Off To A Flying Start

It has been an exciting start to the academic year after a wonderful 2016-17.

The children quickly settled into their new classes.  We celebrated ‘Education Sunday’ at the beginning of the term at St Michael’s to give thanks for our local schools and pray for the new academic year, the school community and the year ahead.  As ever it has been very special to welcome in our new reception children – they are loving school and have already made awesome progress.  Our ‘Welcome Service’ in church on Wednesday was joyful as we officially welcomed and prayed for our new children and their families.  It was very special to hear each one of them individually introduce themselves to the school and their parents in song – testimony to how happy, confident and ‘at home’ they feel in the school.

The year started with a fantastic adventure residential for our year 5 & year 6 pupils.  This focused on team skills & team building, communication and going out of your comfort zone to achieve goals – the children were wonderful ambassadors for the school, they loved the experience and learned new things about themselves.

We have elected a new school council with last year’s year group representatives reviewing the applications for Chair, Vice Chair & Secretary & then interviewing the candidates – a great learning experience.  Each year group elected their new representatives.  The school council involves the children engaging with school decisions – a great way to learn about democracy and the responsibility of citizenship.

The children have learnt the importance of sharing & justice and the unfairness of the distribution of the world’s resources in celebrating Harvest in school – a very generous collection was made for Hucknall Engage Food Bank to support those in need in our community.

We marked Dyslexia Awareness week ‘Positive About Dyslexia’ and explored: overcoming challenges; how we are all gifted differently; interdependence; team work; the importance of developing all our gifts; and perseverance to achieve.

We love books.  Many children completed the ‘Summer Reading Challenge’ & have now embarked on the daily Reading Challenge.  We have also just held our Autumn Book Fair – it was brilliantly supported.

We have also launched ’Hot Chocolate Friday’ to celebrate achievement – it has been very well received by the children (it seems they like chocolate!).

We have also just been awarded a third ‘Gold School Games Award’ for our engagement in Sport, a ‘Stem Ambassador Award’ for engagement in Science Technology Engineering and Maths and our School Dinner Team achieved a ‘Food For Life’ Gold Award for quality.

A joyous and fantastic start to the year…and so much more to look forward to!