Friday 8th January

Happy New Year!

Well, this is not the blog entry I thought I would be writing at the start of the spring term. What a start we have had!

Before I go into details about the frantic week we have had, I just want to say that I hope you all had a lovely break over the Christmas holidays. For those of you who had a visit from Santa, I hope you enjoyed unwrapping your presents. I had a new vacuum cleaner (yes children, as you get older Santa brings you items you never even knew existed as a child). It is a very nice vacuum cleaner. Miss Lee had a steam mop. Mrs Shinner had a new kitchen floor. Mrs Higgins had some new books and some nice jewellery. Miss Raphael had a dressing gown and slippers. Miss Best also had some pyjamas, with a penguin on, and she had a watch. Miss Walters received a hairdryer and a pizza cutter!

Back to this week…

On Monday we had an INSET day. In the morning, all of the staff were involved in virtual oracy training. This involved all of the schools in our multi academy trust (SVAT). Can you remember the names of each of the schools? After lunch, all of the staff had time to prepare the curriculum for the spring term. At this point in the day we believed that all of our children would be returning to the school building the following day. I even sent out a letter to our community confirming that we would be open for all of our pupils. Later in the afternoon we heard a rumour that Boris Johnson would be delivering a speech at 8pm, but we did not know what he would be saying. Anyway, we all left school that evening preparing to return the next day to welcome all of our wonderful children back. How wrong were we! At 8pm that evening Boris Johnson announced that schools would move to remote learning, until February half term. I quickly had to contact Mr Patel and ask him to send a text out to our parents and carers informing them of the change.

On Tuesday we all arrived at school ready to adapt our plans to remote learning. I simply do not have enough room in this blog to list all the tasks that we needed to complete. But what I will tell is that the super staff here at your school were amazing! Everyone worked together (whilst remaining apart) to start ticking things off our list. I am going to share something with you, whenever I ask the staff here at Olive Hill to do something, they always surpass my expectations. I asked them to create packs to send home to support your learning, and I am so excited about you receiving them next week. They are all lined up in the corridor at the moment and so much thought has gone into them. One year group even has soil in their pack! That year group will soon find out why. Whilst they were doing all of the above, we also had the children of critical workers with us, being with the children is always the best part of our day.

On Wednesday it started to snow, just as I left my house. By the time I arrived at school the snowflakes were getting quite big. I really love the snow, but as a head teacher it can make you worry as you need to ensure the safety of all the school users. We are very lucky at Olive Hill as we have Mr Weston who had already gritted the school grounds. Anyway, as I was pulling up to our new gates (that have been a bit temperamental) I noticed that there was a lot of damage to our fence and the safety barrier had gone from the pavement. Mr Weston was on our drive, looking at pieces of a car. Unfortunately, a car had crashed into our gates during the night. I am pleased to report that no one was hurt. So all of this had happened before 8am. The rest of the day we continued to be super busy and then the Secretary of State for Education gave his speech in the House of Commons. That left us all feeling a bit emotional. As always, we are absolutely committed to doing the best by our community.

On Thursday we had to write a long letter to our families, to keep them updated about the current situation (I do hope our parents and carers have read it). Mr Priest and Mr Patel were busy looking at how we could best support our families without access to IT equipment, and Mr Patel has not stopped since! I went out with our reception children at lunchtime, they were absolutely fascinated by the ice (some needed persuading not to try and eat it) and we also played a game of hide and seek. I loved my time with the reception children. It was a welcome relief from all the decision making, risk assessments and paperwork.

Today, Miss Richardson sent me a picture on my way to school. It was a picture of a pony on our bottom field. Guess what I did as soon as I arrived at school, I went to check that she wasn’t trying to trick me. Sure enough, there was a pony on our field. Perhaps the pony had heard about our awesome school and wanted to join us! It certainly didn’t like it when Mr Weston and Mr Brady tried to lead it away. We have a small farm next to our school, it turns out the pony had escaped from it’s paddock. Unfortunately, we are unable to keep it as a school pet. We also had more snow today. many of our children and staff have had great fun in the snow - I hope you have as well. Did you build any snowmen? We did. There is no better way to warm up after being out in the snow than having hot chocolate, so we’ve all had hot chocolate, marshmallows and cream today and a cookie. We felt everyone deserved it after adapting to so many changes in such a short space of time.

As you can see, our week has been exceptionally busy. We are really missing all of our community and we hope you are keeping safe and well at home. We are here to support you. you can phone the school office or you can email us. Adults, please email info@olive.dudley.sch.uk and children, please email children@olive.dudley.sch.uk. Thank you also for the support you have shown us, your kind words mean a lot and they are keeping us all going as we are faced with new challenges each day.

Have a lovely weekend all.

Stay safe.