What’s On – Friday 21st April

Message from Mrs. Castell

Dear Parents

I hope you all had a lovely Easter holiday, it's good to see some nicer weather at last! As we begin a new term, our immediate thoughts and prayers are with the family of 2 former pupils, who experienced an unimaginable loss during the school holidays.  If you would like to support the family, you can do so here:  https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/the-khan-family.

Family Learning Time and Coronation Day

We have lots of events this term, so please ensure you read our communications. We always want to be helpful so please check our website for dates of clubs and events as we update this daily. Our next Family Learning Time will be on Wednesday 26th April at 8.45am. This will also count in lieu of Reading Mondays for May, as there are two consecutive bank holidays. We will celebrate the Coronation with a street party in school on Friday 5th May and children will be invited to wear red, white and blue non-uniform on this day. WISPA are also holding a Crown competition. For a suggested donation of £2, the PTA are royally inviting students to create a crown fit for a King or Queen of any kind. Let your imagination run wild!  All crowns should be brought in on by 5th May for judging, with a prize for the best crown for each class.

Attendance

I would like to thank all parents who have ensured that their children continue to attend school regularly. Good attendance is essential if pupils are to make expected or better progress in school. Attendance is reviewed daily and any pupils whose attendance is giving cause for concern will be referred to the Education Welfare Officer. Please inform the school office if your child is absent. If we are unable to contact you about your child’s absence, we may have to ask the police to call at your home to make a welfare check; therefore, it is vital that you communicate with us if your child is not in school. In particular if your child seems ok, please do not keep them home from school just to “see how they are”. We will always call you if necessary. Attendance this week is 94.1% against our school target of 96%.

Fundraising Day for Ellis

This Sunday sees the Family Fun Day for Ellis, a pupil at our school. Do go along to the Beryl Platt Centre from 11-4 for many events and activities including a bouncy castle, raffle, crafts, face painting, plus drinks and refreshments. We know the family are very grateful for your support.

Poster Competition - Final Reminder

A reminder about the Parish Council's exciting competition for both the Infant and Junior School - we haven't received many entries yet! 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 28th 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!

Word Aware

This week's word of the week is "drifting", chosen by Sharks class. We would be grateful if you would discuss the meaning of this word and use it with your children.

Clubs

Clubs begin in earnest again next week! Thank you for completing your booking forms for staff clubs. We will let you know the places that have been allocated on Monday morning. Staff clubs start after school on Wednesday 26th April.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Helen Castell

Safeguarding

Childnet contains a wealth of information about keeping children safe online.

The Government’s Emergency Alerts system is now live. It will contact people via their mobile phone when lives are in danger. Alerts are a loud, siren-like sound with a message. They are sent to compatible mobile phones within an area of risk. They don’t track your location, need your phone number, or collect personal data. Only emergency services can send them, and you can opt out. On Sunday 23 April 2023 there will be a national test of this system.

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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Awards

SHARKS - Molly for persevering with her setting description about a tropical island. Claudia for persevering with her guided reading this week and highlighting key answers to the questions.

DOLPHINS - Warren for inclusivity making a card to cheer up a friend who had broken their arm. Semyon for independent learning and settling into his new class so brilliantly.

PARROTS - Noah & Alyra for independently researching using the iPads.

TURTLES - Felix for showing great independence and concentration with his learning this week. Jack for independence in maths. He always worked so hard and we are amazed with his maths knowledge daily.

SQUIRRELS - Matilda and Lani for helping in the garden and for politeness from Miss M.

FOXES - Paige for persevering with her writing. Well done! Sophia for independence when writing tricky words on the iPad and trying really hard to sound out words in her reading book.

Year 2 News

Welcome back to the Summer Term. We hope you all had a wonderful Easter break and took the time to refresh and recharge your batteries. We welcome student teacher Mr Willsher in Dolphins class this term, we are already enjoying working with him!

We’re full speed ahead with exploring our new topic ‘A World Without Colour’. Our Reading and Writing will be based around the text ‘Grey Island Red Boat’ by Ian Beck. This is a short chapter book with a traditional story tale feel about it with a few unusual elements. Don’t worry, the drab Grey Island becomes much more colourful! The children are already enthused and intrigued. We have started a new Maths unit on fractions where we have introduced halves and quarters and the children have already made links with division. In preparation for the forthcoming Coronation, the children have learnt some facts about previous monarchs. We have looked at Queen Victoria and the children really enjoyed learning about her. The children were very excited to look for bugs on the Junior School field. This links to our new Computing unit ‘We are Zoologists’. This unit focuses on collecting data, classifying bugs and creating their own online chart.

Please click here for this week's home learning.

Year 1 News

Welcome back! What a great week back we have had. In English, we have introduced our new topic book ‘Marvellous Moon Map’. We have explored Neil Armstrong and facts about the moon. We used our imagination to think about the story before we saw it. In Maths, we have counted in 2’s, 5’s and 10’s and built arrays. We have made equal groups and the children have been so intrigued! We have also discussed what makes us healthy and discovered different ways we can exercise and eat well to keep our minds and bodies healthy.

Please click here for this week's home learning.

EYFS News

This week we have recited the poem 'Raindrops'. We have learnt how it rains and have found out about rainbows. We have read the story Elmer and the Rainbow and discussed how Elmer is unique and that we are all unique too. We then wrote about why we think we are unique, we have read lots of the other Elmer stories too. In maths we read the story of Noah's Ark and matched the animals in pairs so they could go into the Ark. We compared the weight of the animals using a balance scale and used the language heavier and lighter than. We also used some counting elephants to make repeating patterns.

In phonics we have been revising the Phase 3 phonemes, oa,oo (long) and oo (short). Foxes class really enjoyed Forest School and can't wait until next week. Don't worry Squirrels, it will be your turn soon! We will be sending a message on Tapestry to ask if anyone can help with some jobs in our garden, so look out for it!

Have a lovely weekend.

Forest School

Sharks - Tuesday 18th April
It was lovely to see Sharks back and we talked about how different the area is from the last time they were there. The trees have started to grow leaves, there are beautiful flowers everywhere and even the fruit trees have started to blossom and the strawberry plants are looking promising. We talked about what the trees and plants need to survive. We will be planting some seeds next week for the allotment area.
We had a lovely day. The highlight was flying the kite, it was the perfect windy day for it. The children made their own see saws from the balance beams that we have, there were three on the go at the same time. Some children helped to make a pine cone garland to decorate the area with, there will be a lot of craft opportunities now the weather is better and especially with the Coronation coming up!

Foxes - Wednesday 19th April
The Foxes were right at home in the forest, they were all embracing it! The weather was lovely and the children were shown around each area what the safety rules were of each area. We took note of what is around, as next week it will look different again. We had a mindful minute around the fire circle while eating a snack, to listen to how many different sounds we could hear. They met our resident robin and left quite a few letters for the forest fairies, so I hope they reply! Some children found the hammock really relaxing, it is in a great spot so when you lay down all you can see the trees above swaying and the sky.  We look forward to next weeks adventures!

Donations wanted!
We are after a few items to turn our polytunnel into Pixie Hollow (Tinkerbell), so if you have anything listed below or similar that you no longer need, we would absolutely love it!
• Tinkerbell dress
• bed canopy
• fairy lights
• flower garlands
• unused Girls' World head (hair styling head) - hair not necessary!
• basically anything Tinkerbell related for the tunnel

Thank you very much!!