Dear Parents
Another busy week! We had a lovely assembly from our Eco-warriors club on Wednesday for World Water Day. The club has been so active in helping us all think about being more eco-friendly in school and we are working towards an award. Thank you for your donations to the charity Splash.
WISPA update
We have received an update from WISPA (right) following their Someone Special stall last week. They raised £520 profit for both schools which is absolutely wonderful. Thank you to the committee for their hard work, we hope you enjoyed your gifts and had a very special day on Sunday.
WISPA is holding an Easter trail around the village for children to complete over the holidays. Tickets are £2 and can be bought from EventBrite, or from WISPA's stand at the school next Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning/afternoon. Prizes will be awarded on Friday 21st April, so please return your completed maps by Thursday 20th April.
Writtle Parish Council Poster Competition
In today's assembly I announced details of an exciting competition. The Parish Council has asked both the Infant and Junior School for help. 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.
Parents' Evening
Parents' Evening appointments will be held next week - please ensure you check your appointment time on ParentMail. There are no school clubs next week except Tennis on Monday afternoon and Yoga on Friday morning, so please make arrangements to collect your child at 3.10pm. We have Book Looks at 8.30am on Wednesday 29th March for Year One parents and Thursday 30th March for Year Two parents. We are also happy to put books out in the evening, please let us know if this is more convenient for you. Please do not bring children to parents evening appointments; there is no supervision for them. For children with a Person Centred Plan, appointments will be held the week after Easter on Thursday 20th April.
Home Instead Family Fun Day
This week our Year 2 children made some delightful Easter cards to be distributed to elderly residents at home who are being supported by the company Home Instead. Thank you to Mr Chapman for arranging this opportunity to connect our school with the elderly in our community. Home Instead is holding a family fun day at Writtle Sports & Social Club on Saturday 8th April, please see our Community Links page for further details, it's sure to be a wonderful event.
Word Aware
This week's word to develop the children's vocabulary is delicate, chosen by Squirrels class. We would be grateful if you would discuss the meaning of this word and use it with your children this week to secure their understanding.
Attendance
Attendance this week is 94.3% compared with our school target of 96%. Please continue to work with us on attendance. While it has improved, there are still too many children whose attendance falls below 90% at which point they are categorised as persistent absentees. The more that children are in school, the more progress they make. If your child's attendance has dropped to 90%, this is 20 missed sessions and is not far off half a day a week. We know that children get ill, particularly in the age group we serve, but we are noticing absence reported when children just feel a bit under the weather, or children who are really sick but have previous unauthorised absence for holidays, so have already missed many days of learning. We all want the children to achieve the very best they can. If you are unsure about whether to bring your child in, please talk to us, or bring them in and we will call you if they are unwell.
We look forward to seeing you at Book Looks and Parents' Evening appointments next week.
Best wishes
Helen Castell
Safeguarding
The Internet Watch Foundation has released a checklist to help mitigate the risks at home from the internet. To get hold of this guidance please follow the link below: https://talk.iwf.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.
Awards
SHARKS - Zara for a fabulous independent story using some magnificent WOW words. Ruby for persevering with her maths this week even though she's found it tricky.
DOLPHINS - Hollie for her amazing patience and perseverance whilst helping to put the new playground equipment back in its box - it wasn't easy!! Oliver for his brilliant independent maths - applying his knowledge to problem solving.
PARROTS - Isla T - Politeness she always goes above and beyond when her friends are upset to cheer them up and ensure they feel better. Willow - perseverance during P.E, she found shooting the basketball very tricky but never gave up!
TURTLES - Eden - brilliant independence and perseverance with her writing. She wrote a whole page of writing to describe a picture! We are very proud. Archie T - We are very proud of Archie for persevering in all subjects but particularly phonics and writing. Archie always works really hard and is writing lovely sentences with good finger spaces.
SQUIRRELS - Ruby - perseverance with her reading - well done! Anaya - independence in all her learning but especially with her writing this week. Great work!
FOXES - Khiara for independence when sounding out words and writing them. Finlay for always being polite to adults and his friends.
Year 2 News
Spring is officially here! We celebrated this by exploring life cycles in our Science lessons. In English, the children planned and wrote their own friendship stories inspired by the ‘Pip and Egg’ text. They tried to incorporate their science knowledge within the story as one of the characters. We have also looked at apostrophes and their uses. This week we have looked at apostrophes for possession. In addition to this, we have looked at SATS style reading comprehensions and been looking at strategies to help us work out the answers to some questions about a variety of texts. We are still providing opportunities for echo and choral reading to develop fluency, confidence and expression. The children have been practising their letter formation and cursive script. Please encourage your child to use this script at home if they are doing any writing. Don’t forget to let us know how you’re getting on with the white rose “1 minute maths app”. All of the children have been eco warriors this week and have created saving water posters as part of World Water Day. These will be put on display in our classrooms to remind children of water saving tips! Our exploration of the world this week focused on Europe. The children compared and contrasted France and the United Kingdom’s landmarks, food and even footballers! The children were really enthusiastic about this.
One week to go! This week we have looked at the characters in our book and described how Crocodile is a good friend. We explored our senses and imagined how we would feel and sense under the water. We have been measuring weight and mass using non-standard units of measurement. We discussed what the words heavier and lighter meant and measured mass using balancing scales. We designed our own boats in our sketch books using our knowledge of materials that float from Science. We have continued developing our basketball skills with Mrs Gowers too. We look forward to seeing you all for parents evening next week, or after Easter for PCP meetings!
This week we have learnt all about foxes and we enjoyed our poem 'The Fox'. We have found out where foxes live, the food they eat and all about their young. Our words of the week were sly and vixen and we used them in our 'Secret Stories'. We looked at 'Gaspard the Fox' website and enjoyed listening to the stories, we also learnt how to draw a fox and labelled it as well. This week in maths we have been practising the mathematical language of length and height. Lots of children wanted to use tiny or small rather than short/shortest/shorter. We have set a Tapestry Challenge for this so have a look. In phonics we have continued to practise phase 4 which is writing and reading cvcc/ccvc words like desk and trip and revisited the sound igh.
Have a lovely weekend!
Forest School
Dolphins, Tuesday 21st March
We started the day by lighting a fire, we managed to cook a few pancakes before the rain stopped us! The children had a go at using a flint and steel to see how to generate a spark to make a fire. This is a closely monitored activity in a controlled environment.
We thought we would make the most of a very windy day and fly the kite, this was a lot of fun. The treasure box had been buried again by the Year 1s last week so this had to be found again and re-buried, along with a new map for the Year 1s to find the next day. The children are very good at map reading and designing new maps.
Parrots, Wednesday 22nd March
We celebrated World Water Day by being around the pond. The children cleared the pond of any toys and rubbish and filled a container to see what creatures were in there. We wondered if the contents would change if we examined water from different areas of the pond. It did, there were more creatures where there is plant life. We did not see any sign of frog spawn yet though. We talked about the importance of water. The tree beside the pond also made some beautiful reflections on the water.
The afternoon was busy, finding the buried treasure, burying it and creating the map. Swinging in the hammock proved very popular too! The children sowed the pumpkin seeds as well as summer bulbs.
We talked about Tree awareness week, that we are now in spring and tried to explain the spring equinox.
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 Spring!
WISPA is holding an Easter trail around the village for children to complete over the holidays. Tickets are £2 and can be bought from EventBrite, or from WISPA's stand at the school next Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning/afternoon. Prizes will be awarded on Friday 21st April, so please return your completed maps by Thursday 20th April.
WISPA update
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