Circus Week

The week before Easter, all KS2 children were involved in an exciting four days of circus activities, ranging from ball and scarf juggling, stilt walking, diabolo tossing, plate spinning and tightrope walking to curricular activities such as IT, art, poetry, maths and cooking.

The circus week, provided by Shooting Stars Circus Skills, supplied a CD prior to the week that contained a huge amount of curricular work, to add to our own ideas, as well as contact addresses and web sites to visit. They bought with them all the necessary equipment, including several boxes of costumes, and each class was given a pack of videos ranging from animals used in the circus, their welfare and training, to performances by the Cirque du Soleil.

Apart from performance day - held on the final afternoon for all the parents and KS1 - each year group spent one session in the hall daily being taught a variety of circus skills. These sessions always concluded with 10 minutes free choice (the small bikes were very popular). The remainder of the day was divided into circus activities and watching the videos. LowerKS2 decorated specially made large biscuits, with clown faces, and upper KS2 made pizza clown faces, using healthy options for the topping. Some of the work produced included interactive maths games, poetry based on a touring circus and its performance, designing costumes for clowns using IT skills, producing performance posters, looking at the history of the circus, performing a play, making pop-up clowns, designing clown faces on paper plates and balancing clowns.

All the children had a wonderful week and learned many new skills. It was so enjoyable that next year we are having another circus week, this time including KS1.