Lane End Primary School

January - Newsletter 11 (6th January 2015)

Dear Parents/Carers,

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas.

We look forward to an enjoyable and rewarding 2015.

Curriculum

We aim to plan an exciting and stimulating curriculum for your children with a lot of the work linking together in topics or themes. This makes the learning more meaningful for your children as they can make links between subjects. Knowing your child’s theme should help you talk to them about their work. Sometimes there is just one main theme for a term and sometimes more. The themes for this term are listed below.

There is a link to more detailed information about each year group’s curriculum on our website in the ‘Our School’ – ‘Curriculum’ section. An overview of the curriculum for your child’s class for this term will also come home soon.

Thank you for supporting your child at home, it really does make a tremendous difference to their education. Children should be reading each night and completing their homework on time. Please also remember to regularly log on to our VLE and the web-based learning tools we subscribe to such as ‘Curriculum Visions’ and ‘Espresso’ to get the most out of the online learning available to your child.

Clubs - A letter about clubs for the term will be coming home this week. Clubs on this week are: Junior Sports Stars (multi-sports - Tuesday and football - Thursday), Choir (Wednesday), Gymnastics (Wednesday) and cross-country (Friday).

PTA

 We have our first PTA meeting of this term on Wednesday (7^th January) from 7:30pm – 8:30pm – everyone is welcome. A letter went home before the holidays about a ladies ‘swishing party’ (a chance to have a clear out and get a whole new wardrobe without spending a fortune) on Friday 16^th January starting at 7:30pm. Please return your form and £5 entrance fee donation for a ticket which includes a glass of wine or soft drink.

Tickled Pink and Green for Growth

I have spoken to the children in assembly today about a new marking strategy the teachers are going to be using – tickled pink and green for growth. The aim is to make it easier for the children to spot where they are doing well and what they need to do to improve.

Highlighter pens will be used to indicate where the children are doing well and meeting or exceeding the objective (in pink for ‘tickled pink’) and where there is something that can be improved (in green – ‘green for growth’). There will be opportunities for the children to improve their work and it may be that some of the growth areas will be a useful target for the children’s target/challenge book (Year 2 to Year 6) or next step target on the working wall (Reception and Year 1).

We aim to challenge all of the children at the right level for them and plan work to challenge them all appropriately - this marking method should help to give the children even more chance to use their ‘Growth Mindset’ and move their learning forward based on what they need to do to improve.

Dinner changes – if you’re planning for your child to move on or off school dinners please can you give school three days’ notice at least so that food can be ordered or cancelled in time. Thank you.

Please do check your child’s book bag/bag for letters etc so that payments and slips are received on time and help get them organised for clubs/music lessons etc so that they have the equipment they need on the right day! It’s amazing how many children want us to phone home because of forgotten equipment and it would be really helpful for everyone if they had it in school when it was needed. Thank you for your help with this.

Reading for Writing Week – We have an exciting theme week planned for straight after the half term holidays (a change of date to the one previously advertised) and the whole school will be working on an inspiring project which will involve improving their writing through their reading: looking at the style and vocabulary an author uses, their grammar and punctuation, the structure of a non-fiction text or getting inspired by their stories. Reading at home makes a really big difference to your child’s achievement – please help by hearing your child read and supporting a love of reading at home. Thank you.

We aim to be approachable and work in partnership with parents, so if there is anything you wish to discuss, please do not hesitate to come and talk to us.

Yours sincerely,  

James Twigg