Year 5 Visit to Cliffe House

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Wednesday
On Wednesday 29th January 2003 the children in Year 5 went to Cliffe House. We left school and waved goodbye at 12:30pm. We arrived at Cliffe House at 1:30pm. When we got there we put our luggage in the cloakroom in the cellar and then went to the games room where Rob Kersey told us the fire and the safety rules.

The people who didn't have wellies or a waterproof coat were allowed to borrow from the Centre. We then had a tour of the grounds and also went to the adventure playground.

After we had been introduced to our Centre teacher, Rosie, we went by mini bus to Marsh Dairy Farm.

Afterwards we went to our bedrooms, put our luggage away, and waited in our rooms for the fire bell to go so that we could practise the fire escape routine and registration outside the coach-house.

After tea and a little free time we did our homework in the classrooms, then played some exciting games, such as, draughts, bean bag aiming games, and volleyball. After that we all watched the film HOOK.

At 9:00 we had our supper, had a wash, put our pyjamas on and got into bed. At 10pm the lights were switched off, THEN THE FUN BEGAN!!!!!

Thursday
Miss Morgan woke us up at 7:30. Before breakfast we had to wash, brush our teeth, get changed, and comb our hair. The choice for breakfast was weatabix, Sugar puffs or Corn Flakes. Then we had slices of toast and if we wanted, we could have baked beans on toast. After breakfast we had free time, and could play table tennis, badminton, volleyball, table football or play in the adventure playground or the secret garden.

Our teacher blew a whistle and we all had to go back to our classrooms. Rosie told us what we had to do and gave us some worksheets. We set off on our journey in the minibus, we all had measurements to do, from Gate Foot Hill to Stone Wood Bottom. We checked and recorded the wind speed, the air temperature, the soil temperature and the gradient of the piece of land we stood on. We also took soil samples from all the places we went to and when we came back each group had some soil experiments to do. By doing these experiments we were trying to see which parts of Shepley area were acid, alkaline and neutral and how this affected the type of farming done.

In the afternoon we carried out a housing survey. This involved viewing the houses, write about some of their features and on our return to the classroom we had to decide whether the houses were old or new and if possible, with the aid of a chart, could we give an approximate time period when they were built. It was really interesting.

Afterwards we went to a dairy farm to watch the cows being milked from a viewing platform above the milking parlour. The cows seem to know what to do. They came into the parlour, went to the stall, all by themselves. While they were eating their special diet, the milkman attached some pipes to their udders and the milk was pumped out and taken along pipes to a storage tank.

We had our tea and went to do our homework. We also made a start on our diaries. We really enjoyed playing volleyball in our free time and we also went to the House shop. After supper we went to bed, but we did not go straight to sleep. We were talking and shining our torches across the room at each other, and even made shadows that grew in size – a hand coming close and closer

Friday
As soon as we were awoken by our teachers, we had to get washed quickly because we had to strip the beds. We had to fold up the duvet cover, the pillow case and the sheet and take them to the Launderette which was in the cellar. We also had to pack our bags and take them down to the cellar.

After breakfast we had a walk around the village looking at the different utilities the village had, such as, churches, post office, shops, parks, schools and so on.
We left Cliffe House to go back to school at 1:30pm. And arrived back at Lydgate at about 2:30pm. Some of our parents were waiting to meet us and take us home early.

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