Friday 6th November

Happy Friday to you all!

This week has gone so fast! It has been a blink and you’ll miss it kind of week. I hope you all had an enjoyable half term break. Unfortunately, due to the fire break in Wales, I was unable to go away as I had planned. This meant I was able to stay at home, watch television, paint some furniture (badly) and pop into school to see how the building work was progressing.

Talking of building work…they have nearly completed our redesign of the front entrance, and it looks fabulous! Mrs Carpenter and Miss Lee are still waiting for their hatches to arrive, but have rearranged their desks in preparation. Unfortunately, we are not able to show off our new area at the moment due to Covid19 restrictions. The original space was very large and we have put a wall up to create additional room for working with small groups of children. It also helps to keep our children even safer with the added security of another set of doors. Our pedestrian gate has been automated to provide additional security during the school day and we will have new vehicular gates soon.

The Covid19 pandemic continues to cause disruption to our everyday lives and for the next four weeks we are facing another lockdown. The main difference being that schools will remain open. We are doing everything we can to reduce the risk in school and it is a huge additional layer of responsibility for all of the staff. Earlier in the week, we sent out a letter regarding ventilation in the classrooms. We are regularly monitoring this to ensure that our children are able to learn in a comfortable environment. We are not opening all of the windows around school, just a few in each classroom. Our corridors are very spacious and do not often contain children so we are able to keep the heat in that way. We have had a heating engineer out to the top classrooms, these rooms have under floor heating and it can be a bit temperamental. Every year, without fail, we have to spend a lot of money on some part or another. We want to make sure that it is all in working order as the temperature begins to drop. The EYFS and KS1 environments get a lot of the morning sun, they have been very toasty this week. If you are at all concerned that your child is cold, please send them to school in layers as detailed on the letter. Believe it or not, we still have children who try to go outside in a just a t-shirt - it makes me cold just thinking about it. I am on the gates with my winter scarf and I will be investing in a hat soon.

I am really looking forward to next Friday because I get to wear my pyjamas to school! Yay! I do hope that many of our children will also participate in our fundraising for Children in Need.

Have a great weekend everyone. We look forward to seeing all your smiling faces on Monday.

Stay safe.

Hannah Grasby20/21