Wednesday 17th June
Happy Wednesday!
Families, please make sure you have read our latest letter (dated 16.06.20). You will find the letter on our website and it contains information about the current situation in school. If your child is in nursery, reception, year one, year six, or you are a keyworker then you MUST complete the online booking by Friday 26th June if you wish for your child to return to school prior to the summer holidays. After this point, we will not be able to accommodate any more children into these groups.
Today we welcomed back our nursery children. It was lovely to see them confidently coming into the school environment. We only had a small group, they enjoyed their new environment and quickly built relationships with the staff members. I look forward to seeing them again tomorrow.
Our nursery and reception children have seen the biggest change to their environment. We had to take away their colourful rugs and replace with PE mats (we can easily clean the PE mats); we had to put more tables into their environment so they each had a separate place to sit; we had to mix our keyworkers for reception and nursery; we had to move nursery into part of reception and some of reception into nursery; we had to remove the toys that couldn’t easily be cleaned; we had to remove their dressing-up clothes (and I know how much they love to dress up) and we had to change some of their school adults. Despite all of this, the children have been exceptional. They have adapted straight away to their new environment and quickly built relationships with the staff. They love having their own place to sit - it makes them feel like a grown-up! They love having their own individual stationary packs and they are now playing with different toys and new friends. How awesome is that! We are so proud of you all.
This is only a short blog today. Once again Mr Weston (who has been very busy painting our large hall today) is waiting to lock the school up for the night. I am running a bit late as we had our first virtual professional development meeting today. We call them PDMs (another initialisation) and, in normal circumstances, we have them every Wednesday evening in one of the classrooms around school. Tonight we all joined using Microsoft Teams, some people even joined from home. I am very nosy and like to see what people’s houses look like inside, it does slightly distract me from focusing on the training. This special PDM was delivered by Mr Bashir who is a member of our LGB (local governing board). Mr Bashir works at Halesowen College, he has lots of expertise - particularly in safeguarding, so he delivered some of our safeguarding training for us. I will tell you a bit more about safeguarding in a future email.
Not only are we proud of our nursery and reception children, we are proud of you all. We can’t wait to have you all back with us - fingers crossed for September.
We miss you. Stay safe.