• Contact Us

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.”

3D Decorations by Key Stage 2

This term every child in Key Stage 2 has made their own 3D printed winter decoration.

To explain how they did it, we’ve created a short video for you to enjoy.

 

It’s been such a fun process helping each child design and make their decorations and Paul and I have really enjoyed seeing their designs come to life.   It’s taken nearly five weeks to print them all and while we were waiting we’ve compiled some statistics from the project. – Mr Woolcock.

If you’re interested, you can read lots more about the project here:

And here they are, all 200 decorations!

School Council Set To Work

As we enter the second half term of the academic year, the school council have been elected and met for the first time. During this first meeting the children discussed the expectations of a school councillor as well as assigning themselves roles.

Some slight changes to the structure this year mean we welcome fourteen members to the committee including two children representing the infants in Key Stage 1. To aid the effectiveness of the overall council, we have also doubled the representatives from Year 5 and 6, as their experience of school life is greatly valued.

First on the agenda for this academic year was the expectations and vision for this elected group of councillors. After much discussion the children settled on the below vision statement.

Our vision is, for all children at Penpol School to be able to have a voice and contribute towards the continuous improvement of our school community.

The aim of the school council is to involve ALL students in helping to create and implement school policies and procedures that will benefit everyone in the school community. This will address the following areas:

  • To make changes in our school and school community.
  • To give pupils the opportunity to let adults know their feelings and opinions about things that affect them.
  • Pupils should also be able to have a say in decisions and to play an active role in making their school a better place for all.
  •  Serve as the voice for the pupils of Penpol within the school and within the community.

We as a school council will do this by:

  • Talking to our classmates to gain ideas and suggestions.
  • Making sure that everyone’s views and opinions are valued.
  • Having regular meetings to share our ideas.

As part of the School Council all members have been elected into particular roles. This level of responsibility has been trusted to the council members after they were voted in by their peers, as people who are trustworthy, approachable, fair and honest to name but a few of the attributes required.

The following positions have been filled.

  • Chairperson- Will (Class 14)
  • Vice-Chair- Ines (Class 14)
  • Secretary- Juliette (Class 13)
  • Vice-Secretary- Miranda (Class 12)
  • Treasurer- Jude (Class 13)
  • Alerting team- Grace (Class 10), Rocky (Class 9), Thomas (Class 8) & Tess (Class 7)
  • Voting members (All KS2)
  • Committee members (All)
  • News Officers- Lily and Ethan (Both Class 11)
  • Teacher Support (Non-voting members) Mr Stanlake & Miss Simpson

 

What’s that noise coming from the Mac Suite?

Since the beginning of November I’ve been asked the same question time and time again: “What’s that noise coming from the Mac Suite, Mr Woolcock?”

It’s a very valid question as there has indeed been a pretty irritating noise coming from the Mac Suite for the last few weeks.  The machine making the annoying noise isn’t finished yet though, in fact it’s likely to be making that same, annoying noise for a few more weeks yet.

So what is it doing??

Well, the machine is our Makerbot 3D Printer and it’s currently undertaking the biggest print-run of its life – printing out 200 unique and individual winter decorations which have been designed by the children in Key Stage 2.

 

Each child in the Juniors has been using an online program called Tinkercad to imagine, design and construct their own decoration, based on any theme they wish.

To get their creative juices flowing I showed each child how they could make a unique and beautiful Snowflake design, which a lot of children actually ended up choosing as their final decoration.  However, each child could also design their own decoration with their own choice of colours too.

Since then, myself and Paul have been busy making sure that all 200 decorations get printed.  It might seem like a simple task, but in reality it’s far from it!  Each 3D model takes around 50 minutes to print and as they all use two colours we also have to stop the printer to change the coloured plastic mid-way through each print.  Sometimes it’s a little easier, for example when five children have all chosen a red base and a white top layer, as all five can be printed at once during a morning.  But for the most part it’s been a case of setting countless alarms, reminding teachers to pause the printers, scrambling under the table to find the next colour plastic and hoping that the 3D printer doesn’t jam after 4 hours of printing (thus ruining the prints!).


Plenty of late nights and early mornings have been spent coming back into the Mac Suite to set more prints off in the dark, but we’re finally getting towards the end.  We’ve now printed over 120 decorations and they are looking INCREDIBLE.

When all the decorations are printed we’ll be giving the children a chance to bring in a small donation of 50p to cover the cost of the plastic filament in return for taking their decoration home to keep forever.  The children are already excited about this!

As to what the decorations actually look like?  Well, you’ll just have to wait until December to find out.  It’d ruin the surprise to share all the photos of them now, but as soon as we’ve got all 200 ready to go we’ll update the Penpol Times so you can see how great they look!

In the meantime, back to the printer for me!

– Mr Woolcock

Sandwich fun

Class 7 have been learning how to create a clear set of instructions using the features they have been learning about in English. They learnt that in order to have a good set of instructions you need to include the following:

  • Headings
  • Sub-headings
  • Method
  • Bullet points
  • Numbers
  • Pictures

We began by working together as a whole class and and created a set of instructions on ‘How to Make a Cup of Tea’. This helped us learn the best way to set out our instructions.

After that, the children applied what they had learnt and created instructions on ‘How to Make a Jam and Honey Sandwich’. The children used the ingredients needed to make their own sandwich.

Wow! I loved making my jam sandwich. – Luke

Everyone really enjoyed it. Needless to say, lots of great sets of instructions were completed in their literacy books.

 

 

Jacques a dit…on va dehors!

This week, students have been enjoying the dry weather by learning French outside. Classes 3, 4,  7 and 8 were involved in a series of activities and competitions which tested their understanding of instructions and knowledge of body parts in French, which is the current topic they are learning about with Mr Emery.

At the start of each lesson, students followed Mr Emery around the school via instructions in French, until reaching the playground area. Out in the fresh air, students began by doing a number of fun warm-up  activities in French, from star jumps to the Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes (tête, épaule, genou, pied) song. Following the warm-up activities, students then moved on to the more challenging competitions, such as “la souris contre le chat” (very similar to duck duck goose) and “Jacques a dit” (Simon says).

From class 3, Hazel held her nerve and won the Simon says competition, showing an excellent understanding of body parts in French.

It was really fun learning French outside.  I really like winning too! – Hazel – Class 3 – Year 1

Upon returning to the classroom, students were able to recap what they had learnt about body parts in French by drawing and labelling their own monsters.  With all classes having sung a French colour song with Michèle in the Harvest assembly, they were also keen to add plenty of colours to their monsters.

Alex, from Class 3, also enjoyed counting the number of heads in French on his monster, going all the way up to “quinze”, (15, pronounced ‘cans’).

When asked at the end of the session what was their favourite part of the lesson, the overriding response was “learning French outside!”

I loved having lots of space outside to play games in French! – Sienna – Class 4 – Year 1

Let’s hope for more sunshine next week!

 

 

Gramm…..azing work in Year 3 and 4!

After the teachers in Lower Key Stage Two participated in an inspiring training session, Year Three and Four have been focussing on grammar this week. Each class have been doing fun grammar games and activities.

In class eight, the children have been recapping word classes. The children needed to know what verbs, adverbs, adjectives, nouns and proper nouns are. Each group of children wrote down a word of a certain type and made human sentences, discussing and discovering what happens when words are moved about. We also learnt that if you start a sentence with an adverb, we call it a fronted adverbial.

In Year Four, we have been playing games and completing activities about conjunctions.  We have been finding out the differences between subordinating and co ordinating conjunctions and have applying this in our writing, placing conjunctions at different points in the sentences.

 

Year 3 Visit to The Royal Cornwall Museum and Truro Cathedral

Class 7 and 8 were lucky enough to Visit The Royal Cornwall Museum to take part in three Egyptian workshops, all of which proved to be informative and most enjoyable. This workshop has given the children a greater insight into the life of the Ancient Egyptians and has enabled them to use the Museum to discover more about their way of life. The children were able to experience first hand the awe of looking at a real Mummy as well as observing the amazing Egyptian artefacts on display in the museum.

The workshops were about The Weighing of the Heart Ceremony, part of The Journey into The Afterlife where children dressed up and performed some drama. Children became Gods and Godesses and weighed out the heart of the Isat-Naf-Takht (the museum’s resident Mummy) and decided whether he was fit for the afterlife.

Another workshop was discovering hidden clues in the sand in order to learn about Ancient Egyptian Artefacts. The children were able to touch and hold real artefacts which were up to five thousand years old! We also were treated to a tour of the gallery dedicated to much of the Ancient Worlds, particularly, the Egyptians, observing closely through careful sketching certain artefacts as well as The Mummified body of Isat-Naf-Takht,  an Ancient craftsman and priest.


Each class visited Truro Cathedral with an excellent informative workshop which enlightened the children all about some aspects of the Christian faithand some of the everyday occurrences of life in the Cathedral. All children were able to dress up aiding the understanding of the role of certain figures within the Christian community. Isabella said  “It was a great day day. I especially liked dressing up as the Bishop, it felt really special.”  A brilliant day for all!

 

Celebrating European Day of Languages at Penpol

Today marks the European Day of Languages, a day to celebrate the 6000+ languages spoken around the world.  To mark the occasion at Penpol we’ve arranged a special non-uniform day where the children came to school dressed in the colours of their favourite flag.

Even more excitingly, Mr Emery and Mr Woolcock have arranged an entire day of language-learning challenges in the Junior Mac Suite for the entire school to participate in.

Throughout the day each class has had a twenty minute session using a fantastic website called Linguascope, where the children can take on their challenge in any one of nine different languages.  While most children chose French, Spanish or Italian we did have lots who were really brave and decided to take on languages including Chinese, Russian and Arabic.

The challenge itself was a multiple choice quiz where the time for each question decreases as the rounds go by.  A score of 30 or more is considered exceptional, yet Penpol pupils were often reaching the high thirties with several children achieving a nearly impossible 38 points!

With perseverance, accuracy and linguistic knowledge a mighty 38 or 39 points is achievable.  It’s incredibly difficult, but today we’ve seen it happen several times! – Mr Emery

The highest score in each year group will win a special prize, with more details to be given to the children in their next assembly.

Reception: To be announced later this week!

Year 1: To be announced later this week!

Year 2: To be announced later this week!

Year 3: Freddie (38 points)

Year 4: Jake (39 points)

Year 5: Emma (40 points)

Year 6: Aidan (38 points)

I’m really happy that I’ve won, Morgan did really well too but I just managed to beat him in the end by one point!! – Connor, Year 2

 

 

 

 

Languages lift off at Penpol

Language lessons at Penpol primary school are already underway as we begin the new academic year.  All classes have already enjoyed their first French lesson this year, with both Mr Emery and Michelle.  Every student has already demonstrated lots of enthusiasm and eagerness to take part, which are key ingredients to having fun and gaining confidence in learning a language.

Reception students have already mastered the action “tire”(pull) and the different animals in French.  Classes 1 + 2 very much enjoyed dressing up and acting out the classic French children’s story, “le navet enorme”(the giant turnip).  Classes 3, 4, 5 + 6 are already enjoying being able to greet each other in French, with lots of students even making it part of their daily routine to greet Mr Emery in French outside the classroom.

 

Years 2 all the way to 5 have already taken part in singing “Alouette” ( the classic French song about a skylark), showing excellent knowledge of the body parts in French, with actions.

I loved learning about the giant turnip – Hunter – Class 2

Year 6 have the unique opportunity of putting all of the French they have used over the years to the ultimate test: corresponding with their very own French pen pal from a French primary school.  The small school, situated just outside of Paris, have already expressed their excitement about this exchange and are eager to learn more about our Year 6 students.  Watch this space for more news, as Penpol students learn more about French culture and way of life.

With language club now up and running every Thursday, students at Penpol also have the opportunity of learning another language, whether it is extra French practice, or learning numbers 1-10 in Mandarin.

Finally, Penpol school will be celebrating European Day of Languages on Tuesday 26th September, with all students competing in a whole school languages competition.  The competition will be run by Mr Emery, with the aid of Penpol’s ICT teacher, Mr Woolcock.  The aim will be for students to show-off their foreign language skills, ranging from French to Mandarin.  The winners for each Year group will be rewarded with a prize in an assembly to conclude the action-packed day.

Watch this space for more news from languages over the next few weeks!

Penpol’s Got Talent 2017

Last Thursday there was great excitement in the school marquee as the children awaited the arrival of our three very special judges for this years ‘Penpol’s Got Talent. This year the auditions were amazing with children from reception through to year 6 demonstrating that they had the ability and confidence to dance, sing and play a musical instrument in front of a live audience.

Eventually, following four days of auditions, fourteen acts went through to the final. Judging the acts was a very difficult challenge for the three judges but eventually a decision was made.

This year’s winner was Leah who sang so beautifully that it gave the compere, Mrs Ruffell, goose bumps and left the three judges with tears in their eyes.

 

I liked all the singing and dancing, it was beautiful. – Isabella

 

I enjoyed watching all of the acts, especially my sisters singing group. – Patrick

 

I really enjoyed watching and listening to the drummer. He even had light up drum sticks. – Jonash