Co-Curricular Offers
Educational Trips, Visits, Workshops and Life Skills
COPA is active in arranging offsite school trips based on the IB Transdisciplinary Theme of the term as well as to enhance National Curriculum links. We also arrange for visitors to the school in order to host debates, give pupils an opportunity to work with and handle real artefacts from historical periods (Romans, Great Fire of London, Saxons etc...) and take part in music workshops such as African Drumming.
Young Voices at the O2
Every year COPA are represented at the O2 Arena, where our choir takes part in the annual festival of choirs. The concert, which comprises the largest school choir in the world with over, provides an unrivalled musical opportunity for primary school children to perform all styles of music, including folk, pop, rock and classical.
Cooking at COPA
At COPA, each year group gets the opportunity to cook and taste recipes from around the world, linked to their IB learning as well as our Design Technology curriculum. Our International partner schools share recipes with us so that our children are able experience different ingredients in order to create and sample meals from overseas. Many of these, they might not ordinarily encounter. Where possible, we also take advantage of using the produce children have cultivated in the edible garden.
Outdoor Learning
At Cherry Orchard we have a brand new purpose build outdoor classroom in our Woodland Area, which is used as a base for both our outdoor learning - as well as other extra-curricular activities. It is surrounded by a woodland area with planters adopted by each class to develop our edible garden.
The area and Rotunda Building are also used by our Early Years as a base for Forest School and provides opportunities for children to plant, grow, sow and harvest their own fruit and vegetables. To complement and enhance the ‘healthy living’ style of the edible garden, we have several activity trlm trail stations around the area.
Children are encouraged to grow herbs, fruits and vegetables that can be used in the school kitchen in ‘taster sessions’, as well as our regular class cooking activities. We have plans for the immediate future, to introduce a healthy snack bar once a week during playtimes, using any surplus fruit or veg.
Golden Afternoon Activities
Each term children take part in an afternoon of activities across the school, such as making slime, science experiments, drama workshops, cooking and debates as well as other crafting and sporting activities.
These activities are used as incentives to support our behaviour management system and children sign up at the beginning of the term and work towards increasing their time at their chosen activity. This allows the children to mix with other teachers and adults in their year group, alongside their peers, making transition from year group to year group less daunting.
UK Parliament Week
Children across the school learnt about our UK parliament. The younger children learnt about democracy and voted for the books they would like to read. Children in Year 6 were lucky enough to have a visit from our local MP from Gareth Johnson. The children asked him some tricky questions including 'What are you doing to tackle racism?'
Some of the school council gave Gareth Johnson a tour of the school and he has agreed to write a supporting letter to help us improve our school field! Watch this space!