Learning happens outside of the classrooms through planned and purposeful educational visits. All children across school from Reception to Year 6 have an annual block of swimming lessons to develop water confidence, which is so important due to our coastal locality.
As children progress through the school, several residential opportunities are offered to them to enrich their experience. Residential experiences begin in Year 2 with a fun night and sleep-over in the academy hall. This allows children to experience a night away from their family and their home in a familiar environment with familiar adults, thereby developing confidence and independence in a ‘safe’ environment.
All KS2 pupils have the option of joining a residential experience each year. Our residentials are carefully planned to ensure that we meet our aims of developing fully rounded citizens of the future who are confident, take risks, demonstrate determination and have a wider view of the world than they experience in their day to day lives. Most importantly, we aim to develop young people who are open to new experiences and who embrace change. For example, we offer two residential experiences with extreme, outdoor activities. Pupils learn to trust, work in teams and challenge their own fears in activities such as high wire walking, kayaking and abseiling.
We also widen our children’s views of the world by visiting contrasting UK localities. We offer residential visits to a variety of locations including: London, Bath and Bristol. Children are immersed in the history, sights and sounds of busy, vibrant cities which contrast to their everyday life experiences of a rural village in Cornwall. For example, a typical London itenery includes visiting the National History Museum, viewing universities, watching a west end musical production, visiting the main tourist attractions and enjoying a tour of the Houses of Parliament. This adds a real-life context to their previous ‘in-class studies’ of British law and democracy. Children have also visited and toured a mosque as part of word religion studies.
We open children’s eyes to life and career opportunities in other countries. In some years we are able to offer a week-long residential to France, provides a real-life opportunity to speak, read, write and listen in French. Children are fully immersed in the French culture and visit a partner school in Brittany, near Saint Malo. They spend the day in school alongside a French child. The challenge is for the French child to speak only in English and for our pupils and staff to speak only in French! We visit a French market, aquarium, theme parks, cafes and speak only in French. The highlight of our visit is a day at Mont St Michel where we navigate the quicksand and learn about the history of Brittany, comparing to Cornish history.
