Houses and House Points

School Houses

The children in our school are divided into five houses – each named after fossils found in the quarry at the Barrington cement works. Brothers and sisters are always placed in the same house.  Children collect house points for their houses and the house with the most house points each week is awarded a trophy.  The houses are also used for whole school mixed age activity days and for sports events like sports day.

 

House points

Children are awarded house points in recognition of outstanding effort or pieces of work as well as for acts of kindness or politeness.

 

End of Term Celebrations


Every term good behaviour and hard work is rewarded with an end of term celebration. The children are given a house point token every time they are awarded a house point, they then use their tokens to vote for the end of term celebration of their choice. The more house points they earn, the more votes they get. Each term there is a choice of three different activities to choose between and the activity that receives the most house point tokens at the end of term is the one that is organised for the whole school.

Recent end of term celebrations have included a sausage cook out, Christmas cake decorating, water Olympics, igloo building and a relay Easter egg hunt!

 

Brachiopods

Brachiopods live at the bottom of the ocean and have two shells. They are considered to be living fossils. There are three types of brachiopods present in today’s oceans. They are rare today but during the Paleozoic Era they dominated the sea floors.

 

 

Ammonites

Ammonites are probably the most widely known fossil. These creatures lived in the seas between 240 - 65 million years ago, when they became extinct along with the dinosaurs. The name ammonite comes from the Greek Ram-horned god called Ammon. Ammonites belong to a group of predators known as cephalopods, which includes their living relatives the octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus.

Arthropods
Arthropods were invertebrate animals (having no backbone or spine) with a hard, external skeleton (known as an exoskeleton), segmented bodies, and jointed legs

Nautilus

The Nautilus is considered by many scientists to be a living fossil. Why? The Chambered Nautilus, also known as Nautilus Pompilius by its scientific name, is the largest and most common of about six species known to exist. It has remained unchanged for over 400 million years. The nautilus is a mollusk and a member of the cephalopod family and lives in deep waters.

 

 

Belemnites

Belemnites (or belemnoids) are an extinct group of marine creatures, very similar in squid and closely related to the modern cuttlefish. Like squid and cuttlefish, belemnites had an ink sac, but unlike the squid, they have no tentacles. Instead, they possessed ten arms of roughly equal length. Unlike the modern squid, whose arms have suckers, belemnite arms carried a series of small hooks for grabbing prey.