Newsletters

Message from Mrs Birch

This week, we enjoyed Team Pearl’s sharing assembly and hearing extracts from the Traction Man stories they have been writing. Recently, I have been really fortunate to see lots of examples of fantastic writing from across the school. I have particularly enjoyed reading the nonsense poems that the children from Year 4 have been creating and the work on Michael Morpurgo’s book Kensuke’s Kingdom that has been completed by Year 5. It is an incredible journey that the children move through from simple mark making in Nursery through to writing complex sentences in stories and non-fiction by the time they finish Year 6. We hope that you enjoy your child’s writing journey.

Allergy Update

This week, Mrs Jackson and I met with our Chair of Governors, Tracey Hunter, to complete our half termly review of safeguarding. The health and safety of all of our children is of upmost importance to us at Galley Hill. As such, we spent some time considering our approach to allergens.

We want to do all that we can to reduce the risk from allergens to our school community. As such, we have requested for some time that nuts / nut products are not brought into school at any time. A reminder that this would include any chocolate spreads that also contain hazelnut, such as Nutella. We do have children and staff with severe nut allergies and we need to keep them safe.

We know that many parents like to send in a small treat for the class when it is their child’s birthday. This is certainly not expected and no one should feel any pressure to do so. If you do wish to provide your child’s classmates with something, this should be a small, pre-packaged item with the ingredients clearly labelled. We will no longer be able to handout unpackaged or homemade items for birthdays.

If your child is diagnosed with an allergy at any time, even if this is mild, we ask that you please let the school know as soon as possible and check this is up to date on their Arbor records. Many thanks for your support with this.

Parent Code of Conduct

We would like to remind all parents that we have an expected Parent Code of Conduct that can be found on our school website: Parent Code of Conduct

Within it we state that we expect all parents and visitors to ‘Treat all members of the school community with respect – setting a good example with speech and behaviour’. This is absolutely essential as we are role models to children who are learning from our actions. We therefore ask all parents to think carefully about how they are speaking,

what they are saying and who they are speaking about while they are on the school playground. We want all of our children to feel safe and cared for within their school environment. Many thanks for your support with this.

Staff News

This week, we had confirmation that Miss Lewis has successfully completed her National Professional Qualification in Leading Teacher Development. This was a year long qualification whereby Miss Lewis studied and completed assignments around the theme of developing other teachers. In doing so, she also led an important project across the school around assessment. We are very proud of her achievement and I am sure that you will all want to join us in congratulating her. 

Open Classrooms

Just a reminder that our next open classrooms event is taking place 3:15pm to 3:45pm on Thursday (6th February). Parents are more than welcome to visit their child’s classroom to look at their learning in books and on display. While staff may be present in the classes to answer simple questions, this is not a time for detailed discussions about your child. Please make an appointment if you wish to speak to the teacher in more detail. We will be holding our next Parent Consultation on 12th and 13th March.

Sharing Assembly

Our next sharing assembly will be presented by Team Topaz on Thursday 13th February at 9am.

Team Amethyst will now be sharing their learning on Thursday 5th June.