What’s On – Friday 31st March

Message from Mrs. Castell

Dear Parents

As we reach the end of another term my thanks go as ever to you, our wonderfully supportive parent body for working so well with us to achieve the best for our children. Thank you to all our staff, our dedicated teachers, our committed LSA team and our office team for their hard work and support. As we look towards the summer term and my final term, I will continue to work closely alongside Mr Taylor and Mrs Wilson and our governors so that there is a smooth handover for September.

It was lovely to see so many of you at parents evenings and the book looks and I thank you for all of the positive and supportive comments received on those nights.

Teddy Lympics

Thank you to Mrs Scott-Simons, Miss Wakeling and Mrs Glennie who accompanied a team of Year One children to the Teddy Lympics on Wednesday. They were praised for their enthusiasm and behaviour and we are very proud of them.

Poster Competition - Reminder

A reminder about the Parish Council's exciting competition for both the Infant and Junior School. Can you design a poster that advertises Writtle? Share with everyone what makes it special? You might like to draw pictures of your favourite things, or take photographs and add them to your poster. How you create your poster is entirely up to you! Posters could feature the Green, the duck pond, school activities, hobbies like Scouts and Brownies, sports at Paradise Road, in fact anything that families do in the village. All we ask is that the posters are no bigger than an A4 piece of paper and that you put your name and age on the back of it. Please bring your finished poster to the school office by Friday 21st April. The Parish Council will judge the winners with book tokens awarded as prizes and the winning entries will be used to advertise our village! For the grown ups in the village - please see our Community Links page for details of how to become a Parish Councillor. A number of councillors are stepping down this year and the Parish Council would love to hear from applicants who are keen to play a key role in the village. Elections will be held in May.

Community Links

Please check our community links page for lots of interesting activities during the Easter holidays.

Next Term

All of the key dates for the summer term are on our website. Booking details for staff clubs are now live, please check ParentMail for the staff clubs for Year 1 and Year 2. We have written to you separately about Forest School lessons next term, which begin with Sharks and Foxes class.

Library Door

You may have seen our wonderful new library door at Parents' Evening. The brilliant Olivia M, now in Year 3, drew an amazing sketch for us in the style of Quentin Blake. We were all completely bowled over by the result. With huge thanks to one of our parents, Stuart Brick at Signs Express, her drawing has been transformed into a vinyl wrap for the door. We are all absolutely delighted with the finish and will be looking to update our classroom doors in a similar fashion. Watch this space!

Word Aware

As part of our commitment to developing vocabulary with our children each class will be choosing a word of the week and we will share one with you. This week's word is, appropriately  enough, "downpour", chosen by Foxes class. We would be grateful if you would discuss this and use this with your children - let's hope the weather doesn't give us too many examples!

Attendance

Attendance this week was 94.3% compared to our school target of 96%. We will continue to work in partnership with parents to improve attendance next term.

I hope you have a lovely break for Easter. The children return on Monday 17th April. Enjoy the WISPA Easter trail over the holidays, thank you to the committee for organising this event!

Best wishes
Helen Castell

Safeguarding

The child accident prevention trust has useful information on avoiding accidents at home. Their website can be found on https://capt.org.uk.

We all have a duty to safeguard the children in our care and if the school suspects or knows that a child is at risk of significant harm, we will make a referral to Social Services. The school does not investigate any disclosures that children may make, we are a referring agency. Procedures on safeguarding from the Government make it clear that all staff should operate with an ‘it could happen here’ approach to any concerns they may have. If you have any concerns about a child please telephone the Essex Child and Families Hub on 0345 603 7627.

Notices

  • Please do not walk your children across the staff car park, it is not a thoroughfare and is very dangerous to cross. Thank you.
  • A reminder that you can email our Chairs of Governors, Matt Coffey and Esther Burton, at any time at chair@writtleinfantschool.com.
  • If anyone has any spare bird-feeders or teapots, we would love to hang them in the trees for Forest School!
  • As we have children in school with life-threatening allergies, please do not send products containing nuts into school, or egg-based foods such as egg mayo, scotch egg, omelette, frittata etc.
  • Teachers cannot check the class email during the day. Please send urgent messages to parents@writtleinfantschool.com.
  • We love to share awards, medals, trophies, even anecdotes from children’s achievements outside of school. Please hand them to me or email parents@writtleinfantschool.com for assemblies on Friday.
  • Diary dates and school events can added from our website to the calendar on your phone. Click on your chosen list of dates from the Links section and then click export at the bottom of the page.

Year 2 News

The last week of the Spring Term was full of fun activities! The highlight being our Victorian school day. The children (and staff) remained in character all morning. You will be pleased to hear they were all extremely respectful and enjoyed playing the part of Victorian school children. They practised handwriting using chalk on slates (black sugar paper), chanted their 2, 5 and 10 times tables and recited the Lord’s Prayer. Many thanks for completing the History detectives questionnaire. We had a huge range of responses from all age groups and enjoyed hearing some memories from your school days. The children then looked through the questionnaires and discussed the responses in groups which they then presented to the class. As it was a google form, we were able to display pie charts and graphs to illustrate your responses.

Easter is almost here and the children enjoyed rewriting the Easter Story as a booklet or comic strip. They also practised SATS style arithmetic and reading comprehension. The children have loved their PE lessons this half term and have enjoyed Gymnastics. We are so proud of how brave some of the children have become and many have faced their fears. They have loved using the wall bars every week and have been practising their skills of jumping, balancing and rolling. We have also had a basketball match in their classes where they impressed us with their coordination, dribbling, passing and shooting skills. We are so proud of their hard work this term and hope they all enjoy their Easter.

Please click here for this week's home learning.

Year 1 News

Happy Easter! What an amazing term and it has gone so quickly. Thank you to all those that attended Parents Evening, it was so lovely to discuss how much progress your children have made. We look forward to meeting those with PCP’s after the holidays. This week we have wrapped up reading out topic book and wrote our own "blurb" to persuade readers to read ‘How to find Gold’. We explored volume and capacity and it was so tricky! We enjoyed measuring the capacity of different containers using cubes. We had such a fun day today making our boats out of recycled materials and completed some lovely Easter activities. Have a lovely and relaxing break and we will see you after the holidays!

Please click here for this week's home learning.

EYFS News

This week we have enjoyed learning about how plants and flowers grow. Our poem was called 'The Little Seed' and we enjoyed sowing our own seeds. Thank you to those of you who sent some seeds in. We read the story of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' and we measured some beanstalks and compared their height. The children all know to say shorter now! We enjoyed our Easter egg hunt and we have made Easter chocolate nests and some Easter crafts too. The children will bring them home today. We have carried on with phase 4 in phonics and we have been reading sentences with some of the phase 3 sounds in. Please keep reading as much as you can with your children and practising their words and sounds.

We hope you have a lovely Easter and we are looking forward to seeing the children next term!

Forest School

Dolphins, Tuesday 28th March
Unfortunately the rain did not stop all day but we stayed out as long as we could and even had to get the hose out at the end to hose down some children that had been rolling in the mud, with some children telling us it was the best Forest School day ever!!

Parrots, Wednesday 29th March
We toasted marshmallows on the fire and restocked the bug hotels ready for the holidays and gathered all the wood we could find to store and dry out ready for our return.

We observed the trees and wondered how different they are going to look next time the Dolphins and Parrots will be out there! The trees are just starting to show the signs of spring.

Happy holidays to you all, both classes have been amazing.

If you have any items of "treasure" that you no longer need, we would love these for the children to dig up (fake dinosaur bones, gems etc). Thank you! Happy Easter!