Funky Friday 

The JP Funky Friday Concrete Learning Day was born out of the want to make learning visible, more interactive, creative and interesting for our Junior Primary Children. Whilst we acknowledge the need for written work and more methodical tasks such as bonds and times tables. We certainly believe that a worksheet or workbook is not always the best way to learn these skills! Our dedicated and talented teachers were most definitely up for the challenge and creatively ensured much learning took place all without writing it onto a piece of paper! 

The Grade 1 children began Funky Friday Concrete Learning Day by experiencing a paperless spelling test on their whiteboards! They then looked at the difference between 2D and 3D shapes, taking note of the shapes that are all around us! They were each given toothpicks, skewers and playdough to make a rectangular prism, as well as a cube. The children then went on a run around the playground, to try and label two 3D shapes each. A walk around the campus revealed that there are so many shapes around us! This was followed by much discussion and labelling of the newly discovered shapes. 

The Grade 1s under the guidance of their teachers also identified several rectangular shapes on the tennis courts and discussed measurement by using their hands, feet and steps, and eventually it was decided upon that it was a good idea to use the centimetre and metre measurements instead! Back in the classroom, the children were given recycled materials and tasked with designing their own 3D sea creature, this was aligned to our Sea theme for this term.

The Grade 2s spent much of their day in Headmaster’s Woods. This part of the campus allowed for many fun and interactive games linked to the teaching of rhyming words, parts of speech as well as numeracy based tasks such as that of doubling and halving. In addition to the structured learning approaches involving specific group activities, the children made use of our outdoor based resources utilising sticks and leaves. The Grade 2 children thoroughly enjoyed also developing their collaborative skills and appreciating all that we can learn from nature.  

After tea, the Grade 2s broke up into even smaller groups and continued with various educational games which ranged from building 3D shapes, playing memory games with matching place value numbers, building sentences using the correct punctuation and even building their spelling words using arrow cards. 

The Grade 3 children started their day by writing their spelling test in scented shaving foam on their desks. They were then split up into 5 groups and were tasked with completing the following activities, clay modelling, the making of paper folded flower crowns and Scrabble word searches. The day ended with a visit to Topwoods (as is done every Friday at 12:00pm), to allow our children to continue learning by playing on our wonderful obstacle course. 

This was a fun-filled and purposeful day and one that will most certainly return to our Clifton Calendar again!