New: Whole School Diary Challenge!

When this strange time is over and everything is back to normal, people in the future will look back on this period as a major event in world history - in all the gloom and self-isolation, that is actually something to get excited about! You are a piece of that history and have an opportunity to take part in creating a historical record of this period. Who knows – in 50 or 100 years, people might look back at what we create now to find out what life was like.

So, with this in mind we would like to set a challenge for the whole school to get involved in writing some diary entries during your time at home. We want as many children as possible to take part and when we’re all back together at school, we will collate all your wonderful pieces of writing / photography / artwork and put them into one big Combe Down diary.

Here are some things to consider:

1. You don’t have to do it every day, but the more often you do, the greater chance you have or more of your work appearing in the collated diary (we might have 20 amazing accounts from Wednesday 25th March and wouldn’t be able to include them all necessarily!).
2. It is a chance to practise all those English skills you have been learning! Children should focus on trying to include some of the elements of grammar, punctuation and style that they have been taught this year – see the ‘Timetable of activities’ documents on the ‘Learning at home’ page on the school website for some key elements each year group should focus on.
3. If you are too young to write a diary entry or find writing particularly tricky, we would still love you to take part – you can take photos and ask a grown-up to help you write a couple of sentences about them or perhaps photograph some creative work you have produced.
4. Write the date each time you start a new diary entry so that we know which day you are writing about.
5. Write about funny or interesting things that have happened to you that day – what have you enjoyed? How are you feeling?
6. Make sure that what you write is true! Your diary should be an accurate account please!

Here’s a short example of how you could lay your diary entry out:

Wednesday 25^th March 2020

This morning, I woke up and realised with glee that it was another gloriously sunny day. How should we spend the day? After breakfast, I had a go at the Joe Wicks P.E. session – it was quite tough but set me up well for the day and I ended it feeling really positive, though as the day has crept on, my legs are definitely starting to ache! I hope he focuses on arms tomorrow…

Following the session, I went out into the garden and recorded a video message for the school Instagram feed – it’s so weird not seeing the children and I know all of the staff really miss them. Let’s hope we can get back to normal life really soon! I know it’s probably quite fun for most people at the moment, but I have a feeling it might get boring soon if we don’t think or some interesting things for the children to do.

Mrs Biffen