Year 4 will be taking part in a concert at the cheese and grain on June 28th.

Some of our previous topics have included Victorians because we were celebrating our 150 year anniversary. WOW factors included dressing up as Victorians for our Harvest festival Service and for our large Victorian production at Selwood School where children perform songs, rhymes and poems. Also the older children carried out some brilliant “drill exercises” which was part of  Victorian PE lessons. Our Nativity Christmas plays had a Victorian flavour and for another WOW day we visited a museum in Bath to look at Victorian toys, art museum  and the museum of Bath at work.

Another topic was All Creatures great and Small which started with a WOW day – an adventure playground was set up on the school field but during the night a strange creature visited it. The children had to look for clues and decide what this creature was! Great excitement followed and wonderful designs, pictures and writing were produced because of this event. This topic particularly lent itself to creative writing, wonderful drawings and paintings and habitats of animals. Another WOW day included a trip to Brokerswood to look at plant and animal life and to develop mapping skills. The last WOW event was a visit from a world renowned photographer of wild life – he shared some fantastic pictures of tigers in their natural habitats and then spent time in each class developing photography skills, looking at plants and objects in different and unusual ways.

Our topic on Olympics finished off our academic year of 2011/12 We learnt about the history of the Olympic games, we went to see the Olympic torch pass through Frome and join in with the community atmosphere of this exciting event a real WOW day with each class visiting a different area of Frome to explore. We focused on our host city of London and learnt about some of its famous landmarks and fantastic artwork was produced by children throughout the school. Another WOW event was our own Olympic Opening Ceremony which all the children took part in.

In addition we had a fantastically interactive Maths Week organised by Mrs White. This included having parents in to talk about how they use maths at work, lots of interesting maths activities and extra resources that all children could use throughout the week. We had an open event where parents were shown how to use all the resources by their own children and a presentation was given first by the staff.

This academic year 2012/2013 we have just finished a topic called Amazing People, Amazing Jobs. We explored the school community first and there were lots of visitors into class to be questioned by the children.  Our parent community came in to share knowledge about their jobs and what they involve and this led to some super follow up work, definitely events with the WOW factor. KS1 had a fabulous visit to the local police station and all classes went to a fire station in Bristol which was fantastic!!!

Currently we are working on a topic called Robots and we are all dressing up as Robots for one of our WOW events.

Berkley School Governing Body receives National recognition for all their hard work by being awarded Governor Mark.

This award recognises the high quality of school governance, which was also recognised during the school’s last Ofsted inspection.

The assessment panel were particularly impressed with the Governors

• High level of engagement with school development planning particularly in relation to the school curriculum.
• Strong action by the Governing Body in strengthening R.E. and the religious character of the school
• The good levels of appropriate challenge and accountability brought by the governing body to the school and its leaders using data and engagement with school self- evaluation
• High level of trust between the Governing Body and the Head teacher which creates a culture that allows constructive challenge
• Good visits to the school by governors that assist in their deep understanding of the school

The Headteacher Carole Brautigam and Chair of Governors Les Stather is extremely pleased that the Governing Body has been recognised as being such an asset to the school.  Les is very proud of the amount of time and effort all the governors have put into making Berkley school such a success and for gaining the award.