks,

Mr Emery (Penpol Languages Co-ordinator)

Class 7 are Internet Strong

This week we’ve been looking at how to be Internet Strong in our E-Safety lessons.  The key idea here is that our passwords need to be as strong as possible to protect our accounts and keep our things safe.  We’ve talked with each class about some top tips for making strong passwords and have explored a website called DinoPass which is a fantastic and free way to create some super-strong passwords!

Here are some of the tips we’ve learnt this week:

Passwords should be strong so that hackers can’t get into our things.  You could put an exclamation mark in your password to make it even safer! – Samuel

You should put capital letters and symbols into your password so that nobody can guess them.  It’ll take them ages to work it out! – Aimee

You should never tell anyone your password, apart from an adult you trust who can keep it safe for you in case you forget it – Kiki

They should be quite long, maybe with two random words put together.  It’s really important that you can remember your password! – Tilly

Of course we also got to explore a new island on Interland too, this time is was the Tower of Treasure where the children had to collect letters to build the strongest password they could.

 

Aboriginal Art

For our topic of Weather Around The World, Class 8 have visited Australia. We found out about the climate there and studied some of the Aboriginal culture: Dream stories and artwork. Inspired by some of the pieces that we had studied, the children set about designing and drafting their own animal based picture in the aboriginal style.

I loved looking at all the different pieces of aboriginal art. I especially liked finding Australian animals. – Harry

We then painstakingly completed our final pieces with acrylic on paper, dot by dot by dot!  The animal designs were made first using paint on black paper. We then used white paper to make our backgrounds. We had to choose colours that complemented our animal designs so they stood out. To create our dots, we used cotton wool buds liberally loaded with paint and carefully applied onto the paper.

I really enjoyed making the background – Tess

Our finished products will be on display in our classroom.

 

 

Merci ma famille!

Class 8 have been enjoying sing-a-longs in French this term to help them learn key vocabulary on the topic of family.

So far, Class 8 can already say who is in their family, including pets, size of the family member and colour of their pet. Mr Emery has been really impressed with their enthusiasm during lessons, which is shown in their singing, classwork and homework.

The song for this week is a song which shows appreciation for the family (merci pour ma famille), as well as friends (mes amis). Each student drew and labelled each of their members of the family, which they then each held up for the song.

If you’d like to hear a little snippet of one of class 8’s song, take a look at the video below.

I am really enjoying our French lessons, especially the songs and games we do in class.  Alex, Class 8

 

I love practising a new language!  I also go to language club every Thursday after school to learn an extra language.  Corran, Class 8

Next up for Year 3 will be the celebration of “Pâques”, which is the name for Easter in France.

 

Class 8 are Internet Alert

As part of our five week Be Internet Legends program, the children have been learning about how to protect their personal information online by being on the look out for phishing attacks and spam in a module called Be Internet Alert.  Using the excellent resources from Google, we’ve discussed how to check if a website is safe, how to spot suspicious messages and how to ensure we’re as safe as possible when we use the internet.

“You shouldn’t send stuff that’s important to people you don’t know.  If you aren’t sure you could ask your friends and family if they know that person and if they don’t you don’t send them anything.  Always be careful!” – Brodie

As well as learning all about this, we’ve played the Reality River game on Interland to really help the children cement their new found knowledge!

“I really liked playing on Reality River because it was cool and I learnt about how to be safer online.” – Mason

“I learnt that if a website has a green padlock symbol then it’s usually safe to put your password in.” – Freddie

“I’ve leant that you have to look closely at details in messages that you are sent to see if it’s a scam or not.” – Fynn

 

Announcing Music in the Marquee 2018

The last three years have seen sell out performances at our annual Music In The Marquee concerts from Bradley Johnson, Little Chix and last years Yellow. I’m delighted to say that this summer we will be hosting our fourth concert in the Marquee, featuring a somewhat familiar face…

Each year we ask the children which music they are enjoying and what sort of act they’d like to see play in our marquee at the end of the Summer term. This year the overwhelming majority of children told us they’d like to hear Ed Sheeran, with some of the older children asking in particular if Bradley Johnson could make a comeback. I am delighted to say that when I spoke to Bradley he was thrilled that we wanted him back to perform again.

So, for the second time, I’d love to introduce you to Bradley Johnson! Bradley is a singer/songwriter from Liverpool who first came to national attention as a finalist on the X Factor back in 2011 when he amazed judges with his version of Ed Sheeran’s The A Team. Since his television debut he’s been working on his own material and has been crafting his skills to become the UK’s finest Ed Sheeran tribute act. He made his first trip down to Cornwall for a sell-out show in our Marquee back in 2015 and can’t wait to come back again later this year. Bradley says: “I loved playing at your school last time, I still remember it as one of my favourite gigs. I can’t wait to be back again this year, with even more tunes for you all to enjoy!”

Bradley will be playing two sets of live music on the night, the first being a hit-filled Ed Sheeran tribute set including tunes both new and old including ‘Shape of You’, ‘Bloodstream’, ‘Thinking Out Loud’ and ‘Perfect’, followed by a later set which will also include other popular pop and rock covers as well as a selection of his own material. As always with Music in the Marquee his two sets will be accompanied by local support acts to round off the whole evenings entertainment.

Just like in previous years the event will raise money for the Penpol Friends Association and will also feature a fully licensed bar, BBQ, soft drinks, and food for everyone to enjoy. I hope you’ll agree that Music in the Marquee 2018 is already shaping up to be a phenomenal night of entertainment.

We are opening this event to the whole community, but want to give our Penpol parents the first chance to get tickets.  For this reason we’re offering you a special pre-sale of tickets, starting TODAY! Tickets are priced at £8 for adults and £5 for children.  Please note that all children must be accompanied by an adult.

Please return this slip and money to the office as soon as you can to secure your tickets. Music in the Marquee has been a sell out for the past three years and tickets will be on a first come first served basis.

Relive last years Music in the Marquee:

Sphero Rolls into Penpol School

One of the reasons we visit the BETT Show in London each January is to try and find exciting and innovative ideas to bring back into the classroom at Penpol.  This year we’ve returned with a dozen brand new Sphero SPRK+ Robots for the children to get to grips with.

These small plastic robots are pretty clever, despite their simple appearance.  Each robot can move at up to two meters a second, controlled remotely via iPad and can run complex sequences of code written by the children.

To get to grips with these new resources the children in Key Stage 2 have been spending time learning how to connect to the devices, how to steer and drive them and of course, having a little bit of fun along the way.  It’s pretty exciting to have a Computing lesson without being sat in front of a computer!

“It’s a great thing to have races with, if you watch the video we did in the hall it was educational to learn how to code but also fun to race them.” – Phoenix, Class 13

“They’re very fun to play with and they’re great to have races with.” – Jake, Class 13

“I like the Spheros’ because they’re fun and great to learn with and I can’t wait to tell my mum that we had a really fun day in Computing with Mr Woolcock!” – Jowan, Class 13

 

I think it’s safe to say we’re looking forward to writing lots of interesting programs for the Sphero in the future.

“The Spheros’ are really fun and educational at the same time, I’d recommend them to anyone!” – Joe, Class 13