Friday 6th October

Happy Friday!

A huge thank you to everyone who supported Census Day on Thursday, we had lots of uptake for a school meal and some very excited prize winners! Please make sure you have booked a Parents’ Evening appointment, you know we will chase you if you haven’t. We always endeavour to have 100% attendance at these meetings as the partnership between home and school is so important. The children always look forward to sharing their learning with their grown-ups.

We have high aspirations for our children at Olive Hill, and we want them to be the best that they can be - including fantastic authors. Today, our year four children received their ‘Creative Writing Books’ and they were so excited. The books have been everywhere with them today, including outside. The children haven’t stopped talking about the stories they are writing and it was our year five and six children who inspired them during assembly this morning. To launch the idea of creative writing with our year four children, some of our year five and six children volunteered to share what they had done. With very little notice, and no time to rehearse, the children took to the front of assembly to describe what they were writing about and to read an extract from their own writing. Some staff were moved to tears as the children so proudly shared what they had written. The idea behind the Creative Writing Books is to give our children the freedom to write, without the pressure of all the rules that can be associated with writing. We just want them to use their imagination, and to write about the things that interest them - they can even include illustrations. Their creative writing books are not marked, but they can share them with an adult if they wish. The creative writing books are not your traditional school books, but fancy notepads. These fancy notepads are becoming hard to source on a school budget (we don’t buy them in bulk, as we like the children to have a selection to choose from) and my family are ‘fed-up’ of trawling various shops and supermarkets looking for bargain notepads! They will be very pleased to hear that the children now have them and we no longer have to keep looking (until next year).

We are encouraging our year four, five and six children to enter the BBC 500 Words competition. More information can be found by clicking on the link below:

Everything you need to know about 500 Words - BBC Teach

The competition is also open for younger participants, and we’d be delighted if our younger children took part as well.

Thank you for the continued support we have from our community. We have more and more parents coming forward to ask how they can support us as a school - volunteering to read with our children and offering their expertise. We are also keen to get parents involved in our enrichment sessions, please do speak to Miss Walters, Mrs Shinner or Miss Homer if this is something you would like to know more about. We will also be relaunching our PTA (Friends of Olive Hill) at some point during this academic year and this relies entirely on volunteers from our parenting community - if you feel you have the skills to take the lead on this, please let us know..

Wishing you all a lovely weekend.