What’s On – Friday 12th May

Message from Mrs. Castell

Dear Parents

We have had a wonderfully sporty week! Thank you to Mrs Scott-Simons for the following report:

Year 2 Sports Update

Our 3 Tees Cricket Finalists: Raury, Bobby, Annabel, Alex, Carter, Amy, Albie and Sophie

It’s been another busy sporting week here at WIS and we were blessed with the weather too, as the rain held off thankfully. Firstly, a massive congratulations to our 3 Tees cricket team, who won their area final and are now the Chelmsford representatives, heading to the County finals in June (date tbc). All eight members of the team once again proved what skillful, competent cricketers they are, as well as displaying super teamsmanship and politeness towards others. We are hugely proud of them; Miss Wakeling and I couldn’t stop smiling!

On Wednesday this week, ten lucky footballers had the opportunity to be involved in a friendly five- a-side mini football festival at Colchester United’s Stadium. The children displayed fantastic football skills, scoring lots of goals and embracing the experience of playing on such a fabulous pitch. Well done to all involved, you were amazing.

Library Visits

In other news, we had the first of our class visits to the library on Thursday. Parrots class had a fabulous time, for many it was their first visit to the library. Mrs Soden explained how to get a library card and how to borrow books. The children then ate their snack in a mini-picnic on the village green. Dates of subsequent visits are as follows:

Turtles: 18 May
Dolphins: 8 June
Sharks: 15 June
Foxes: 22 June
Squirrels: 29 June

Summer Fete

The WISPA/WJSPA Summer Fete will be held on Saturday 1st July, 11.30am - 1.30pm, please save the date!  We desperately need volunteers to help run the stalls, so if you can spin a tombola, serve a drink, cook a burger or hook a duck, we would really appreciate your help. The more people there are to help, the shorter the shifts will be, so you can get back to enjoying the fete!  We also need at least 2 large barbecues if anyone has one to lend? Finally if you are a business-owner who would like a stall at the fete, or if you run a club that would like to do a demonstration, please contact the school office and we will direct you to the organising committee. Thank you so much, it is a brilliant family event and our biggest fundraiser for the school.

National Numeracy Day, Wednesday 17th May

Next Wednesday is National Numeracy Day. We invite everyone, children and parents alike, to develop their confidence with numbers and brush up on their maths skills. There are some great resources on the National Numeracy website, including this document "Help Your Children to Love Maths".

Word aware

As part of our commitment to developing vocabulary with our children, Turtles class has chosen "observe" as their word of the week. We would be grateful if you would discuss the meaning and use it in conversation with your children.

Attendance

This week's attendance is 93.8%, compared to our school target of 96%.

Enjoy your weekend. Hopefully we'll see some more sunshine!

Best wishes
Helen Castell

Safeguarding

As you may be aware, we use the PANTS rule in school when discussing what is private. A reminder that information can be found at https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/support-for-parents/pants-underwear-rule/

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 - Frankie T for inclusivity. She always makes sure younger children are okay on the playground. Albie for inclusivity. Mrs Scott-Simons said he was an amazing team player during football this week.

DOLPHINS - Joe for his inclusivity for working so collaboratively with others and Max for his perseverance and care in all of his work this week. Also Isabelle for being wonderfully helpful in assisting during class cheerleading lessons this week.

PARROTS - Adonise for independently decoding CVC words, she has persevered! Alesha for being inclusive as she always ensures her friends are able to join in during group work or on the playground

TURTLES - Ava for inclusivity and kindness. She wrote a lovely card for another child's mum. Artie for perseverance with learning how to hula hoop in his gym trail group. Miss Wakeling was so proud!

SQUIRRELS - Luca for inclusivity, helping a friend join in a game and Mabel D for perseverance with her reading.

FOXES - Leo for persevering with writing his name using the correct formation.
Ivy for being more independent at school, great job for putting on the dressing up outfit yourself!

Year 2 News

We are so proud of the children this week. They have shown great resilience and perseverance and managed to complete the majority of the SATS. Next week will be used to complete the SATS so we can get back to normal. This being said, they have loved participating in our Eurovision themed week. We have created cheerleading routines to some of the songs, made some very colourful bunting, European fact files and learned to speak some different European languages. The activities will continue next week. We were also proud of those who attended the football festival at Colchester stadium and our cricketers who have reached the Essex final.

Click here for this week's home learning and important reminders.

Year 1 News

Welcome back after yet another bank holiday weekend! We hope you had fun celebrating our newly crowned King! We have finished reading Marvellous Moon Map and discussed what we liked and did not like about the text. We dressed up as the characters from the story and acted out parts of the story. We discovered fractions of shapes and quantities and looked at halves and quarters. We now know what the job of the numerator and denominator is. We described the weather and observed weather changes, we then created our own weather report to monitor how the weather changed over the week. We developed more of our dance to ‘We are the planets’ and added some of our own cool dance moves. We continued to improve our tennis skills with Mrs Gowers and will be ready for Wimbledon any day now!

Please click here for this week's home learning.

EYFS News

This week we have learnt the poem 'Sliced Bread'. We talked about the words 'slice' and 'loaf' and what they mean. We found out how bread is made and then wrote some instructions for how to make toast. We really enjoyed making toast and practised the skills of spreading and slicing the toast into quarters, Some of us tried honey or strawberry jam for the first time. We made some bread too and had to work out how we could share the loaf between us. Some children were excellent at doubling! We read the 'Little Red Hen' story and talked about the characters and where the story was set. In phonics we revised the phonemes ur, ow, oi and looked at the tricky word 'you'. In maths we practised working within ten and finding different ways to make 10.
Have a look at our Tapestry Challenge this week, we would love to see the pictures and videos!

Have a great weekend.

Forest School

Sharks - Tuesday
A very muddy forest school.
• we released the tadpoles into the pond, we had to clear the pond first as the whole area had to be strimmed and cut down ( with most going into the pond!) so after the tadpoles had acclimatised to the water temperature they were released
• due to the wet weather there were so many snails, we found 3 different species ( milk snail, garden snail and white lipped snail)
Some great snail facts were told to us by some children, one fact was quite incredible, a snail has 14,000 teeth!!!
• as it is such a damp area it is perfect for funghi and mushrooms to grow, the children are aware to leave them all alone, we found quite a few field mushrooms,
Wednesday - Foxes
A very very muddy day following the storm during the night. The digging area had turned into a water area, the children painted the fences and were playing in this area nearly the whole time.
• we stood by the pond to see if we could spot any tadpoles, the water was so clear, we saw two swimming around and could even see worms at the bottom and other pond creatures, hopefully we will be seeing froglets around the pond in the future
• home grown chard was sown into our herb area
• a pop up restaurant in the mud kitchen was serving delicious potions
On both days activities were alongside the ninja line, swings, hammock, polytunnel for quiet colouring / drawing, playhouse, mud kitchen, various bug hotels with bug lists, gardening, balance beams etc.