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• Friday 9 May 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 5 Week 3 What a fantastic way to celebrate VE day with our own street party on Friday! Cuckoos loved dressing up in red, white and blue and learning the Lindy Hop to dance with parents. The rest of the week we were busy making our own bluebell prints inspired by Andy Warhol’s technique and enjoyed completing our maths out in the sunshine.
• Thursday 8 May 2025 Potions Club (Terms 5 and 6) - Oobleck and silky playdough Over the last two weeks at potions club, we have made oobleck and silky playdough! We loved that the oobleck could be both solid and liquid and were amazed that the silky playdough could be created with just two ingredients - cornflour and hair conditioner!
• Thursday 8 May 2025 Forest School - Term 5 (Kingfishers) As always, we had the best day at forest school! We built dens, climbed trees, made rafts and made hot chocolate using kelly kettles - just look at how much fun we had!
• Tuesday 6 May 2025 Kingfishers - Trip to the Beaney We had a fantastic trip to The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge! We embalmed a classmate and removed their organs to prepare them for the afterlife. We also mummified an animal (and saw a mummified cat), handled and observed real artefacts and replicas, and made our own cartouches on papyrus paper!
• Friday 2 May 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 5 Week 2 This week, Cuckoos have loved learning about woolly mammoths as part of their instruction writing unit and with the weather warming up, enjoyed exploring capacity with water outside in the tuff trays. The highlight of the week was definitely the mini marathon though, which they all had so much fun partaking in and absolutely smashed it in the heat! Towards the end of the week, we were really treated by the morris dancers and found joining in with the traditional dancing so fun.
• Friday 2 May 2025 Forest School - Term 5 May Day
• Tuesday 29 April 2025 Outdoor Learning The sun was out which made it perfect for our Outdoor Learning Day. Some of the subjects we did outside were PSHE, Maths, DT and RE.
• Friday 25 April 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 5 Week 1 There was no better way to start the Summer Term than having Forest School and a trip to Hole Park to visit the bluebells. We loved smelling all of the different flowers and of course, admiring the beautiful bluebells, which we will be using to inspire our Andy Warhol prints in art... watch this space! We would like to say an huge thank you to the Barham family (including Petra the dog!) for welcoming us to into their home and Thomas' Dad and Iona's Mum for making the trip possible. When we returned to school, we loved creating watercolour paintings of the bluebells and then going on a dinosaur hunt at Forest school.
• Friday 25 April 2025 Toilet paper timelines In history we used toilet paper to help us create timelines. Each sheet represented 100 years and allowed us to visualise the length of time the Ancient Egyptian period spanned for.
• Friday 25 April 2025 Ann Swan workshop with Anna Saunders We used chalk to create beautiful studies of fruit and vegetables inspired by the artist Ann Swan.
• Friday 25 April 2025 Visit to Woodside Farm
• Wednesday 16 April 2025 Year 3 - Federation Day We had a fantastic day at Goudhust & Kilndown Church of England Primary School getting to know Leopard Class!
• Thursday 10 April 2025 Federation Day It was lovely to spend the day at Goudhurst and Kilndown Church of England Primary School with Hippo Class.
• Thursday 3 April 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 6 Federation Day Fun! We had a fantastic end to our Spring Term by celebrating our new relationship with our friends in Elephant Class. We enjoyed finding out and sharing facts about ourselves, engaging in outdoor games, having fishy Friday with everyone and playing outside on their beautiful and very busy playground - the chickens and rock wall were a definite highlight! Back at Benenden, we also enjoyed taking a walk aroudn the village this week using a map with our own symbols and following a route using directional language.
• Thursday 3 April 2025 Federation Day 3rd April 2025
• Tuesday 1 April 2025 Science Fair! On Tuesday 18th March, over 50 children from across both our schools took place in the inaugural 10:10 Federation Science Extravaganza! We had over 150 visitors to see exhibitions ranging from exploding volcanoes to strawberry DNA extraction! What was so impressive was the huge amount of work that had gone in to each and every single display, with the children able to explain the science behind their investigation too. The judges had an extremely difficult time - thank you so much to them for donating their time and energy. The exhibition really did embody all of our school values, especially as there were children joining in from every class from YR to Y6. Thank you to all of those children who took part, their parents and carers for supporting them and coming into school for the afternoon and to everyone who helped with the organisation, especially Mr Emmett. What a fantastic celebration of British Science Week at our wonderful federation!
• Monday 31 March 2025 Springtime in the Forest Fun in the sun
• Sunday 30 March 2025 Afternoon Tea March 2025
• Sunday 30 March 2025 Forest School Term 4
• Sunday 30 March 2025 Trip to Bodiam Castle
• Friday 28 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 5 What a fantastic week in Cuckoos. We have spent a lot of our week building up to making our own smoothies, designed using the prefernces set by our parents. We wrote about smoothie recipes, prepared fruit and finally got to share with our parents. In Maths, we have loved getting outside to measure using rulers and had a lovely afternoon sharing cream tea and creating Easter Crafts with parents on Friday.
• Thursday 27 March 2025 Trip to The Amelia Kingfishers had a wonderful time at The Amelia learning about several inspiration people from Tunbridge Wells. They learnt about Lord North, Beau Nash, Decimus Burton, David Salomons, Amelia Scott, Olive Walton and Pauline Gower. They also learnt about how you can be inspired by anything... even a button! They finished their workshop by thinking about who they thought was the most inspirational, here are some of their ideas:
• Sunday 23 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 4 This week in Cuckoos, we enjoyed making clay fish in Art and reviewing smoothies as part of our research in DT. We also enjoyed playing with the Maths sticky dart board and bowling pins to support us in our understanding of numbers to 50, specifically counting in tens and counting one more, one less. In English, we wrote the opening and build up of our adapted versions of the book, ‘Black Dog’.
• Friday 21 March 2025 Writing our sounds
• Friday 21 March 2025 Exploring number bonds to 10 - Ten frames Barn Owls have been working really hard to find out all about number bonds to 10. We even wrote number sentence for the first time - GREAT job Barn Owls.
• Friday 21 March 2025 Banquet Barn Owls & Woodpeckers Barn Owls wrote invites to their Y6 Buddies. We then had an banquet all together.
• Friday 21 March 2025 Building and Reading sentences Barn Owls have been busy building sentences with our new sounds.
• Sunday 16 March 2025 Cuckoo Class Term 4 Week 3 Another busy week in Cuckoos. We loved preparing fruit by grating, cutting and peeling in DT. We used different techniques to shape clay in Art and enjoyed exploring our numbers to 50 through the tuff tray activities in the sunshine.
• Wednesday 12 March 2025 Land use in our local area Land use around our school
• Sunday 9 March 2025 Firecrest World Book Day and Poetry slam

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