Lane End Primary School

Dear Parents/Carers,

Anti-bullying Week

Next week is national anti-bullying week and we will be working on ‘Saying No to Bullying’ in assemblies and class time during the week. Each class will also produce an anti-bullying charter. We will not tolerate bullying in school and will be reinforcing the message to the children that we are here to help and that they need to go to an adult if they feel that they or someone else is being bullied so that we can take action. This year’s national anti-bullying slogan is ‘Stop and think – words can hurt’.

Remembrance Day – Poppies will be on sale for the last day tomorrow and we will be observing the two minute silence at 11am. There is a ‘wall of remembrance’ display at Cheadle Hulme United reformed Church on Swann Lane which our Year 6 class have contributed some work to. The class are also visiting the church on Friday morning and will be able to talk to veterans, linking to their work on World War 2. We held an assembly about Remembrance Day for all of the children on Monday. 

PTA

PTA Christmas Fair

 The PTA Christmas Fair is on Saturday 3^rd December from 12 – 2:30pm. Please look out for raffle tickets

 which are coming home to sell today or tomorrow – there are lots of fantastic prizes.

  Non-Uniform Days

 We are having 3 non-uniform days for the children in exchange for something for the Christmas fair:

 Week One (Friday 18^th November): Please could children bring in a Children’s Tombola Prize,

Week Two (Friday 25^th November): A bottle for the bottle tombola (any full unopened bottle as a

 donation, e.g. bubble bath, olive oil, wine, sauce etc.)

Week Three (Friday 2^nd December): Cake or Chocolates (home-made cakes would be particularly

 lovely!).    Thank you very much for your support.

  Christmas Craft Day

The children will be making Christmas crafts in school on 1^st December to sell at the PTA Christmas Fair.

 The money raised from these stalls will go directly to each class to buy resources chosen by the class. This means that the children will have a fun economics lesson with, hopefully, some profit and something to show for their efforts! We will name each child’s piece of craftwork so you can buy your own child’s piece if you would like to.

Can you help at the Christmas Fair? – If you are available to help at the Christmas Fair, please let us know. You can do this by emailing Sam Stansfield on tonyandsam@tiscali.co.uk, phoning her on 0777 3054036 or returning the reply slip on this newsletter to school. Any amount of help is much appreciated – half an hour of your time can make a big difference to the smooth running of the fair. You don’t need to have come to PTA meetings to help – just let us know that you’re available and we’ll be able to let you know which stall you could help out on etc. Thank you!

PTA Annual General Meeting – Thank you to everyone who came to the meeting. This year, the PTA chair and secretary role are going to be shared by Kate Godfrey and Bev Sangster and the Finance role will be undertaken by Sam Stansfield. Thank you very much to everyone who volunteered and a big thank you as well to Sally Hindley who has done such a great job as PTA finance officer for the last 4 years.

Children in Need – Friday 18^th November

 Week One of the non-uniform days is also the date of Children in Need. So, like last year, as well as non-uniform and a tombola prize we are also inviting children to bring in a one pound donation to Children in Need to have their face painted with spots at breaktime (as Children in Need has a spotty theme again this year)! Children can also come in spotty clothes as part of the non-uniform day if they would like to. We hope that you can support this worthy cause.

 Golden Time and Behaviour

As you hopefully know from the literature that we send home, the children are rewarded for their good behaviour during the week with 30 minutes Golden Time – a fun time when the children can choose what activities they would like to do. Children get their 30 minutes of Golden Time if they stick to all of our Golden Rules throughout the week:

• Do be kind and helpful
• Do be gentle
• Do listen
• Do work hard
• Do be honest
• Do look after property

(Our Behaviour Policy with more details is also available on our website in the ‘Parents’ section)

If a child breaks the Golden Rules they can lose Golden Time. This is normally lost in 5 minutes blocks for minor incidents and in larger amounts if the member of staff feels that the behaviour warrants this. It is always the behaviour that we disapprove of and not the child and therefore we aim to praise and reward good behaviour. 

We aim for excellent behaviour at Lane End and the high standard of the children’s behaviour and engagement is regularly commented upon by visitors to the school – I know that parents also want their children to learn to behave well. We were very pleased to see that in our most recent parents’ questionnaire there was 100% agreement with the statement ‘I believe the school achieves good standards of behaviour.’ 

Despite this, we never want to be complacent and are always looking for improvement. One way we feel we can do this is by working even more closely with parents on the children’s behaviour. Most of the children keep to the Golden Rules each week but may occasionally lose some of their Golden Time – we know that the vast majority of the children will learn from this, which is exactly what we all want. However, we want to have a more defined system of letting you know if your child is regularly missing 10 minutes or more of their Golden Time so that we can work together to help improve their behaviour.

For this reason we are going to have the following system:

• If your child has lost 10 minutes or more of their Golden Time for three weeks in a row then the class teacher will send a note home to you informing you of this along with the reasons for the loss of Golden Time (there will be a reply slip so that we can make sure that this has been received).  
• If 10 minutes is lost for a fourth week in a row then the teacher will give you a ring so that you can discuss it.
• If your child is still losing 10 minutes or more Golden Time by the fifth week in a row then I will give you a ring so that we can discuss ways forward.

We hope that, in this way, all of the children will value the Golden Rules knowing that this information is systematically shared with home, and that if there are any children who are repeatedly missing their Golden Time that we can tackle it together. We really hope that you agree that this system will give you an early identification of whether you need to be talking to your child about their behaviour in school so that we can work together to help all of the children learn for next time. We will, of course, still let you know if there is anything else that we think you should know.

Further to this, Mr Toyne is currently working with the Pupil Forum to find ways to make Golden Time even more special. One of the Pupil Forum’s suggestions was for children to bring in unwanted games from home to add to our Golden Time stock – everyone thought that this was a good idea and we would very much appreciate any good quality games that you no longer want and could send in (that could be played in 30 minutes!). A lot of the children like the element of choice about Golden Time but another suggestion was to have some more organised activities to take part in during Golden Time, e.g. a sports competition. So we have also started thinking about ways of integrating other options into Golden Time.

Curriculum Visions

All of the children now have access to an exciting new curriculum website called ‘Curriculum Visions’ via our VLE. We have now subscribed to this site (after a month’s trial) and it has a huge range of online texts across all different topics and subjects for primary school aged children.  If you scroll down a bit on the VLE you will see the Curriculum Visions button (as shown above). You then need to log-in with the username and password as shown on the button: lane.end    SK87AL

It is definitely worth having a look at and now we have the full subscription there is also a lot of multi-media content to access too – videos on topics which relate to the books etc. We hope that you and your child enjoy using it and find it useful.

The feedback link is still available on the VLE – if there is any content which you are finding useful or if you’d just like to give us some general feedback on the VLE, please click on the link. It should only take a couple of minutes. 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

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PTA Christmas Fair Help – Reply Slip

Reply Slip – please either send this slip by or contact Sam Stansfield from the PTA on tonyandsam@tiscali.co.uk or  0777 3054036 if you are able to help at the Christmas Fair – thank you.

Name:                                                                        Child’s Name:                                               Class:

Contact Number:

I can help on Friday 2^nd December in the afternoon to set up the fair (the hall will be available from 1:45pm, please say when you will be able to help):    Yes / No    Time:

I can help on the morning of the fair (Saturday 3^rd December) to help set up (school will be open from 9:00am, please say when you will be able to help):    Yes / No    Time:

I can help during the fair on Saturday 3^rd December to help on a stall:   Yes  / No    Time:  

(We will need a lot of help during the fair, even if it is for half an hour – please say when you can help from and to and someone from the PTA will let you know how you can help).

Thank you very much to everyone who is able to help.