On a grey, wet Monday, it was cheering to welcome Mr William Howell-Harte down to the Junior School to launch our annual Book Week. Mr Howell-Harte teaches English in the Senior School and is a talented speaker. His overall theme was aimed specifically at the children and how they are going to be such an important part of ensuring that tomorrow’s world will be a better one. His final slide showed Mahatma Gandhi’s quote: ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’ We could not have asked for a more fitting start to our week.
Monday was nominated as ‘book in a day’ and the children enjoyed being read to, at the start of each lesson, from a variety of short books which included: The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Leonardo Beautiful Dreamer, Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?, Leonardo and the Flying Boy and Dogs in Space.
On Tuesday morning the school filed into the Hall for assembly, to the sound of David Bowie singing Life On Mars which lead seamlessly into a short video clip of NASA’s projected mission to Mars to set up a space station. We were then treated to a selection of children describing how their time machines work and how they made their robots.
The hall was a sea of blue for Wednesday’s assembly and the children looked fantastic in their water warrior costumes. Themes included: providing fresh drinking water for all the world’s population, preserving water, purifying sea water, saving seals and turtles, providing flushing toilets everywhere and experimenting with ways to recycle water
Paul Johnson ran two very successful workshops on Wednesday afternoon, showing the children in Years 5 and 6 how to make their own writing books. Paul is a well-known bookmaker, based in Manchester, who teaches his skills around the world. He brought samples of his very impressive pop up books made using his origami and simple cutting skills. Paul returned on Thursday morning to run similar workshops with Years 3 and 4 who also really enjoyed this project..
The Infants were treated to an author visit from Angela McAllister on Thursday. She read extracts from her delightful books and engaged the children in the storylines through questioning and description.
The week culminated in the House Spoken English competition where we were fortunate enough to have the actor, Pip Torrens adjudicate our poetry competition. The children’s own poems were based on aspects of ‘What will our world look like in the future?’ Some had a slant on transport, others natural resources. Some of the Years 5 and 6 children wrote quite stark thought-provoking verse whilst the younger ones took a more light hearted approach to their lives in the future. Our four houses provided some light relief with their renditions of humorous poetry. The overall winners of this year’s House Spoken English competition were Leopards! Congratulations to them and all the entrants who performed so brilliantly, the standard of poems that the children had written were amazing.
A huge thanks to all the parents and carers of the children in school. Without your tireless support and enthusiasm Book Week would not be as enjoyable and entertaining as it always is. The children are the future and they have fully embraced this throughout our very active Book Week.
Junior School Open Day
The next Alleyn's Junior School Open Event is from 1.30pm to 3pm on Wednesday 22 May 2024. There will be a Head's Talk at 1.40pm after which you will be offered a tour of the school with a pupil. There is no need to book a place at this Open Event - everyone is welcome.
Last updated on 20 05 24 at 09:12
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