I can’t believe we are already 4 weeks in to the term! What a busy four weeks it has been.

Today is National TA Appreciation Day where we got the chance to thank our wonderful support staff for all that they do for our children. They were treated to tea and cakes in the staffroom as a small token of our huge thanks and appreciation for all that they do. It was also lovely for them to see the messages of appreciation from our families on Facebook.

As a school, we feel it is so important to develop leadership skills in our children and to give them a say in how the school is run. Last week, our new School Council were democratically elected for the year and what a great choice the children made! Their role will include a half termly meeting linked to our school values, supporting with charity and school events, greeting visitors to the school, giving out a School Council termly award and monitoring the class reward tokens.

As you may already know, we have a SCITT (School Centred Initial Teacher Training) and have trained many teachers over the years, some of whom now work for us. We currently have four student teachers based with us and we welcome them to the team: Miss Stead in Year 5, Mr Taylor-Smith in Year 4, Mr Rafiq in Y2 and Miss Bradley in Year 1. In addition to this, all the SCITT students will be visiting our school in a few weeks to enhance their learning on the teaching of reading. During these sessions our children will benefit from extra reading sessions with the trainees.

A letter came out last week detailing the clubs we are running this year. https://greetlandacademy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Clubs-letter-24-25-for-parents.pdf

Separate letters will be sent out for requesting a place on these clubs and we have refined our processes to make sure that as many children as possible get to attend a club over the school year.

I am thrilled to say that our KS2 gym roof is now repaired and we are able to have all our KS2 children back together for assemblies. It feels like a life time ago that we were all together in this way!

This week our KS2 children have been given the opportunity to use the amazing team building equipment that FOGS purchased for us. I know some of you got to try the equipment out yourselves when you came to open afternoons last year and you may recall our teachers having a staff training session using them also! The equipment is being used a lunchtimes to support our children in play and has proved to be very popular. Please watch out for communication from FOGS shortly about the events this term and a call for more members to sign up to help out. Without FOGS we wouldn’t have our iPads, library books at both sites and the team building equipment to name but a few of the things they have funded.

Calling all Year 5 parents- our feeder school , Brooksbank, has advertised their open evening. If you would like to go along and see for yourself, the open evening is on Wednesday 2nd October from 5:30-8:30pm.

Finally, if any of you know someone looking for a place in Reception starting next September, please direct them to our school office to arrange a tour of the school.

Wishing you all a lovely weekend.

Mrs Crowther