Week Ending 10th March 2017

This week, the following children have received a Head Teacher’s Award:

Gabriel – Year 4 – for using beautifully expanded adverbials and powerful, vivid similes.
Riley – EYFS – for transforming into a phonics whizz.
Max – EYFS – for overall amazing effort in Maths.
Keira – Year 2 – for trying her best and using different sentence starts and adjectives in her writing.
Jack – Year 2 – for fantastic description and sentence starts in his writing.
Archie – EYFS – for amazing writing and phonics skills.
Koby – Year 3 – for brilliant identifying and labelling in Geography

WILF will be spending time with class 12 for 99.2% attendance this week and Jessica will be visiting class 13 for 99%. Class 13 have also been awarded with the golden dustpan and brush this week for the ‘tidiest classroom’ award.

Diary of the week:

Wow…Friday again already! Time really is flying by and I can’t believe that we are now into the second half of the year already; the children really are making progress and we are so proud of their efforts and hard work. The curriculum continues to push children to their limits. However, they are all rising to the challenge and the teachers are working incredibly hard to ‘plug those gaps’ in knowledge and understanding, whilst also extending and challenging those children, who need that little extra push.

I know that Mrs Clarke informed you all last week about the exciting delivery of the chicken eggs, which had all hatched and were chirping away by the end of the week. This week, it has been great to see every class visit the chicks and be able to handle and stroke them. Day by day, they grew so quickly and developed confidence in their wings by the time we waved goodbye to them on Thursday. Once again, this has been a great experience for the children.

Following on from this, a small butterfly habitat will be in the corridor, where the chickens were taking residence, from next week. Again, this is a fantastic opportunity for children to observe over the next few weeks as we can watch the transformation of the caterpillars into butterflies.

Unfortunately, car parking has been brought to my attention again this week. Please be careful when parking around school and try to keep the safety of the children at the forefront of your mind. Parking up onto the pavement is dangerous and children are having to venture into the road to get around the traffic. This is a polite notice…we can’t be out there every morning and evening and therefore we have to listen to the parent voice. Please think about the children.

Over the last term, I have been working with groups of children on their writing skills and comprehension of texts. As a school, we have entered two writing competitions recently and the results are due in next week. I can’t wait to hear if we have any winners; I will keep you posted!

On Wednesday evening, we had a very interesting staff meeting about ‘dialogic learning’. This means learning through effective and co-operative talk and learning to talk with each other in caring, critical, collaborative and creative ways. We hope to be making a whole-school approach to effective talk over the coming months and are excited about the impact that it can have on children’s learning, but also the way in which they communicate throughout their lives in general. We look forward to sharing future plans with you.

A reminder that next Wednesday is the school disco and we very much look forward to opening the doors between 4.30pm to 6pm to all year groups. Ticket sales have been going well and the excitement levels are rising already.

Have a great weekend, take care of yourselves and keep safe.

Warm regards,

Mrs Bates