Adventurers' Class News!

Thank you for visiting our class news page, here you will find information regarding events and trips as well as any class news such as celebrations and achievements such as our fabulous Stars of the Week, Star Writers, High 5 children, Spelling Bees, and Pen Licence earners. 

So, pop back each week so see who they are!

Spring Term

Adventurers Visit George and Charlotte

The copper in the mine is all mine, all mine…

At 9 a.m., we boarded one of the coaches in Mr Tilley’s well-appointed fleet, belted up and set off for our destination full of expectation and excitement. After a short detour owing to a road closure, we arrived at Morwellham Quay and alighted into bright sunshine. We were escorted to a room where we watched a video about the history of Morwellham, which focused on the Victorian period. We learnt that Morwellham was at its busiest in the 1860s when mines in the Tamar Valley were some of the biggest in the world. Having learnt about mining, we were eager to take a ride into the mine just down river from the quay. We walked the short distance to the ‘station’ where we boarded the carriages of a train pulled by an electrically powered engine.

We entered the mine at one of the entrances to the Deep Adit. From time to time, we stopped to view life-sized dioramas of the miners at work, and the water-wheel which was used to pump water from out of the lower levels of the mine. One of the ways in which ore was extracted was by lighting fires next to the rock face and quickly cooling the heated rock with water. The rapidly cooling rock would crack and split. Later, productivity was increased with the introduction of gunpowder into the process; although the process of extracting the ore was still a laborious task: at first, the holes were made with a drill bit and sledge-hammer, but the innovation of drills powered by compressed air meant that the process was rendered a little easier (if considerably more noisy) for the miners.

Once the ore had been extracted, it was sent to the dressing floor. Here the ore was sorted according to size and then broken by women (known as bal-maidens) using sledge-hammers into pieces the size of large eggs. The ore containing a high copper content was placed to one side and the pieces of ore containing smaller amounts of the metal was passed on to the children (usually girls of seven or eight years of age earning three or four pence per day) to refine further until the pieces are about the size of a marble. We had a go at breaking some ore. We were exhausted after only a few minutes at the task; it didn’t require a lot of imagination to know how we might have felt after a shift of twelve hours! At least we were allowed to take some copper ore as a souvenir of our visit. From the dressing floor, the ore was then usually transported to South Wales to be smelted into pure copper. As it takes four tons of coal to produce one ton of copper, it made more economical sense to take the copper to the coal rather than bring the coal to the copper!   

Although the labour of children was exploited in the mine and on the dressing floor, some children were lucky enough to attend a school, founded by Elizabeth Rundle in the 1830s, where they were drilled in the three Rs – and, of course, their duty to God and the monarch. Discipline was strictly enforced, often with the application of a cane to the tenderer parts of the anatomy, or, perhaps less physically painful but no less humiliating, the donning of a dunce’s hat. Attendance was not compulsory, and parents had to pay a penny per week per child for the privilege. One of the most interesting and amusing activities of the day was dressing in clothes of the Victorian period. At this time, more so than today, there was a clear distinction in the quality and elegance of the clothes worn by people at different levels of society. Dressed in our finery, we posed for a photograph outside the chandler’s shop once owned and run, very successfully, by Jane Martin.

We certainly enjoyed our visit to Morwellham Quay and thank Miss Mars for organising the trip, and to Mrs Gubbin, Mrs Lamble, Mrs Mart and Mr L for accompanying us on the visit.

Indoor Athletics Meeting

Joining with pupils from five other primary schools in North Cornwall, a team of Adventurers ventured to the leisure centre at Bodmin to take part in an indoor athletics event.

No sooner had we entered the hall, then we were off and running – and jumping and throwing!

We participated in a number of track and field events – relays, obstacle races, vertical jump, standing jump, (soft) javelin and ball push - hardly having time to catch our breaths, such was the fever pitch of the activities.

Autumn Term

Ocean Protectors - Finding Nurdles!

Nurdles? Sounds as if it’s the name of a comic character in a Dickens’ novel. Well, nurdles aren’t so funny, albeit they are useful and, consequently, ubiquitous in our modern world.

For our first trip of the Autumn term, we ventured to Crooklets beach to meet Fiona, a member of the The 2 Minute Foundation and its Beach School Co-ordinator. The aims of the foundation are to see a world without plastic litter and pollution, and to inspire and to enable people to change the way they interact with outdoor spaces.

First, we undertook a two-minute beach clean. The beach was divided into three sections, with a group allocated an area. Unsurprisingly, we were looking for plastic waste, in particular nurdles. The best place to find nurdles is along the strandline. So, what is a nurdle? Nurdles are pellets of plastic, each less than 5mm in diameter and weighing around 20mg. It is from nurdles that plastic items are made; for example, it takes about 600 nurdles to make a small plastic disposable water bottle. Unfortunately, not only do the finished products end up in the oceans of the world but so too do the nurdles. Each year, an average of over 200,000 tonnes end up in the oceans, circulating for decades, eventually washing ashore – at the moment, they seem to find Scotland’s coasts particularly attractive places to end their oceanic odysseys.

Our next activity was exploring the rock pools of the inter-tidal zone. We were delighted to see that these were teeming with life. We were even lucky enough to find some Beadlet anemones and some Strawberry anemones; also, we found a rare Pink velvet crab seeking some peace and quiet in one of the larger pools.

After lunch, we tested our map-reading skills. Fiona had placed some painted stones at various locations on the beach and our task was to navigate our way to them. As well as a picture painted on it, each stone had an interesting, ocean-related fact written on it. For example, nineteen out of every twenty animals on the planet lives in the oceans; and over half of the oxygen produced on Earth evolves from phytoplankton in the seas.

Our day on the beach in Fiona’s company was a fun learning experience. We look forward to increasing our knowledge of pollution and recycling over the next few weeks as Fiona will lead our Ocean Protectors lessons every Thursday afternoon, this half term!

To coin a phrase: every little helps!