School clubs and extra-curricular activities

Extra - Curricular activities

 
During the school year a wide range of clubs and activities is offered, and full use is made of educational visits and visitors. These include residential visits for the two classes of older children to venues such as Dartmoor, Exmoor and London.

A wide range of music tuition is provided, including singing, guitar, drumming, piano, violin, clarinet, saxophone, flute and recorder.

High Five's
Football Club	Maypole Dancing
Gardening Club	Puppet Making

Gardening Club

Following an extensive tidy-up of the school grounds and the construction of the new raised vegetable beds in 2008, gardening club has gone from strength to strength.  Last year parents and grandparents of the Key Stage 1 children participating in the club became involved via weekly handouts given to the children.  This encouraged them to undertake a wide range of fun activities including counting the number of different birds which fed from their homemade suet bird cakes, colouring in pictures of tadpoles and frogs, cooking using their own produce and going on bug hunts.

The positioning of the new vegetable beds alongside the school path attracted curiosity from passing children, parents and visitors to the school, particularly when crops of strawberries, sweetcorn, giant pumpkins and some very large onions materialised. The children were very proud of their harvest and as they had been involved with every stage of growing, they were keen to taste the variety of fruits and vegetables produced, even if they didn’t think they would like them!

We try to garden as organically as possible in the school grounds by making scarecrows and insect traps to discourage pests and encouraging beneficial wildlife by making bug boxes and sowing flowers to attach pollinators.

Gardening club runs during the Summer term and the first half of the Autumn term and will be organised this year by Mrs Lockhart and Caroline Budd.

New this year

This year alongside crops grown for the children to harvest and take home we will also sow, grow and harvest two or three crops in large enough volumes to enable us to supply the school kitchen with some produce to include in school dinner meals.  We will grow a ‘pasta sauce’ crop, a herb crop and look more closely at companion planting and intercropping learning about the myth of the Three Sisters and planting them in the vegetable garden.  To further encourage beneficial wildlife into the garden areas, we will add a stumpery to the pond area, a variety of insect shelters and sow and plant additional plants to attract butterflies and other nectar feeding insects all with as many recycled materials as possible.