The start of a new school year, after six weeks away, can be a tricky time for everyone. Despite this, the atmosphere in school has been a happy and healthy one – children have settled in really well. We’ve enjoyed welcoming children back to school – and welcoming new children joining us, too. We’ve loved hearing children greet us happily each morning!
We’ve welcomed back Mrs Lake (3,4B), who’s been teaching at Moortown Primary, and Mrs Paterson, who’s returned from maternity leave. It’s great to see these familiar faces around school. It was also lovely to see Miss Gilliland, who’s now working at St James’ CE Primary, at our Sphere Federation training day on Monday.
School is looking really smart. This is the first year in quite a while that we haven’t had a big building project happening over summer so our site staff have been able to get on with lots of painting.
It was also great to return to school to hear about the success of one of our pupils who entered a National Diving Competition. Well done! We believe this was diving from a 3 metre board but your parents tell me you aren’t scared of diving from the 10 metres!
Summer competition
Did you enter our Summer competition this year?
Thank you to those of you who did. We invited you to send in a smiley face spotted at some time in the holidays. Monday’s the deadline to send in a pic.
Dates
In case you missed an earlier email, here’s a list of key events across the year.
For a fuller and up-to-date picture of what’s going on, check out our school calendar.
(Have a look at our weekly Living and Learning theme at the start of each week in the calendar, too – this week, our theme’s been ‘I follow the school rules’ so please talk about these at home.)
A few reminders
Just a few reminders of some of the things that help make school run smoothly…
School attendance is important. We don’t authorise term time absences unless in exceptional circumstances. If you are requesting a term time absence, a form should be collected from the school office and completed prior to the absence.
Having said that, we know that sometimes children can be unwell. If your child has vomited or had diarrhoea, please keep them at home until 48 hours have passed from their last episode of being unwell. Stomach bugs travel quickly around school – this helps to break the cycle.
Please ring school to let us know if your child is not going to be in school for whatever reason. It’s important we know where all our children are – a call from you saves us chasing up the absence.
Please name as much uniform as you can. Wherever possible, we’ll return misplaced items but as you can imagine, items with no names are almost impossible to return.
Communication between home and school is really important. You might not have had a chance to meet your child’s new class teacher yet but please be assured we’re available, usually at the end of the day, if you want to say hello or have a quick check-in. We may call home from time to time to check in, too.
And finally, if you’re unable to walk to school, please park legally and with consideration for our neighbours.
Our website
As it’s the start of a new school year, we thought it might be a good time for a quick ‘tour’ of some of the key pages of our website.
The Find Out section is there mainly for the key information you need to know about. One of the pages to be aware of is Policies and Other Points – this page contains lots of information, including our Positive Relationships policies and our Uniform policy.
The Join In section describes lots of different ways that you and your child can get involved, from wraparound care and clubs to any job vacancies we may have. There’s information about our Governing Body in this section, too.
The Learn More page is where to go for ways to support your child’s learning. The Class News pages are always the some of the most visited pages – they help to keep you up to date with what your child’s learning. Other pages give you information about different subjects – Reading, Writing, Maths and other curriculum subjects. If you’re a parent of a child in Nursery or Reception, check out the Early Years page, too.
Talking of supporting your child at home, next week we’ll talk about our new topic for children in Years 1-6. It’s a Geography topic – start asking your child now what they’ve been learning in Geography!