St Michael & All Angels CE Infant School JANUARY NEWSLETTER 2019

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1 St Michael & All Angels CE Infant School JANUARY NEWSLETTER 2019 In this Issue: Mrs Daniel s Message Message from Revd Potterton Year R Robins Year 1 Woodpeckers Year2 Owls Local Author Visit Oaksfed School Athletics PTA Update Diary Dates Dear Parents/Carers, I hope you all enjoyed the Christmas holidays and a belated Happy New Year to you all! This term we have welcomed Mrs Mary Flynn as Head of Learning at St Michael and All Angels; she brings a wealth of experience to our team particularly in Early Years. We have also welcomed Mrs Jo Rigby at Copythorne where she will teach the Year R class one day per week. Sadly, Mr Ratcliffe our Site Manager had a nasty fall whilst out running and has severely injured his shoulder so will be off work for at least 6 weeks. This does leave us with a bit of a challenge should we experience snow or ice during this period and being able to grit all of our 3 sites. So if there are any parents who are able to help in such weather conditions, especially if you live within walking distance, please let the admin staff know, your help would be very much appreciated! On the subject of possible wintry conditions, whilst the children will be hoping for snow, we appreciate that this can cause difficulties for working parents including school staff. Our aim is to try and keep all our schools open if safe to do so and we have reviewed our snow plans accordingly. We will communicate via Parentmail as soon as possible if we are unable to open. We will

2 also put an update on our school website. In making any decision we have to try and get a member of staff to the school to assess conditions on site and wait to hear from all staff that they can safely get to school as many of them live a considerable distance away. When we have that information we then make the decision on whether it is safe for us to open. In the same way we have contingency plans, I would urge you to review your contingency plan as well. We fully appreciate that even if we manage to open you may not be able to get your children to school due to the local conditions where you live or you may want to wait to see if the situation improves later in the morning. Unfortunately, we are seeing a number of children who are regularly late for school. This interrupts their learning as well as the rest of their class. Please make sure your children are in school ready to start their lessons on time. If you are having difficulty for any reason please let us know so we can work together to try to support you and your child. Finally, we have a fantastic group of parents who have adopted children who meet together to share their experiences giving support and encouragement when needed. If you would like to join them, please let the admin staff know and they will put you in touch with a member of the group so you can find out more. Yours sincerely

3 Message From Reverend Potterton Wow! What a totally amazing Christmas we shared with the school. The School Nativity was simply beautiful and really enjoyed by all of us who were in St Michael s for the re-telling of the most wonderful story ever told! Whether blessing the characters for the Crib, singing Christmas songs in Collective Worship or just appreciating the effort staff and children made to ensure that the birth of Jesus was a living and present event, relevant to all of us, no matter our age or part in the nativity! It was especially wonderful having children from the school taking part in Crib Services in all three of our Parish Churches. We continue to look forward to welcoming the school to St Michael s on the first Wednesday of each month for our 'Collective Worship' featuring the 'Open the Book Team who visit school every Wednesday morning from local churches in Lyndhurst.. I want to remind parents and carers that you are welcome to join us and share in the children s worship. Free coffee is always available in the church in-between dropping the children off at school and the start of the short service which lasts no more than 20 mins. As a church, we know that whilst the school s inset days are necessary and important, they do present parents and carers with a challenge in arranging additional day care etc. We know that this can also be costly, especially when things are tight. Can we help? We would be willing to open the Church on all school Inset days from September this year offering a variety of learning experiences during school hours. This could be Music in the morning and LEGO Play in the afternoon after a packed lunch. We want to get it right and so invite you to me david.potterton@newforestparishes.com or text me on if this is something you feel would be helpful. If you would like to join the team supporting the day(s) I d like to hear from you too. There would be a nominal charge and numbers would understandably have to be restricted. Anyway, as we look from Christmas to Easter, the journey of learning and faith continues. All the Churches in the Benefice (St Mike s, Christ Church and All Saints, are thrilled and privileged to support the school in its passion for learning. Learning together continues to be both fruitful and fun! If you are thinking about a baptism service this year, in any of our Parish Churches, please get in touch with me, we d be pleased to chat with you about your plans. Keep in touch. David Revd David Potterton MA Priest in Charge Lyndhurst Benefice

4 Year R Robins Robins have been enjoying retelling the traditional tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. As you can see the children have had lots of fun acting out the story, reading books to their bears friends and drawing their own bears and giving them names. They have also been very creative making bear masks and singing the The Three Bears Rap.

5 Year 1 Woodpeckers The Woodpeckers received a very exciting package last week. It turned out to be an ornate picture frame, but the portrait of the Queen was missing it s a mystery! So we are working hard to find out about both portraits and the Queen. On Monday we visited a portrait gallery in our classroom and used magnifying glasses to help us become history detectives and see what we could learn about the past from the portraits. We are looking forward to welcoming our grown ups into our classroom on Wednesday 13 th February to share all our hard work.

6 Year 2 Owls Throughout our new project Great Explorers, the children will be learning how to be like Barry Butterfly. They will: explain and reflect on what they think is important and believe respect that others have different views & opinions to themselves begin to explain how something wonderful makes them feel understand why they might need stillness or space ask questions that may not have an answer appreciate that we are all unique and special. Passover is one of the most important festivals in the Jewish year. Passover is celebrated in Spring by Jewish people. Passover is celebrated by Jewish people, who remember how the Israelite people were freed from slavery by Moses. The story of Passover is in the Torah, the Jewish holy book. Passover is celebrated for seven or eight days. On the evening before Passover begins, there is a special service called a Seder. At the Seder meal there is a special Seder plate on the table. The children have been learning about the Passover and about the Seder and what the different foods represent. The children participated in their own special Seder service and tasted the different foods and thought about their meaning in relation to the Passover story.

7 Local Author Visit We were lucky enough to have local author Liam White pay a visit to our school just before Christmas. Liam spent time with each class reading his debut book Timmy The Lonely Christmas Tree to the children and talking about how and why he became an author. The children really enjoyed the visit and gave some lovely feedback about Liam s time with us. Here are some quotes from our Owls: It was a good story and the author was a nice man! It was an awesome story The illustrations were great, they were really careful drawing the pictures. I liked Timmy because he was nice to Billy the little Christmas tree. A massive thank you to Liam for taking the time to come in and see us and for helping make Christmas even more special for our children!

8 OAKSFED SCHOOL ATHLETICS Children from our three federated schools were selected to create two teams to take part in an inter-school athletics competition on Saturday 1st December at Testwood School. Four of our Owls were chosen take part and they were Ava, Monty, Wilson and Zack. They did exceptionally well and seemed to really enjoy the event. Charlie from Ace Sports ran the event and said the children did brilliantly. They came 9th and 11th but the main positive was the great team work and fair play they showed throughout, especially as they didn t know each other too well. - Charlie Here are some quotes from our four entrants: The relay race was great fun, we got to work in teams. - Wilson We saw our friends from our other schools. - Ava I made new friends there and really liked all the events. - Zack I liked all the running. - Monty Thank you to Charlie for organising the Oaksfed Teams and to the children for taking part, we are all very proud of what you achieved!

9 St Michael & All Angels PTA Update Following our first PTA meeting of 2019 we would like to say a huge thank you to all those who helped with the school disco, toy and book sale, school hall decorations, Christmas lunch, Christmas animal and wreath sale, children s Christmas shop, hamper making, and tea, coffee and cake sales at the nativity service. What a busy term! We hope you and your children enjoyed these lovely events and activities. Thank you for your generous donations through the raffle and other fundraising events. Collectively we managed to raise 1200 over the last term, which we hope to put towards some children s outdoor play equipment and reading books for the school. Upcoming events World book day - Thursday 7 th March further details to follow School Disco provisional date Friday 8 th March Baptist church Lyndhurst. Event organiser; Jodie. Quiz with fish and chip supper - Friday 1 th March. Event organiser; Debbie. PTA Theatre Trip further details to follow. Event organiser; Rissa Thank you for all your excellent fundraising ideas received through the questionnaire feedback, we will be discussing these in more detail at the next PTA meeting. The PTA would really appreciate any additional input you may be able to offer with planning and delivering upcoming events please come to the next PTA meeting Tuesday 5 th February 9:00am in the staff room. If you have made a suggestion or have a new idea that you would like to take forward and are unable to attend the meeting please contact us in person, via the mail box in the main playground or Lyndhurstpta@outlook.com Chair: Jo Vice Chair: post available Secretary: Tam Treasurer: Zoe Year 2 rep: Mandy Year 1 rep: post available Year R reps: Aga and Jo

10 Diary Dates Monday 28th January Tuesday 5th February 1pm Year 2 visit to Bartley CE Junior School to wath their production of The Lion King 9.15am PTA Meeting in the Staff room Wednesday 6th February 9.15am Family Service at St Michael & All Angels Church Wednesday 13th February Yr1 Celebration of work after drop off, more information to follow Thursday 14th February LAST DAY OF SCHOOL Friday 15th February INSET DAY, SCHOOL CLOSED Monday 25th February FIRST DAY BACK TO SCHOOL Tuesday 5th March Year 1 Trip to Beaulieu, more information to follow Wednesday 7th March World Book Day, more information to follow Friday 15th March Red Nose Day, more information to follow Half Term School closed Monday 18th February Friday 21st February