What’s On – Friday 23rd June

Message from Mrs. Castell

Dear Parents

We had an incredibly successful Sports Day and my thanks go to all of the staff, in particular Mrs Scott-Simons, for organising the morning. We loved linking our team names to the school values and also the brilliant performance from our cheerleaders. Thank you to parents for taking the time to come along, all the children were amazing!

Summer Fete - Saturday 1st July 11.30am - 1.30pm, WJS playground

A plea for help at our Summer Fete next Saturday. We really need a volunteer for our Beat the Goalie stall, as well as people to help with face painting. No experience is required as we have stencils, so please offer a hand if you can! Our cheerleaders will be performing at 11.45am, so if your child attends Cheerleading club, please come ready for that time. Please make sure you bring plenty of loose change with you on the day for the stalls. Thank you for your donations today, the next dress down day is on Friday 30th June in exchange for sweets and cakes. Please don't forget to hand in your raffle tickets - there are some amazing prizes to be won, including tickets to the new GoApe at Hylands!

Year Group Performances

We look forward to the first of our end of year performances from Year One next Friday 30th June. Up to 2 family members are invited to attend - the children have been rehearsing all week and are very excited to perform for you! We will start at 9.30am. There will be a collection for Great Ormond Street Hospital at all performances. EYFS' performance is on Thursday 6th July and Year 2's Celebration Assembly is on Thursday 13th July.

Book Fair and Reading Monday

We're receiving lots of wonderful entries for our Book Fair competition! Please remember the deadline is Monday. All you need to do is email us a photo of your child reading in an interesting location. The best entry from each class wins a £5 book token to spend at the Book Fair, which is open morning and afternoon all next week, until Thursday morning. The final Reading Monday of the year will be on Monday 3rd July at 8.45am.

Chickenpox

There are a number of children absent with chickenpox this week, so please be aware of the symptoms and NHS advice. Children must stay at home until all spots have scabbed over - this usually takes 5-7 days. Please do not administer ibuprofen (Nurofen) to children with chickenpox, as it may cause serious skin infections.

Premature Aware Award

We are very proud to have received the Premature Aware award. Suzy Newman and family are holding their annual fundraising event tomorrow for The Smallest Things charity, from 10am - 4pm at 9 Paradise Road, Writtle. The money raised enables the charity to carry on doing the amazing things they do for so many families and to keep spreading the word to more schools! There will be a secondhand sale, a cake stall, tombolas, ice lollies and lots of games so please go along if you can.

Word aware

This week's word is enthusiasm, chosen by Parrots class. Please try to use this word at home and discuss its meaning with your child.

Attendance

Attendance this week is 92.9% - our school target is 96%. Please remember that from September 2023 the doors will open at 8.40am and close at 8.50am. The extra five minutes ensures that we are meeting the expected length of the school week from September 2023.

Have a lovely weekend.
Helen Castell

Safeguarding

The UK Safer Internet Centre has tips, guides and resources to help keep your child safe online.

The National Fostering Group has published a page on their website, aimed at informing adults about the top causes of childhood accidents and how to prevent them.

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 - Prezlee for independently completing his maths! Alex for independently reading Lila and the Secret of Rain with expression.

DOLPHINS - Stanley for always being such a great role model and demonstrating all of the HIPIP values. Eva for her hard work in RE and persevering with care and attention on her picture of God.

PARROTS - Isla T for independently learning her lines for the show and being very expressive! Dylan for persevering with his reading and building his confidence to read more fluently. Henry H for independently taking part in the Cheerleading performance and being fantastic at it!

TURTLES - Isla for persevering in her learning, trying her best and working really hard. We are very proud of her! Naomi for amazing listening this week and great contributions to class discussions. We were really impressed with her knowledge and confidence in talking about the different types of plants in Science. Eden for working super hard with her learning this week. She has listened very well and joined in with class discussions. We are very proud of her!

SQUIRRELS - Lani for inclusivity, always being such a good friend! Matilda for independence and always being so helpful to everyone in class. Phoebe and Mabel D for their perseverance during the Sports Day activities.

FOXES - Elliot for perseverance when blowing bubbles with his hand and being so friendly to the new parents and children. Oliver for persevering when writing his name using the correct formation and size.

Year 2 News

Another warm and wonderful week has slipped by. We can’t believe how quickly this half term is going! We are so proud of how our Y2 children were great role models and supported other children in their teams on Sports Day. In Maths, we have been revisiting column addition and subtraction. In our Topic work, the children have been practising echo and choral reading of our book ‘Lila and the Secret of Rain’ and we have focused on reading with expression. Transition into the Junior school has started. We were kindly invited to the year 5 and 6 show ‘Star Warts’. The children thoroughly enjoyed the play and we were impressed with the wonderful singing and dancing. Rehearsals for our celebration assembly are underway. We will let you know next week of any costume requirements. Don’t worry, they shouldn’t involve purchasing anything new.

Our Y2 visit to Hylands park is happening on Tuesday. Children may wear comfortable clothes as we will be doing some sports activities in the morning and mindfulness activities in the afternoon. We will send a parent mail on Monday of any reminders needed in prep for our visit.

Please click here for this week's home learning.

Year 1 News

We have had such an exciting week! Our caterpillars have arrived and we have been learning about their life cycle. We have loved practising for our show and are very excited to show you what we can do! In Maths we recapped our place value knowledge and started to learn about Money. We have learnt to recognise coins and notes and will continue with this next week. In English we have finished reading our class text ‘Grandma Bird’ and developed our ability to answer comprehension questions about a text. The children have also planned their own stories ready to write next week.

Finally, the children had an amazing time at Sports Day and thoroughly enjoyed showing you their PE skills! Thank you for all your support and hard work as always. Enjoy the sunshine this weekend.

Please click here for this week's home learning.

EYFS

What a busy week we have had! We have enjoyed learning about butterflies, our caterpillars have grown so much already! Foxes class went to Writtle Library yesterday and enjoyed two stories and got to look around the library and at the books. It's Squirrels' turn next week. We loved Sports Day and working in teams, thank you for all your cheering and support, we hope you enjoyed it too. This week in phonics we have continued to revise phase 3 and have practised reading and writing sentences containing these phonemes. In maths we have been working on doubles and halves and number bonds to ten. Our new starters for September visited this week and the children were amazing - so friendly and helpful!

Please keep sending us your book fair competition entries to parents@writtleinfantschool.com.

Have a lovely weekend.

Forest School

Tuesday 21st June - Dolphins
We celebrated National Insect Week, the annual celebration of “little things that run the world”, with a round of bug hunting. It had been a bit soggy in the morning, so we didn't find many insects but we were so grateful for a little rain. It was also the National Week of Play this week, and we had lots of physical play, especially with our new nest swing and the other new physical equipment.

Wednesday 22nd June - Squirrels
This was a shorter session in the afternoon for both groups due to Sports Day in the morning, however we still had lots of fun. Where the children get their energy from we never know! There was an amazing find under a log which ended our day perfectly - 2 baby newts! These were the first newts that EYFS had seen, so they were very excited. I wonder what they will find next week?