Week Ending 3rd February 2017

This week, the following children have received a Head Teacher’s Award:
Diesel – Year 6 – for excellent English and Maths work.
Grace – Year 5 – for her adventurous use of vocabulary.
Jacob – EYFS – for fantastic problem solving skills in Maths.
Joshua – EYFS – for amazing subtraction work in Maths.
Beatrice – EYFS – for fantastic effort and progress in phonics.
Alfie – EYFS – for choosing to write independently and doing an amazing job.
In Gold book assembly, I gave out the certificates and gifts from the Rolleston and Mansell charity to a number of our pupils who achieved 100% attendance last year. Well done to you all.
Diary of the week:
A wet and grey start to the week, with outdoor play limited. Children have been great and we have put the new rota into operation for wet lunchtimes. Behaviour in and around school continues to be really good. I have completed a learning walk this week. I was looking at ‘maths mastery’. It was great to see the children engaged, focussed and challenging one another. In March, we will be holding a training event for parents to come and see what this looks like; I will send more information out about this after the half term holiday.

Today, Mrs Bates sent off the school entries for the Nottinghamshire Governors writing competition. Our youngest children wrote stories of 200 words, years 3 and 4 wrote 400 words and our oldest children (in years 5 and 6) completed stories of 500 words. We enjoyed looking through a few before they were sent away to be judged and were very impressed with the array of story genres included. There are 18 prizes to be awarded on the 11th March at the governors’ conference. We look forward to hearing about the results. In addition, the 500 word stories from year 5 and 6 are also being used to enter the Radio 2 writing competition. The children have been very busy and so enthused about writing for a real purpose and audience. We will let you know as soon as we hear about any results.

We have continued to have a lot of staff absence this week; fortunately, we have been able to cover this internally. I have to say, I did struggle on Monday going from Year 1 to Year 6 and Mrs Bates was put through her paces in Year 2 on Tuesday. It certainly keeps us on our toes!

We hope to see all staff back in on Monday as we enter the final week of this half term. Just a small reminder that Monday 20th February is an INSET day so the children will not return to school until Tuesday 21st.