Friday 4th March

Happy Friday!

We hope you all had a lovely half term break. The children have been enjoying telling us about their family adventures over the break, trips to the cinema seem to have been very popular. We had some special visitors to the school grounds over the holiday, two goats! You can see them in the blog picture nibbling away at our vegetation. These two rascals weren’t actually invited to our school, they escaped from the smallholding next door to the forest school area and have now returned. I wonder if they will visit us again!

It was great to have everyone back on Monday, and we no longer have quite so many restrictions. You will have noticed that the staff are no longer wearing masks - it is so nice for the children to be able to see when we are smiling (we smile lots because our children are awesome). We are in the planning stage of lifting all restrictions, whilst remaining mindful of the fact that Covid19 has not gone away. We are slowly introducing more mixing amongst our children and they are so excited to be seeing more of each other around school. It is important that we lift restrictions in a way that allows our children time to adapt and allows us to reintroduce measures should we experience an outbreak of Covid19.

As usual, this week has been very busy. On Tuesday I celebrated St David’s Day and I was thrilled to receive daffodils and welsh cakes from one of our families with welsh connections. Year two have had some special visitors in their classrooms in the form of paramedics. They have enjoyed learning about the job of a paramedic and were very keen to tell me about Miss Mullard lying on the stretcher! The biggest event of the week was definitely World Book Day, everyone looked absolutely fabulous in their costumes. The effort that everyone had gone to was amazing - both staff and children. Mrs Bird said it was the best wellbeing day ever and it made everyone smile. The highlight had to be the dinosaur costume worn by one of our year six children - it certainly entertained the younger children! We have used the vouchers to purchase books for the children that should be arriving sometime next week, please let us know if you’d prefer the actual voucher.

As part of our World Book Day celebrations, year four visited Long Lane library. They did get some strange looks walking down the road in fancy dress! We are hoping to resume library visits for more year groups in the near future.

Today you will have received communication regarding our new cashless payment system. As this is a brand new system we will experience some teething problems and I hope that you will be patient with us whilst we resolve any issues that may arise. Within minutes of the system going live we had parents paying for school dinners and Breakfast Club. We hope that the introduction of this system will support our community and we will continue to accept cash payments for those of you who prefer this method.

Early next week you will receive a letter with information regarding parent’s evening, we would encourage all parents to book an appointment to discuss their child’s learning with the class teacher.

We have a number of families, and year six children who arrive very early for school in the morning. If you are waiting for the school gates to open please can we kindly request that you stand to one side, therefore allowing pedestrians to walk safely without having to step onto the road.

I am sure you have all been watching the news and have deep concerns regarding the invasion of Ukraine. As a group of staff we have been carefully considering how we respond to the children’s questions and will continue to do so. For families who have children asking questions, the BBC Newsround website deals with the issues in a very sensitive manner and it may be something you wish to look at as parents to support you with responding to your child. I must commend the maturity of our year six children who spoke very maturely about the matter in a lesson about compassion earlier in the week. Our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine.

With only five minutes to go until the computer switches off, I wish you all a peaceful weekend.

Stay safe.