Friday 20th January

Happy Friday!

Hopefully all our parents and carers should have received a letter, via ParentMail, this evening informing you of potential disruption due to strike action. We will keep you informed of our plans moving forward.

We have had several visitors in school this week, and we love showing people around our school. Everyone is always very impressed with the children. We had lots of teachers who came to observe how we teach maths at Olive Hill - we use the mastery approach and we have seen our outcomes really improve, with our progress for last academic year being considerably above the national average at the end of year six. It is Mr Holder who facilitates the professional learning with this group of teachers so we also get to see him during these visits. Also visiting us this week have been our new parent governors, as governors they have specific responsibilities and it is important that they are familiar with the school and how we educate our children, including the curriculum we deliver and how we use our funding to deliver that curriculum. We regularly offer school tours to potential new families, but we are quite happy to also give our existing parents a tour - please contact the school office to make an appointment.

This week I have really enjoyed being a lunchtime supervisor for Hawthorn Class, they have been an absolute delight and we have enjoyed den building (there are no pegs left on my washing line after I promised to bring some in and I didn’t have time to go to a shop), and when the snow kept us in, we really enjoyed a craft session designing a character. If any of our families have any old sheets, curtains, duvet covers, blankets or material that they no longer use, we could put it to great use with our den building. We are happy to take any donations and they can be handed in at the office.

In our desire to encourage an absolute love of reading, we have now started setting up non-fiction stations across school to further enhance our provision, alongside our fiction book nooks. We have one station positioned near the benches where the children wait for dinner - we definitely need to add more books as the children have been eager to select a book and build on their knowledge of the world. Our child leadership team will be asking their classes about the types of non-fiction books they would like to have. We want our school to have so many books that it resembles Waterstones!

We have stocked Breakfast Club with new equipment, it is just like Christmas all over again! Our Breakfast Club staff (Mrs Birch, Miss Clarke, Mr Brady, Mrs Waldron and Mrs Aziz) spent lots of time considering the needs of the children in Breakfast Club and have ordered some brilliant new items.

As you are all aware, we redeveloped our nursery environment during the summer holidays. Well, that was only stage one of our investment into our nursery provision, The next stage will be creating their own outdoor area that they have direct access to. We are in the process of designing what it will look like and we can’t wait for the work to begin.

Thank you to all of our families who supported us on census day. We had lots of children come through for school dinners. There was great anticipation as the children looked for a winning sticker on their box.

We often remind parents of the importance of parking and driving safely, especially in the vicinity of the school. We cannot express strongly enough the danger of irresponsible parking and driving - we have seen people putting the lives of our children at risk. You must not park on the zig zags, and please avoid making U-turns in the road. Additionally, as pedestrians, please carefully consider where you are crossing the road.

We look forward to seeing you all on Monday morning. Wishing everyone a lovely weekend.