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Our Year 6 pupils have been very busy preparing for their luncheon today. They've invited lots of special guests - Head Teachers of their Senior Schools, our Governors, The Mayor of Haslemere and our wonderful parent body, FOSI. The children had to plan and budget for the menu, shop for ingredients, cook the food and lay the tables, including flower arranging the table displays. They've really enjoyed the challenge and have learnt so much from the process. The guests are on their way!

A wonderful afternoon at the School Travel Awards 2023 at the Royal Lancaster Hotel yesterday, where Miss Smith and Mrs Goldsworthy celebrated St Ives being a finalist amongst only 5 other schools in the country for the ‘My Best School Trip Award’. This is a wonderful and well-earned achievement. Thank you to Miss Smith who not only organised the trip, but also wrote the entry for the award, acknowledging that school trips are a huge team effort, with lots of organisation and research to give the children the best possible experiences. To quote Miss Smith: “school trips are an integral part of life at St Ives, both academically and pastorally and we are so proud of our learning outside the classroom that benefits every child from Nursery to Year 6”.

Congratulations to Langdale Primary, Ambleside, Cumbria for its space trip to Liverpool. Your trip sounded wonderful and your win is very well deserved!

Yesterday afternoon, for World Ocean Day, the whole school spent the afternoon learning about water wastage and ocean pollution and how we can play our role in preserving our oceans. Pupils learnt how inland plastics reach our oceans, created Blue Haikus, enjoyed a quiz on plastic and the whole school gathered together to transfer a huge bucket of water from one full bucket to an empty one, using individual cups & passing the water between them without spilling any in order to get the children thinking about how careful we need to be with this precious resource. It was a fantastic activity and was wonderful to each how children of different ages worked so well and so carefully together to ensure the water was safe in their care. Well done everyone and thank you World Ocean Day for helping us play our part in making a difference in our planet's future.

Last week in STEM, the Year 3s were tasked with a challenge to build a tower using spaghetti and marshmallows. The children were divided into teams and were given two minutes to discuss ideas before starting on the build. They were then given 10 minutes to construct their towers. They then had time to review and adjust where necessary. We were unanimous in deciding which team had made the tallest tower and learnt it was due to their tower's solid, square base and the sturdy horizontal and vertical supports. Excellent teamwork Year 3!

We are thrilled to announce we're a finalist for the 'My Best School Trip' Awards at the School Travel Awards 2023 for our trip to Powys in Wales last year. We are so proud of the superb extracurricular opportunities we offer here & it is wonderful to have them recognised! All of our trips, whether they are residential trips, day trips or short off-site experiences are extremely well researched & organised for the benefits of our children from Nursery to Year 6 who gain so much from learning outside the classroom.

As part of our Sports Festival this week, during Swimming lessons, pupils were given the option of taking part in a brilliant Mermaid workshop where the children learnt to swim using fins, with huge success. Thank you so much to Abbie at Splash Active - the children loved it!

In the 112 year history of St Ives, we held our first Cheese Rolling competition today! Cheese rolling is believed to be at least 600 years old and is now officially an extreme sport. With much hilarity, the children took turns to roll the cheese down the driveway, using an enormous range of skills and tactics. With its steep curve, the driveway proved a treacherous course and the poor Cheddar took rather a battering, with some mid-competition patching up needed, but thankfully it proved a mighty cheese and lasted long enough for the whole school to have to have a go! An event we're sure the children will laugh about for a very long time.

Our Prep Inter-house Race Walking Competition proved very competitive. Houses thrashed it out around the sports field using all the techniques they had learnt earlier in the day, with Red House being victorious!

Well done to our swim who took part in the English Schools Swimming Association (ESSA) - Primary Schools' Relays Championships on Saturday. Having qualified after the first round against Surrey Schools, St Ives swam against schools from around the South-East region and the competition was fierce. With only the top three schools moving on to National Finals, it was a big ask. Our aim was to beat our qualifying times from the first round and keep our takeovers clean. Finishing 12th in both relays, we held our heads high, as we took 1 second off our Freestyle qualifying time and 3.5 seconds off our Medley Relay time! We could not have asked any more of our swimmers and with four out of five of them being Y5 & swimming a year out of age, this bodes well for next year. Well done team!

What a beautiful morning for Pre-Prep Fitness Club. We practiced some races for Sports Day and played some fitness games. We even got to spin Mrs Hayden’s exercise wheel to see which exercises we had to do for our warms ups. These included Spider-Man lunges and Buzz Lightyear squats along with many more. It's also the first day of our 3-day Sports Festival, so we'll be tired little bunnies at the end of the day.