Newsletters

Newsletters 2021-22 Friday 8th October No.3

Deanshanger Primary School (@DeanshangerS) | Twitter

This weekend, we look forward to playing a part in the village's special events. As you join in the Scarecrow Trail, please pop down to school too if you can. We will be collecting, and showcasing, a selection of beautiful sunflowers. If you have made one at home, please come and share it with us at this time. The sunflowers will be displayed in the school hall as a long-lasting display for our new Sunflower Award - a special way to recognise the special attributes of Mrs Robson.

Following our focus on harvest and thinking of others, we are also keen to collect food items for our community fridge. Donations of dried pasta, rolls, tins, toiletries and cereal, would be very gratefully received.

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday, wherever possible, between 11.00 am and 1.00pm.

Thank you so much for helping us to prioritise safety outside the front of the school. We have had lots of feedback to suggest that you have noticed a positive difference — this is the result of everyone pulling together, thank you.

We will continue to monitor the situation very carefully and put the cones out to try and keep areas clear. Please be kind if we ask you to find a safer place to park as this is purely to keep everyone safe not to make your morning more difficult than it needs to be.

Don't forget to book your child's ticket ASAP and by Wednesday 13th October at the latest.

Reception and KS1 children will stay in their school uniform and will probably wear their coats too.

KS2 children are invited to come in their warm home clothes, but will probably be best wearing coats too!

Collection for the first disco will be at 4.30pm from the main front gates (by admin). Entry and exit for the KS2 disco will be from the same front gates.

Chair of Governor Updates

Well, another 2 weeks have gone by already and I hope you are all well and getting on with life as normally as possible. The governors have been reading lots of information about school life and preparing for our FGB meeting on the 11th October.

I met with Mrs Rice last Thursday for a catch-up on the latest news re various items such as how the staff are, COVID, finance and the curriculum. I also shared brief feedback on the staff survey that the governors sent out

I took part in a Zoom seminar run by Governor Services for Chairs and Vice-Chair's on Tuesday where we had presentations on Early Years Framework, Health and Safety, safeguarding and Governor visits. These are very valuable exercises in sharing experiences with other schools.

On Wednesday, I joined a virtual assembly with a theme of Harvest, it was a lovely presentation by an outside agency — Bridgebuilder.

One of our governors, Mr Geordie Stewart, has reluctantly had to stand down due to a change of job. I wanted to thank him for his support and involvement with the school and wish him luck in his new career.

This weekend is the Scarecrow Trail and the school will be involved in collecting food for the Community Fridge and inviting children to make sunflowers to display as a tribute to Mrs Annette Robson our bursar who recently passed away.

Finally, can I remind all parents that you can contact me by email ChairofGovernors@deanshanger.northants.sch.uk if you want to raise any issues or ask questions.

Have a good weekend and stay safe.

Thank you

David Aaronson

Chair of Governors

Reading

As always, it has been a busy start to the term with reading across the school. Our younger children in Reception, Years One and Two have been using Huxley Horse Box and news of a new reading challenge is in the process of being organised to share.

The rest of the school continues to be engaged with Accelerated Reader. Competition is very tight! The reading trophy has already left Mr Gregory's classroom once this term!!!!

Our overall school reader is currently Zayne Acharia in Year 4 Peregrine Falcon Class with almost 800,000 words. Brandon Clark (Year 5 Snowy Owls Class), Harry Maynard (Year 5 Rockhopper Penguin Class), Olivia Clark (Year 6 Peacock Class) and Layla Sherburn (Year 6 Puffin Class) are closely following.

At this moment in time, Year Six Puffin Class are narrowly leading the way. There is literally a six-thousand-word difference between them and the other Year Six class. Who knows who will lead by the end of the week?

Julie Atkinson, our school librarian, has shared this information with us. We very much hope you can support our village library.

Deanshanger Village library is now open as follows:-

Wednesday 10am-1pm, 2pm-5pm
Friday 10am-1pm, 2pm-5pm.

The Friends group, staff and volunteers are working towards re-instating this as the great community hub it was pre-March 2020.

The craft activities planned are:-

3:0pm - 4:30pm Friday 8th October Bookmarks to celebrate Libraries Week

3:30pm - 4:30pm Friday 29th October Halloween Crafts, e.g. witches' hats and wands.

3:30pm - 4:30-pm Friday 5th November Bonfire and firework collage pictures and bonfire and firework chalk pictures on dark background paper.

3:30pm - 4:30pm Friday 12th November Remembrance crafts focusing on poppies and other relevant WWI and WWII images e.g. Spitfires, silhouette soldiers from WWII and any type of poppy image. These will be used in collage-work, to be laminated.

*The places will be offered on a first come, first served only basis. This is due to COVID 19 overcrowding restrictions. Handwashing or sanitiser will be essential and supplied by the library.

However, those that turn up when all the places are gone will not be turned away empty-handed but shown examples of the themed craft and given resources to take home. These are free activities.

It was wonderful for us, as a whole school staff team, to see so many of you at Parents' Evening via Zoom. This was our first meeting of the new school year, and it was good to for us to meet you and share information about how your child has settled into new school routines and initial target areas to support learning.

There will be further Parents' Evening later in the school year on Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th March. As the school year develops, teachers will be in touch about curriculum areas and materials you can use at home to support your child with their learning. There is a curriculum meeting on Wednesday 3rd November on Zoom at 2:15pm and 6:30pm to inform parents about maths and English teaching at Deanshanger Primary School. Please try to attend as this will help you to support your child's learning.

Community Fridge

We are delighted to see how popular the Community Fridge is and how many families are ‘food heroes’. Thank you for embracing his initiative.

The opening of the fridge relies on a great group of volunteers. With their help, we are able to open the fridge five days a week. We really need additional volunteers though and hope that you might be able to help us. Could you, or a friend or neighbour, help us on the Thursday afternoon shift at 3.30pm — 4.30pm? Even support every other week would be amazing. Please pop into admin, or message Mr Peel ( dpeel@deanshanger.northants.sch.uk ) or me, if you are able to help us. Thank you

With the winter evening darker and colder evenings drawing in, we are going to change the timing of the Friday night shift. From next week, i.e. Friday 15^th October, the community fridge will be open at 5.30pm – 6.30pm. Please help us spread the word so that no one misses out.

Finally, for now, you are probably already aware of Natasha's Law meaning that all food items must have the ingredient list available for allergy reasons. This new statutory guidance means that we are rapidly rethinking how the fridge works. We will be buying a new shelving unit which means that the many baked goods will be available as loose items but with full ingredient labels on display. Until this time, we would not advise you to use the fridge if you do have food allergies.

For the same allergy reasons, we can no longer allow anyone under 18 years old to go into the community fridge without an adult with them.

Squid Game — Concerns

We have noticed a growing number of children acting out this programme. We would like to remind parents that it's an 18 certificate and children should not be watching this due to its adult content.

We feel it is important to point out the risks of underage use of such video games, so you can make informed decisions on how to supervise your child’s access to todays’ technology and prevent them from accessing such content.

Please read below for more extensive information and tips on Computer game use.

08 Oct 2021

Computer Games

We are very aware that we have shared information about the home use of computer games many times. In school, we see the impact of children acting out games that have ratings much higher than their age. Language choices and levels of aggression can make break and lunch times very difficult. The...

Start of Inter Faith Week of Prayer for World Peace

Open Book Afternoon (to be confirmed)

From 24 Oct until 29 Oct

October

Future Job Day

On Friday 22nd October we encourage all children to dress in clothes matching the role that they would like to take on in the future. This means that they might come dressed as a pop star, dentist, farmer, athlete, teacher... Please don't go out and buy anything for this day — improvisation is the way forward!

We will be focusing on these jobs in class. We will let you know shortly if there will be a parade at the end of the days, with parents and carers invited in, depending on the number of COVID cases locally.

We are delighted to announce that Mrs. Hannah Hodge is joining us on a full time basis as Admin Support in the school office. A very warm welcome to the DPS Team, Hannah. Many of you will already have met Hannah either in the office or at Wrap Club. With her leaving, and Mrs Hannah Holden at Wrap club too (thank you and good luck in your new job), we are recruiting for these roles. Please make contact if you would like to find out more.

If you have any questions about items in this newsletter and indeed any aspect of school life, please make contact.

As always, we really encourage you to make contact directly with us if you have any questions or concerns. We will endeavour to answer these quickly to avoid worries building. Whilst we recognise that Facebook is a popular social media platform, posting questions on it will not provide responses from us in school so please contact the school office, class teachers and/or myself instead. Thank you.

Take care and have a lovely weekend,

Rachel Rice

head@deanshanger.northants-ecl.gov.uk