Education

Little Hands Karen 01763 260964

Melbourn Playgroup Jane Crawford 07842 151512 Notre Ecole Janet Whitton 261231 Primary School Headteacher Stephanie Wilcox 223457 U3A (Univ. of Third Age) Chairman Arthur Alderton 260399 Village College Act. Principal Simon Holmes 223400

Melbourn Primary

I was thrilled to join the primary school back in September and I can hardly believe how quickly the first half term has gone. It is a very exciting time to join the school as the new head teacher. After the completion of a building project, providing the super new spaces of new hall, offices and refurbished old hall as two new foundation classrooms, it feels like a time of new opportunity and new beginnings for the school. I already feel very much part of the team and have been made to feel very welcome by all the staff, children and many of the parents and members of the wider community that I have met.

I have spent my first few weeks getting to know the staff and children visiting classes to find out what everybody thinks about their school and also inviting the opinions of parents via parent workshops and questionnaires. I am collating all of this information and drawing up an action plan of how best to develop the school. One of the strengths of the school is the strong sense of community that is felt by staff and I hope that these contributions to the village magazine help widen our community even further.

Headteacher Stephanie Wilcox

KS1 Assembly October 2011

We welcomed forty six new Foundation children to school for the first time in September, who have settled extremely well and are enjoying all the exciting learning opportunities that their teachers are providing them with. As well as Foundation children we welcomed four new children in other year groups and two new teachers Miss Cottle and Miss Clarke who are beginning their teaching careers with us, teaching in years 1 and 2.

The Years 5 and 6 team have been out and about many times already this term visiting Ely Cathedral and Wicken Fen. The year 6’s have also been to Duxford with other year 6’s from all the cluster primary schools in the Melbourn Village College catchment area for a year 6 conference. Here are some comments from children: Wicken Fen: It was fun learning about birds on the boardwalk. The windmill went really fast when the wind was blowing. The water was pumping through the windmill. The faster the windmill went, the water went even faster. The pond dipping was best. I caught a water boatman and lots of mud as well. We used a net to catch the creatures in and pots to put them in helped us look closely at what we caught. After we sat down and had a talk with the lady, we talked about what we caught. By Sian Howard Ely Cathedral: Exploring the cathedral was fantastic and I thought the colours were amazing: gold, silver and bronze, mainly gold though. The history was really fascinating. The story of Henry VIII with him cutting most of the heads off to make him look powerful. By Thomas Doggett Duxford Year 6 Conference: When we went to ‘Learning to Learn’ we went in an auditorium and some people talked about having a dream and fulfilling that dream. After that we got into our groups and we did some trust games and puzzles. We got to do fun things like make models. After that we got to watch a performance by a theatre group which was very funny and showed a lot about being a responsible year 6. We got to go outside and play with people we had never met before. By Findlay Livingstone. During this half term Years 3 and 4 have been exploring a topic called ‘Food, Glorious Food’. It is a new topic that we are including in our new creative curriculum cycles. As part of the topic the children have investigated where their food comes from and have developed their geographical skills. They have also studied what constitutes a healthy diet and how they can maintain a healthy lifestyle. In art they have studied the work of famous still life artists and using a range of art media created their own. I think all the children thoroughly enjoyed their DT sessions where they designed and made their own ‘Super Sandwich’ which of course they were allowed to eat as well.

In Years 1 and 2 the children have really enjoyed their topic on Australia. The children have been very keen to learn lots of new facts and have approached their work enthusiastically. We are teaching the children our topics using a creative approach and are linking all subjects through this. In Literacy we have looked at fiction books with an Australian setting. We have read ‘The diary of a wombat’, ‘The sun mother wakes the world’ and ‘Wombat goes walkabout’. We used the structure of these stories to write our own. We have been making Aboriginal music, creating Aboriginal dance in PE and we even made our own Australian pots!

In Foundation our topic this term has been bears, which we have all really enjoyed! We have packed our rucksacks for a bear hunt and been finding out about textures by using lots of interesting materials to make a ‘feely bear’ collage. We have been experimenting with different art materials and used charcoal to draw a picture of an old bear – we used smudging and rubbing techniques. We have enjoyed getting to know our classroom and can now independently choose resources and games to develop our own learning – the creative table is a favourite! To end our topic this term we have planned a teddy bears picnic. We all brought our teddies to school and ate sandwiches and jelly.

We have celebrated Harvest Festival this term and were very appreciative of all of the gifts of food that were donated which we sent to the Cambridge Foodbank charity for families in need in and around the city of Cambridge. Music is a strength at the primary school and this was evident during the various harvest services. I enjoy hearing all the practises coming from the hall. After half-term the year 5/6 children will be preparing for a visit to the Birmingham NEC to participate in the ‘Young Voices’ concert, with the Melbourn Village Fete Committee kindly paying for all the children to have an event t-shirt. Alongside this, preparations for Christmas will be starting with the Foundation / KS1 Christmas production of The Grumpy Sheep.

The PTFA at the primary school run an exciting calendar of events to help raise funds for the ‘extras’ that school budgets unfortunately just do not cover. This year we will be striving to raise funds to improve our playground and outdoor learning facilities for gardening, environmental studies and the arts. The first event of the academic year is the annual fireworks event, a little earlier than normal on Saturday 29th October at 7pm, which I am looking forward to attending for the first time and perhaps meeting some of you there. Stephanie Wilcox

Notre Ecole

We have been very pleased to welcome several children to our Wednesday after school group. They have been making good progress learning how to greet each other, to talk about themselves and to count to twenty. They have also been learning the French words for some of those things we use in the classroom such as un-crayon – a pencil or un-stylo – a pen.

Meanwhile children attending our Thursday after school group have revised classroom words and are developing this theme to make sentences using prepositions of position to say where one thing is in relation to another. Both groups have enjoyed making the most of the late summer and early autumn sunshine, which has allowed us to take our activities outside.

We have also welcomed some new members to our

adult group. In the beginner’s group we have talked about our summer holidays and revised phrases used to talk about today’s weather and tomorrow’s weather. We have also revisited the grammar rules for forming the past tense.

Meanwhile the more advanced group have been practising the conditional tense and using direct and indirect pronouns. They have also read and discussed a text in French about the ‘Friends of the Children of Chernobyl’ charity and completed a quiz based around the Shepreth Wildlife Park.

Perhaps you would like to start learning a new language in the New Year, in which case we would be very happy to see you or your child at one of our groups. We are a French native speaker and a graduate of European Studies with French. Please call either Marine on 01763 222876 or Janet on 01763 261231 for further details.

Learn French in a friendly atmosphere *French for Children Games, role-play, songs etc. Every Wednesday from 3.45pm to 4.30pm Every Thursday from 4:15pm to 5:00pm *French for Adults All levels, Conversation Every Wednesday from 8.00pm to 9.00pm GCSE lessons available by arrangement. Individual lessons also available. Tel. Marine – 01763 222876 or Janet – 01763 261231 mob-07533 443153 mob-07791 853448 (Enhanced CRB clearance recently completed)

MVC Open Evening by the Journalism Club

The recent Melbourn Village College open evening was a successful event and one that was great to be part of. I was working in the Journalism Club team as part of the English department to set up and run a fun informative and interactive interview system.

We had the idea based on a series of comical interviews the group had made early this year, where to test our interviewing skills with an interesting variety of people and personalities we interviewed each other as fictitious characters. We then repeated the setup with the younger of our visitors and had the options of us interviewing them as a fictional character or them interviewing members of the club who then were the fictional characters.

We thought that this would be a good way of interacting with people who could be shy or nervous as they could hide behind a fictional character. After some thought we also had visitors interviewing other visitors so as to reduce the intimidating factor of being interviewed by a big, scary year 9.

The team had a successful evening and got a lot of appreciative thank you’s and positive comments from both parents and visiting students.

I really enjoyed working at the Open Evening, it was a great feeling to be positively representing Melbourn Village Collage and interesting to meet with families and children to help them enjoy their evening. I would definitely help again and look forward to having more good experiences with it in the future. Jeremy Bridle So, my day at open evening, (sigh) I really haven’t been looking forward to this but, okay, my ‘blog’ as I am hesitant to call it goes as follows:

I arrived, ‘annoying’ cousin in tow as I went to the drama hall to begin my drama piece of forum theatre, preparing myself for the switch because two parties had requested my services.

Mrs Nichols ordered the hall in her design and we set off to our places. Our act got off to a flying start as I realized this was, in effect, a pantomime. Since I love a good panto’ I was soon ‘in my element’ with several satisfied applicants walking away their confidence in drama renewed. We then merged our plays together and set up an impromptu rota. Everyone was satisfied, the time flew by with our group but at quarter past, I broke it to my group that I would have to leave. They asked me where on earth was I going, so I replied, ‘Into journalism’.

I arrived at the library, cousin in tow once more, and was tasked with the job of interviewing random people who came along in a unconventional manner. Alright I thought, not one to complain, I set to work having to interview a whole host of characters ranging from Tracy Beaker to Henry VIII and even one name of a village idiot. So I took to my task with considerable gusto armed with an amazing recording computer, camera hybrid and throughout the night this was my task. The aftermath consisted of exploring what tasty treats I could find in history (surprisingly quite a lot!) and being told to write this ‘blog’.

I definitely think that journalism club will be infested with new students. Alex Crockford

It began as a small trickle of people that soon became an onrush; me and my fellow journalists, Alex, Jeremy and Robert were desperately trying to keep up with the seemingly endless amount of visitors.

We all had jobs we were supposed to do, I was originally running the video interview, basically I sat down with a kid and interviewed them in front of a small machine with the ability to record and playback our interviews, they had the option to

be a fictional character from either their own imaginations or a character from a book/film, or they could be themselves. The majority of the kids chose to be a large range of characters from TV, we had kids pretending to be everyone from Tracy Beaker to Homer Simpson.

Then they had the option to be either the interviewee or the journalist, although nobody chose to be the journalist. Robert had essentially the same job as me, just without the video booth as we only had one. Jeremy was at the door greeting people and telling them a bit about what we were doing and a bit about the school in general.

Alex arrived later and by that time we were alternating roles every few minutes to try not to get bogged down by the huge amount of people coming in. The visitors came in waves, just as we thought things had calmed down for the evening another group would arrive. Jeremy and I stood at the entrance trying to talk to everyone so they knew what was on offer, however, it was not unusual for a family to slip past us, as we were talking to another.

The prospective students often seemed more confident than us at what we were doing, and would often choose to do a video interview. At one point when there was a large wave some of the students actually asked to interview each other.

Overall, I think the evening was a huge success, everyone had loads of fun and I have a feeling Journalism Club may be adding some new members to its ranks in 2012. Tom Windred

On open evening I was tasked with helping Journalism Club in the library. What we were doing in there was making interviews with the year 5 & 6’s in front of the video booth (a sleek white TV with a web cam in built to record and play back the interviews for the children to watch).

It was a big hit and lots of kids wanted to partake in the activities. Half way in, one of my colleagues who had been working over in drama, came along and helped out which meant that it wasn’t as hard because of the extra help. Later, with about 40 minutes left, another unexpected helper came in the form of Alex’s cousin Andrew.

My personal opinions on the whole night; at first I was bit nervous as were we all, I would think but as the night went on the butterflies went away. Robert Fox

This year’s open evening was a nice experience. One reason was because I performed drama with my friends which we had been working on it for 3-4 weeks, and it was one of the first times I had performed on stage in front of many of the young visitors.

I was rather nervous before we did it even though there were other groups performing around me, plus they were people who I had never met.

The experience was worth practising as it was really fun and I would definitely do it again if I got the opportunity. Every time we performed, people clapped and thanked us. Another reason I enjoyed open evening was because of all the things that people were doing. There was loads of stuff to do. It was a very good night and I hope that they would like to come to MVC because of the lessons and the different subjects. Andrew Houghton

U3A (University of the Third Age)

U3As are self-help, self-managed lifelong learning co-operatives, open to everyone not in full time work, but as the name implies, consisting of mainly older people. The learning experiences are for fun, not for qualifications, and you can brush up a language, play sport or do yoga, share your music or art preferences, discuss books and poetry, study local history or churches, go on long (or short) walks, bird watch, paint, share your collecting, gardening or textile passions, join a quiz or Scrabble group. Or, start up a group to share your own interest/skills!

Melbourn and District U3A currently has over 30 interest groups supported by members from many surrounding communities and if you would like to join or know more please contact Arthur Alderton 01763 260399

Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)

The spring courses will be held at Royston Town Hall on Tuesday Mornings 10am–11.30am starting on 17th January. If possible, please enroll on 10th January between 10am and 11am at Royston Town Hall. The fee for 10 classes is £45, payment by cheque preferred, payable to WEA Royston. There is a choice of courses: 1960s in retrospect by Stephen Barnard or Bright Wings of Summer by Brian Sawford.

A more general natural history course. Contact Carol Bradshaw 01763 268678.

From an Old Melbourn School Girl

In 1952 when the Saxon burials were being excavated at The Whiting Company site in Back Lane, a group of pupils from the school were taken to the dig. I, and a friend remember that we were allowed to jump into the graves and take bones as a souvenir. Are there any people in the village who remember this trip and did they keep the bones? Both my friend and I got the heebie-jeebies and the bones were buried for us by our families. I do enjoy the magazine keep up the good work.