Caring Curious Courageous

Enabling all children to learn and grow

Dear all families,

I love walking down the drive in the morning to see all the happy faces of your children waiting for the gate to open, so they can run into school. The good mornings and hellos are wonderful to hear.

As you can see, our building works have now started, thank you for supporting the changes to drop off arrangements. We have lost a lot of our car parking spaces and have had to be very creative so that staff can park on site. We are very thankful to the staff who have also made some big changes; car sharing, cycling, and some lengthy journeys by public transport. The covered racks near the school office are now for staff only. Finally, thank you to all of you for bearing with us and also for offering drives for staff parking. It all helps.

I hope you all had a lovely half-term. It has been a busy week back at school and the children have got straight back to learning. This year, we have been working hard to increase transparency between school and home, so families feel better informed about what the children are learning and how they are progressing at school.

Since September there have been two 'open classroom' events where families have been invited into school, so the children can show off their books, many year groups have now had class assembles, the first round of parent teacher meetings have taken place and there have been a variety of curriculum workshops ('The Vineyard curriculum', 'Importance of Reading', 'How we Teach Maths' and 'history, geography and art curricula') which have explained the fundamentals of our curriculum as well as sign posting where to find them on the website. Still to come are the second round of parent teacher meetings, an art exhibition, a workshop on 'The Ofsted Framework' - date coming soon and many others.

The excitement is building for World Book Day which we are celebrating on Friday 3rd March. I have my costume ready and will be coming as a character from one of my favourite books. I can't wait to see who the children dress up as and about the books that have inspired them.

Have a lovely weekend.

Frances Bracegirdle

Headteacher

Soft starts – 8.30am until 8.45am

Soft starts begin at the start of the school day and last for 15 minutes. This is the children’s learning time, whereby teachers have prepared tasks/activities to rehearse key learning from prior lessons. We know from research that the ‘forgetting curve’ means children require multiple opportunities to re-visit learning in order to commit it to their long term memory. Soft starts are used for one of these times so that misconceptions are addressed and prior learning is revisited. Therefore, we strongly encourage all children to be at school and in class for 8.30 in order to make the most of this important teaching and learning time.

Ms Reilly – Teaching and learning Lead  

Big Emotion Workshop

On Wednesday evening we hosted a well-attended presentation by Dr Helen Childs from our CAMHS led Children’s Well Being Team. This was a fascinating evening on the research behind and approaches to the supporting children’s emotional well-being regulation. Thank you to everyone who joined us and we are looking forward to developing some of your ideas to take this forward. Please see the slides here.

Mrs Axbey

Creative Arts Week- 20th March

The week will end with our whole school art exhibition on Friday 24th March. 

• Reception and Year 1 will visit the art exhibition at 2.30pm - 3.15pm 
• Year 2 and Year 3 will visit the art exhibition at 3.15pm - 4pm 
• Year 4, 5, 6 will visit the art exhibition at 4pm - 4.45pm 

Further information will be sent nearer the time but please add these times and dates to your diaries.