What’s On – Friday 5th May

Message from Mrs. Castell

Dear Parents

What a wonderful day we have had celebrating the Coronation in school! The children's crowns looked absolutely amazing. Congratulations to Lottie, Mabel D, Samuel I, Artie L, Hettie and Joe P for their winning creations. We held a special assembly this morning with a coronation ceremony and we all sang the National Anthem. The weather prevented lunch on the playground, but we still held a street party style lunch with takeaway boxes of fish and chips and a special coronation cupcake!

School Communications

We appreciate how useful Whatsapp groups are for parents to communicate between themselves, but this week we have dealt with a number of communications from parents querying incorrect information that was circulating in a group. Please refer to our newsletters, websites and numerous reminders on ParentMail for the correct information.

3 Tees Cricket

Miss Wakeling and Mrs Scott-Simons are so proud of the twelve Year 2 children who attended the 3 Tees cricket competition at Parkwood Academy on Wednesday. Both teams played incredibly well, displaying great skill and sportsmanship as well as proving to be fabulous team players. Both teams won 4 out of their 5 matches (there were only 2 runs between the game they had to play against each other!) resulting in an overall 1st and 3rd place, as it all comes down to who gets the most runs! Our winning team will now move on to next week’s area final at Writtle Cricket Club. There was an amazing atmosphere at the competition and we thank those of you who were able to come along and support the children - it’s such an exciting game to watch! Well done to all of you - you were amazing!

Library Blinds

If anyone is able to offer help to install our library blinds, we would be very grateful! We have dual blinds which offer privacy and blackout functionality but they are a little complicated to put up. Is there someone out there that can help us?

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 "celebrate", chosen by Parrots class.  We would be grateful if you would discuss this and use this with your children.

Attendance

Attendance this week was 95.4% compared to our school target of 96%.

Enjoy the Coronation and the Bank Holiday weekend!

Best wishes

Helen Castell

Safeguarding

A recently published video by Financial Times films gives an important insight to the impact of social media on our children and our family life.

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 perseverance with her maths at home. Leighton for inclusivity. He was an amazing team player during PE, making sure everyone got the ball. Hettie for amazing independence and perseverance with her maths this week.

DOLPHINS - Isabelle (inclusivity) for taking care of a friend who needed cheering up and Ozzy for independence in his computer work together with helping others around him who needed support.

PARROTS - David for politeness and being such a kind new member of Parrots! Lowen for independence, solving some awesome division number sentences using pots and dots

TURTLES - Amy was very polite thanking all the adults for taking her to the competition. Charlie for being so brave this week and for persevering in maths. Archie J for persevering in writing. He took his writing home to write up in neat and the Turtles team are so proud! Finley for his amazing maths work yesterday morning, completed before 9am!!

SQUIRRELS - Stellan, Milo and Martha for independence when making a wonderful dinosaur egg display and labelling all the exhibits!

FOXES - Elliot for being more independent when writing words, you can do it! Chloe for being inclusive and always so helpful.

To all twelve of our 3 Tees cricketers who played so brilliantly at Wednesday’s competition. Raury, Primrose, Alex, Hettie, Albie, Carter, Annabel, Bobby, Sophie, Franklyn, Cienna and Amy  showed amazing perseverance, even when they were totally exhausted! We’re so proud of you all!

Year 2 News

Well done to our amazing Year Two cricketers! We were so proud to pick up 1st and 3rd place in this week’s competition. You are all fabulous and your skills and sportsmanship were excellent. You represented the school so well. We have had a lot of marvellous maths this week. We started with a fabulous fraction lesson involving biscuits where children had the choice to nibble a half or 2/4 of their biscuit. They were then amazed when they realised that in fact a half and 2/4 are equivalent. It certainly helped them understand this concept. We also looked at finding and recognising ¾ of a shape or quantity. Our marvellous Maths continued by reviewing telling the time for o clock, half past, quarter past, quarter to and even telling the time in 5 minute intervals. Our Coronation themed day included creating a timeline of different British monarchs, finding out why this Coronation is so important and researching our new King. Everybody looked amazing in their red, white and blue outfits and amazingly creative crowns. We hope you enjoy the Coronation and Bank Holiday celebrations.

SATS start next week so please make sure the children are well rested and have had a good breakfast. When the children aren’t participating in the SATS, we have organised a range of exciting Eurovision themed activities for the week!

Year 1 News

Welcome back after a lovely bank holiday weekend! On Tuesday we had a super fun P.E day as we had Mrs Gowers in the morning and dancing in the afternoon. We looked at characteristics of the characters in our topic book ‘The Marvellous Moon Map’ and used them to describe the correct character such as the words: adventurous and cautious. We learnt how to share objects into equal groups and focussed on dividing. The children persevered and worked super hard to solve the division number sentences. We looked at the four seasons and discussed what is similar and different between the seasons and found out we are currently in Spring. We also learnt about the coronation and some information about King Charles. We had fun celebrating the King’s coronation with our street party lunch. We hope you have a lovely weekend celebrating the coronation!

Please click here for this week's home learning.

EYFS News

This week we have been learning the poem ‘I Have a Little Frog’. We have enjoyed learning about frogs and their life cycle. We have been reading the traditional tale ‘The Frog Prince’. We have made our own story maps to help us remember the story and we have been writing about the story. Some of us even wrote the story! We have been busy today preparing for our Coronation celebration. We have made bunting, cards and crowns. We enjoyed dressing up in red, white and blue! this week in Phonics we have revised the phonemes ar, or and ur we have also looked at the tricky word ‘you’. In maths we have been looking at the number 10 and looked at all the numbers to 10, we have talked about doubles/halves/odd and even numbers.

Have a lovely long weekend!

Forest School

Sharks - Tuesday 2nd May
Very busy day. Thank you so much to a child from sharks class bringing in a few of his tadpoles from his own garden for us to enjoy, we will be watching them grow and releasing them into our own pond when they are ready. Here are some of the things we got up to on Tuesday:
• made the tadpoles a temporary habitat
• planted a pumpkin seedling and made a dead hedge using sticks to protect the seedling ( more to come)
• planted the strawberry plants
• found a gorgeous caterpillar that was hiding in one of our covers that we had to move so we made it a new home and monitoring it closely
• had a look at some nests that were donated by a tree surgeon, talked about the importance of not littering as plastic was found in the nests
• talked about the changes in the area, the trees now have their bright green leaves with tiny helicopter seeds, talked about what makes the leaves green
• word of the day - Chlorophyll ( green pigment in leaves and plants )
As well as the usual activities available.

Foxes - Wednesday 3rd May
As their topic is about frogs the tadpoles were very popular. What we got up to:
• lots of mint and ginger tea, the children enjoyed cutting and using herbs from the herb garden to make different teas (obviously none were actually consumed)
• we made some beautiful daisy and dandelion chains
• the hammock was very popular this week
• looked at the some nests that were donated to us and talked about the importance of pollution
• getting to know our trees and their names - word of the day - Sycamore
As well as all other activities available.