Parliament Week in Blakemere

Date: 17th Nov 2018 @ 4:36pm

What a fabulous time we have had in Blakemere taking part in different activities for Parliament week.

Our week began by learning about how Parliament is made up. The children found out that Parliament is made up of 3 parts: The Queen, The House of Commons and The House of Lords. They carried out some research to find out more about each part and then produced an information cube with their findings.

As it is 100 years since women received the vote, we decided to explore how this all came about. We talked about and explored The Suffragettes. We learnt about who they were, what they did and how they managed to secure the vote for women. We looked at how this was an important for women in terms of equality of opportunities and talked about how it links to our schools 'No Outsiders' project.  We also looked at some of their posters, which were used to encourage people to support them, and then went on to produce our own 'Vote for Women' posters.

Finally, we held our own class debate and referrendum. We have recently been learning about the life and work of Jacques Cousteau and how he made the world aware of the pollution of the oceans. We decided that we would like to explore the topic of plastic use and its positives and negatives as a material. The class split into two groups and prepaared their arguments for the debate. The debate was chaired and each side were given the opportnuity to present their views and findings. After listening to all the information the children were then asked to vote on the following question:

Should Over St. John's Primary School reduce its plastic use?

The children visited our polling station, cast their vote in secret and placed it in the ballot box. They were checked off the register by our polling clerk. The votes were then counted and verified and it was found that 19:10 were in favour of reducing our use of plastic in school. Blakemere have decded totake this idea forward and look at how they could achieve this in school.