The Courier

Dear Parents

As always, it was great to see all of the children coming back into school with smiles on their faces after the half term break. If nothing else, it is good to change routines for a short time and recharge the batteries ready for a new spell of learning in the classrooms.

The week has gone calmly and smoothly here in school, with lots to engage the children and keeping teachers busy as well. Of course, today's world book day tends to ramp up the excitement levels somewhat, but it's always wonderful to see the children enjoying themselves and hopefully inspiring a love of reading at the same time. I will give you some brief highlights of the week gone by, although I'm sure you will be able to find out more detail in the rest of the Courier as you read on.

The Year 5 children enjoyed their trip over to Mary Arden’s Farm early in the week, although it was a chilly outing by the sounds of it. It was also lovely to see so many parents coming in to escort their children to the quizzing in the IT suite before school. One special highlight has to be the success that the girls enjoyed at the ISA Netball tournament at Malvern St James on Wednesday. In a tough competition with lots of competitive netballing schools, they managed to battle through to the semi-finals and secure a third-place finish. This means we have qualified for the national finals, which is an achievement in itself. I will be looking to clear the diary as much as I can to attend next Friday’s finals which just so happen to be hosted locally at Rugby School.

Over the week and for the next two weeks we have six evenings of parent consultations, and as always it is a great opportunity for me to meet and greet lots of you and also for you to hear key information about the progress of your children from their teachers. I hope you find the format of these meetings helpful and we have done as much as we can to provide a calm, settled environment for them to take place in by spreading them over more evenings. Along with report writing, this is a substantial commitment of teacher’s time and forms an integral part of the teaching and learning circle. As always, we are always looking to finesse and improve events such as these, and we will be doing the same once again after these meetings as we start to look ahead to next school year.

In my assemblies I often like to talk about exciting things happening outside of the school, and help the children try to look up from their own worlds see a bigger picture. There were two wonderful celestial events to discuss this week with the appearance of the aurora borealis in many parts of Britain right down as far as Kent, and the beautiful conjunction of Jupiter and Venus that was apparent in the sky during the later part of the week. I hope you got a chance to see them too.

With my best wishes for a calm and restful weekend.

Joe Thackway
Headmaster