It is always a pleasure to be asked to write the introduction to the weekly newsletter and even though the whole school has been carrying out assessments this week, there have been lots of exciting activities happening. In this edition, you will get a glimpse into the wonderful projects our Year 5 children have been working on, important dates to remember and find out about the highlights that happened across the school this week.

Every class has been excited about the Alice in Wonderland workshops linked to World Book Day. Thank you to Mrs Rautenbacjh for organising this as so many Class Dojo pages have included photos and videos of the children having a lovely time. Year 4 also had their reading cafe which continued to promote this love of reading and thank you again to those of you who were able to attend.

I joined Year 6 for a maths lesson and the children were very knowledgeable about the different types of angles as well as sharing with me how they were working out the challenges that had been set. Year 1 have been using compasses to identify North, East, South and West as part of their Geography topic and when I went into Year 3 they were also focusing on map skills. I watched some Year 2 children learning to play the recorder and they sang me a song as part of their music lesson. I joined some children in The Orchard for their Science lesson where they were identifying similarities and differences of different species of animals and I was very impressed with their knowledge. I had such a lovely time that I stayed for the start of the computing lesson where the children were taking their own images to create a story using props. I look forward to seeing the finished results!

EYFS clearly knew what was happening with the weather this week as they have been learning about Antarctica as part of their Habitats topic. They read the book ‘Be Brave Little Penguin’ and then wrote their own sentences to describe an animal from Antarctica for their friends to guess. The children had a great time making snow as well as creating landscape art using natural materials such as leaves, sticks, stones etc. The EYFS staff have informed me that we will have to wait until 24th April to learn about The Desert and so hopefully the weather will reflect this! 

Thank you to everyone who brought or donated cakes on Friday to raise money for the coaches to take some children to The Proms. Even if your child will not directly benefit from the money raised, any support is appreciated and shows what a great school community we have. This will also be happening next week (Friday 21st March) if anyone missed out or wants to join in again.

To everyone celebrating Holi this week, I hope that you had a fantastic Holi filled with joy, positivity and lots of celebrations! On Monday, please remember that it is ‘own clothes day’ if you would like to donate something related to Easter/Spring for the class hamper. 

Have a lovely weekend,

Mrs Wilson