Week Ending 8^th March 2019

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

Teresa - Indigo 2 – For her beautiful, accurate and expressive reading to Mr smith on world Book Day. Teresa read the whole book herself to Mr Smith and Hope

Holly – Indigo 2 – For writing an outstanding piece of descriptive writing packed full of amazing vocabulary choice

Current attendance results are as follows:

1^st place goes to Orange 1, Orange 2, Blue 1 and Indigo 2 for 100% attendance.

Week Ending 8^th March 2019

A very busy week in school this week…for the children and the staff.

This week, the year 5 children enjoyed their Taster Day at Hall Park Academy, which helps to prepare  them for transition. They experienced secondary life for a day and I am told that they were very engaged in all of the sessions; computing being one of them. A great day for them and super to experience the next stage of their educational careers. Choosing a secondary school for your child is a HUGE challenge and responsibility and these transition days really can help to inform your decisions. Speak to your child about their views and start the planning now.

Thursday was of course World Book Day and what a fabulous day of reading enjoyment and engagement it was. It was fabulous to see so many adults in school reading with their children - thank you very much for coming. In addition, the children looked fabulous in their book character costumes of pyjamas - thanks again for support with this. Throughout the day, the children took part in book swaps (thanks for your donations) and the classes of varying ages joined together to read with each other. A lovely feeling across school yesterday and was a fabulous event. Thank you to Miss Brown and Mrs Jamson for organising the day for everyone.

Linked with reading, the whole staff left promptly on Thursday evening (yes, some in their PJs!) to attend a training event through the Flying High Teaching School Alliance on closing the vocabulary gap for our children. The whole event was around widening the children’s vocabulary usage and exposure and the importance of reading. If a child struggles to read, they will struggle to learn and they can find it difficult to make progress. We are developing our whole school approach to reading and we will be sharing some further knowledge and understanding with you over the coming months. In the meantime, I can’t stress enough to you the power and importance of reading at home with your child. Thanks for your support in advance.

Further networking we did this work was around writing moderation with other schools from the Equals Trust. The event was very useful as we shared writing for those children who are working towards the expected standard. All of our judgements were confirmed and then we discussed the barriers that such children can face and therefore, sometimes find it hard to meet the end of year expectations. As a group of schools, we talked about what needed to happen for some of our children to make further progress and of course we discussed first quality teaching, the power of reading and understanding vocabulary, the importance of spelling, interventions and how to engage children in the written world and encourage them to be emerged in literature.

We’ve had a great week and I look forward already to next week.

Have a great weekend everyone.
 

Warm regards,

Michelle Bates

Head Teacher