Our weekly message: Friday 27 September

Friday 27 September 2024

This week’s Living and Learning message is a great one to think about at home: I know that rights come with responsibilities…

Food in school

This week, we want to flag up a page on our website you perhaps don’t visit much – Food in school. This page has lots of information about school dinners (including the current menu), free school meals and packed lunches.

On the subject of food in school, don’t forget to alert us to any allergies that your child may have.

Staying healthy…

Last week, we mentioned the West Yorkshire NHS website Healthier Together, launched to provide consistent advice from local health and care professionals.

Linked to this, check out this guide to keeping your child healthy from the UK Health Security Agency.

…for good attendance

It’s worth thinking about what your child might miss if they were absent for five days in a row…

For younger children learning to read, they’d miss five, half an hour phonics lessons – that’s a full two and half hours of phonics teaching. In this time, they’d miss out on learning four new graphemes (eg ay, ou, oi, ea) and practising reading and writing these in words and in sentences. They’d miss learning up to four new tricky words, too. Your child would also miss valuable time to practise the previous week’s graphemes and developing fluency in reading words containing those sounds. As well as the phonics lessons, your child would miss four reading practice group sessions and would not have the time to read and re-read the physical book in school. In these sessions, we develop fluency, prosody and comprehension. They’d also miss the library session and not be able to choose a new book to take home.

Before deciding to keep your child at home, remember to check this NHS site: Is my child too ill for school?

Governor recruitment

We’ve had two expressions of interest from parents who are interested in joining our Governing Board. This means we now have an election. Please take a couple of minutes to read each of the two candidates’ written statement and make your vote. Thank you.

 

Finally, a quick reminder…

We’ve another Watch Us While We Work session next week – Tuesday morning. This is the first of two opportunities in the year to see some Maths and Reading being taught in school so that you can support your child at home.