September Newsletter

HOUSE CAPTAINS AND HOUSE AMBASSADORS

Well done to all of the children that stood up in front of their classes or houses this week to make their House Captain or Ambassador speeches - you all did brilliantly and all the teachers are very proud of your ambition. Sadly, there are only so many spots available so you couldn't all have the job, but some of these places were won by a very small margin because the competition was so strong. We welcomed our new pupil leaders in assembly on Friday and here they are proudly smiling just after receiving the news and their brand new badges. For those of you that are still hoping to take on a pupil leadership role this term, the school librarian job is currently up for grabs and there will be eco-committee roles and hopefully digital leaders/Seesaw ambassadors to come soon too, so keep an eye on your Seesaw messages for more information.

YEAR 3 HOUSE AMBASSADORS

YEAR 4 HOUSE AMBASSADORS

YEAR 5 HOUSE AMBASSADORS

YEAR 6 HOUSE CAPTAINS

RUGBY IN BLOOM

A group of children from our eco-committee attended the Rugby in Bloom ceremony at the Benn Hall this week to collect our SILVER GILT award for the second year running. They got a chance to meet the Mayor of Rugby and have a tour of the Mayor's parlour in the Town Hall while they were there too. They were wonderful ambassadors for our school with their excellent behaviour and wonderful manners.

WORKING WITH THE MENTAL HEALTH IN SCHOOLS TEAM

Last week, we welcomed Annabel into school, who is our allocated Mental Health in Schools worker, along with a colleague, to talk to the children about mental health and anxiety in assembly. They then carried out an audit of our school to see where they can focus their efforts as they work alongside us and our fabulous Children and Families team this year to continue to develop the pastoral and mental health support for our AFJS pupils.

If you would like to see the video about anxiety that they shared with the children in their assembly, please click this button below

If you have any queries or concerns about your child's mental health, you can always speak to Sam or Lois from our Children and Families team - you can call the school office or email the Children and Families team at pastoral2421@welearn365.com

HOME LEARNING

Here is an extract from our home learning policy that shows the expectations for home learning each week:

Your children should have brought home their logins for TT Rockstars and Spelling Shed this week to enable them to get started on their home learning assignments. They have reading books from our school library to read and can also read any other books from home to achieve their target amount of reading time each week.

We offer incentives for pupils to complete their home learning, with a whole reading reward afternoon (decided on by the children) for any children that are regularly recording 4+ nights of reading in their reading diaries. There is both a whole class reward of extra break plus individual rewards of house points for pupils completing work on TT Rockstars and Spelling Shed.

We understand from past experience that home learning is a contentious issue and there is such a difference from one family to the next in turns of what they want and expect for home learning for their child. Some families find it a huge burden and the cause of many arguments, while for some families, there can never be enough homework set. We have focused on the key skills of times tables, spelling and reading because we know that these areas are the ones that benefit from regular practice and over-learning and also that they are the key skills that underpin almost everything in the primary curriculum and beyond. If you would like to read our home learning policy in full, to understand the reasoning behind our home learning offer in more depth, you can click the button below to access it on our school website.

If you have any problems accessing the home learning through these programmes at all, please do not hesitate to speak to a member of staff. We may be able to offer the loan of a device or support with internet, support with logons, time for your child to complete work at a lunchtime etc if you just come and have a chat with us.

PARENTAL ENGAGEMENT

We love to have parents and families in to school to share with you all what your children have been up to. Every class does a class assembly per term, where the children can share some of the many things they have been doing in class with their parents and carers. This term, these assemblies are on a Tuesday afternoon from 2:50pm and we warmly welcome any family members to come along. Please see the dates below.

We also hold a termly open afternoon/morning for the parents/carers of each year group, where you can come in to school and take part in some curriculum activities alongside your child and have a look at their books and see what great learning they have been doing. This term, we will be holding these open afternoons in the week beginning 27th November on the following days:

PARENTAL COMMUNICATION

Following parental feedback from last year's end of year survey, we are also currently working on ways to improve the home-school communication and keep parents even more informed about what is going on in school. We have met as staff to discuss ways we can improve our use of Seesaw and you will have hopefully seen increased content posted on your child's account this term. We are also hoping to open up the messages function to allow parents to address small queries directly with the class teacher during certain hours and we will send further details about this once we have it fully up and running. We will also be using the announcements feature to share reminders about things like bringing in forest school kit, going on a trip and bringing in books to change for example. Please bear with us while we work on this and ensure that we bring in this new change whilst still considering the work-life balance and workloads of staff, but hopefully once we have it fully sorted, this will really help you to feel even more involved in every day school life

NEWSLETTER CHANGES

In another effort to keep you updated on things, we are adding a second newsletter to our schedule. This main newsletter will continue to be published approximately every 4 weeks but then we will also be sending out a BWI (Behaviour, welfare and inclusion) newsletter two weeks later, also approximately every 4 weeks. This will be more focused on keeping parents updated on our behaviour policy, the work of our Children and Families team, how we support pupils to have a HEALTHY BODY AND MIND and much, much more. This means there will be a newsletter almost every 2 weeks to keep you abreast of things in school and in our wider community.

NEW ADDITIONS TO THE FARMERS FAMILY

Meet our newest FARMERS! Peggy and Meggy, our school chickens! They have been a very welcome addition to our Farmers Family and children and adults alike are enjoying greeting them in the mornings, checking for eggs, helping to keep them fed and watered and much more! It seems that they are quite calming to sit and watch for 5 minutes and many children enjoy sitting near the coop during their breaktimes and watching them. They have started venturing out of their coop for short periods of time now, after some intensive recall training over the past two weeks, although Peggy is not quite in the swing of this yet! Meggy runs the minute she is called, whereas Peggy just pretends she hasn't heard and carries on pecking away at the grass. Once they are fully settled and confident, we hope to involve the children much more and allow them to roam free on school grounds as much as possible. Please keep an eye on your messages for a consent form to agree to your child having contact with our chickens and to inform us of any issues that contact with them may cause over the next week to allow us to meet the risk assessment requirements in place for safe hen-keeping.

Diary Dates

WEEKLY DIARY DATES

• Every Monday 3:20 - 4:20 Young Voices rehearsals
• Every Wednesday 8am - 8:30 John Dove Tang Soo Do
• Every Wednesday 9:30 - 10:30 Children and Families Team Coffee Morning (see flyer below for more details)
• Every Wednesday 3:20 - 4:45 Cookery club 3:20 - 4:45 (but not weds 27th Sept)
• Every Friday 1pm - 3pm Forest School for year 3 and Forest School club after school

UPCOMING EVENTS - more information will be shared closer to the time but keep these dates in your diary

• Mon 25th - Friday 29th September Y6 Condover residential
• Monday 9th October at 6pm - PTA AGM - all welcome
• Tuesday 10th Oct - Hats on for mental health day
• Fri 13th Oct - PTA quiz night
• Tues 24th and Weds 25th Oct - parents evenings 3:30 - 6
• Weds 25th Oct - Y5 author visit at Macready Theatre
• Thursday 26th Oct - Spooky disco at 5pm for y3&4 and 6pm for y5&6
• wb 30th Oct HALF TERM
• Fri 24th November - TRAINING DAY - SCHOOL CLOSED TO ALL PUPILS
• Thurs 14th Dec Y3/4 Christmas play - one from 2pm-3pm and one from 6pm-7pm
• Fri 15th Dec - PTA Christmas Fair - TBC
• Tues 19th Dec - Christmas lunch and Christmas jumper day
• Weds 20th - Y5&6 Carols evening from 6pm
• wb 25th Dec and 1st Jan - CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
• Monday 8th Jan - TRAINING DAY - SCHOOL CLOSED TO ALL PUPILS

Messages from the office

• Kidzone breakfast and after school club is very full this term so please let us know in plenty of time if your circumstances change and you are hoping for your child to start attending. At this moment in time, there are some days where we have no spaces at all and some children are on a waiting list.
• Kidzone payments are now online ready to be paid - remember that these payments should be made in advance.
• After School Clubs will start wb 2nd October and the list of choices should come out by the end of next week. There are still spaces for children in Y4,5 or 6 to join Young Voices rehearsals on a Monday after school too, and these have already started. Just drop the admin email a message if you would like to add your child in to these rehearsals.
• Individual music lessons will start next week. Text messages should have been received if you have a child that already plays or has expressed an interest in starting this term, with further details.

SCHOOL LUNCH ORDERING

Please remember that lunches must be ordered in advance to enable the kitchen to cook the correct amounts. If you have not placed an order by 9:15am, a dinner will not be coooked for your child, as the kitchen will have already got food production underway by this point. It is parental responsibility to ensure that lunch provision is organised for your child. Of course, we don't want the children to go hungry, so we do our best to help. We run a check every morning and office staff will make contact with the parents/carers of any children that have no packed lunch and no school meal ordered, in plenty of time, to ask you to bring in a packed lunch. We can sometimes organise an emergency lunch as a one-off, but we cannot guarantee what your child will get, because the Stir Foods staff must ensure all those that had pre-ordered get their choice first. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask and remember that you can bulk order the meals quite far in advance to help make sure there is always a lunch ordered for your child and to save you having to remember to log in every day.

Here are details of some local activities we have had shared with us recently that may be of interest to you.

Please remember that we cannot vouch for any of these providers, we are just sharing information that might be of use or interest to our families that has been sent to us.

Healthy Body and Mind - Support for all of our Farmers Families

This is the last time you will see this section on the newsletter as we will be hosting a new newsletter at the end of this month. Until then, here are just a few reminders of ways to get support if you need it.

You can email our Children and Families team at any point if you want a chat about anything. Sam and Lois have a wealth of experience between them and can usually help in some way or signpost you to somewhere or someone that can. Contact them by calling the office or by emailing them directly at pastoral2421@welearn365.com

Warwickshire's Children and Families Team always have a number of workshops on offer, on a wide range of topics, all free of charge - click here to see if there is anything may be useful for you https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/warwickshire-children-and-families-17595309993

If you or your child are experiencing a mental health crisis, you can contact the Rise Crisis Team by calling 08081 966796 and selecting 'option 2' at any time of the day or night. Please note that it is an advice-only service overnight from 8pm to 8am. In an emergency call 999.

If your child is struggling with school-based anxiety, please take a look at this webpage from Young Minds with lots of information and advice for parents https://www.youngminds.org.uk/parent/parents-a-z-mental-health-guide/school-anxiety-and-refusal/ 

The Family Information Service phone line is a freephone number to enable anyone to contact them for support. You can call them on 0800 408 1558 with anything - even if they can't help, they may be able to point you in the direction of someone who can!