Friday 21st April
Happy Friday!
Welcome back to the summer term 2023! We hope you had a lovely Easter break. Eid Mubarak to all our families celebrating.
This week, each of our year groups have started their new learning experiences:
Our nursery cohort will be learning how animals and plants grow and change;
Our reception children will be comparing life now to life in the past;
Year one will be exploring different bodies of water and learning how to keep safe when around water;
Our year two cohort will be keeping it local with an in-depth study of the Black Country;
Year three will be learning about transport and how it has changed throughout history whilst also considering what it might look like in the future;
Our year four children will be developing their understanding of where food comes from by looking at how farming has changed throughout history;
Year five will be comparing the physical and human geography of contrasting regions;
And, year six will be expanding their knowledge of natural disasters with a focus on volcanoes and earthquakes.
We are looking forward to hearing about the children’s new learning and sharing their outcomes with you.
As always, our children have returned to school smiling and quickly settled back into their classroom routines. As much as the staff enjoyed their Easter break, quite a few have remarked on how they missed the children. We had visitors from another school on Tuesday and straight away they noticed the calm atmosphere of the school.
Our reception children thoroughly enjoyed their trip to Wild this week. They had a great day meeting the different animals and the bird show was a huge success. The children and staff returned to school exhausted but very happy. The children were a credit to the school and their families during the trip and we are looking forward to taking them out again.
Earlier in the week, a member of our parent community kindly gave up their time to deliver an Eid assembly to the whole school. It is wonderful that our parents want to do this for our school and we truly appreciate it. It was a great opportunity for our children to be immersed in this important festival, and Mr Priest tells me there were lots of questions at the end.
There is a lot going on this term, including a few bank holidays. Listed below are some of the dates you need to know (this is not an exhaustive list, and individual year groups will let you know of other dates for your diary):
Monday 17th April - INSET
Thursday 20th April - Reception trip
Thursday 27th April - Hawthorn trip
Thursday 27th April - NEU strike action. Some disruption expected.
Friday 28th April - Apple trip
Monday 1st May - school closed due to bank holiday
Tuesday 2nd May - NEU strike action. Some disruption expected.
Friday 5th May - proposed date for Coronation celebrations
Monday 8th May - school closed due to bank holiday
Tuesday 9th May to Friday 12th May - Year six SATs
Wednesday 17th May - Friend’s of Olive Hill school disco
Friday 26th May - last day of summer term one
Monday 5th June - return to school
Tuesday 13th June - new reception intake meeting
Friday 7th July - Summer Fair
Monday 17th July - End of term reports distributed to parents
Friday 21st July - last day of the academic year
As some parents have asked, the children will return to school after the summer break on Wednesday 6th September 2023.
The NEU has announced that further strike action will take place on Thursday 27th April and Tuesday 2nd May. Due to the nature of strike action it is not always possible for the school to give you advanced notice of the likely impact of this. At this stage, we can confirm that years one, two, four and six will attend school as usual on Thursday 27th April. There will be restricted attendance in reception on Thursday 27th April. We will write to you on Monday, via ParentMail, providing as much detail as we can and up dates regarding unknown year groups and Tuesday 2nd May.
We hope that our families celebrating Eid have a wonderful three days and we look forward to hearing all about it on Monday.
Wishing everyone a lovely weekend.