Dear Parent/Carer,

What a great Eisteddfod we had last week!

We had an incredible number of castles made at home. Thank you very much for supporting your child with those! Llongyfarchiadau to our art, writing and story winners and also to our Year 6 Bard, Gabrielle Richards!

I hope that you found our Parental Consultations helpful. We always give you the dates well in advance so that you can make arrangements to attend and I was very pleased to see so many parents on both evenings. You make a difference to your child’s education by coming to meetings such as these.

Nursery Consultations take place tomorrow and on Wednesday and they will be a lovely chance to see how much the children have learnt and settled in.

This week is Book Week and children are doing lots of lovely activities related to books and story-writing.

They had a great time in school on World Book Day! Mrs Jones has arranged a series of visits to Waterstones over the next few weeks and children will have the chance to spend their World Book Day token for a free book there.

Mother’s Day making sessions will start tomorrow. For a price of either £2.00 or £2.50 (to include a gift bag), children can put their name down for a special craft activity to make a present for Mother’s Day on Sunday 31st March.

We will also be hosting a Mother’s Day sale soon, so please send in any unused toiletries/chocolates etc for us to sell and raise funds for school.

On Wednesday, representatives from Network Rail and the Transport Police will be coming in to talk about safety near rail lines.

Later on Wednesday afternoon, I will be holding two meetings for any parents interested in helping with any fund-raising events. If you have any good ideas to share, I would love to hear them and you would be more than welcome, even if you haven’t been able to help us previously. It was good to meet with parents before Christmas and I hope to build on those ideas.

The meetings are at 2.45pm or at 5.30pm. I hope that you will be able to join me at one of those meetings.

Sports activities in classes are running as usual. I am grateful to NewportLive for their continued support.

Friday is Comic Relief Day and the School Council have suggested a Wrong Clothes Day where children wear odd clothes or back to front or wrong clothes for a donation of £1.00. They will also be sharing jokes with their class and designing a new red nose. I hope that you can support your child with this charity day.

Family Learning

We have had a tremendous response to our series of Family Learning sessions that Mrs Couch has been running. We will be following on from these with your suggestions and requests and your comments have been really helpful in deciding the direction of these sessions.

Staffing

Miss Lewis continues in Class 1H for this week.

Unfortunately, Miss Balfe has had to unexpectedly finish her supply period in Miss Bishop’s class as a result of a change in personal circumstances. I’d like to thank her very much for all of her hard work and dedication to the class she has shown while with us and wish her all the very best in the future. I know that the children and staff will miss her.

As this was an unexpected decision, I am not yet able to confirm the long term replacement for the class. However, Miss Lucas, who has previously provided supply to the school, will be with the class for the week and I know that they are in very good hands.

National Tests

The National Tests in Literacy and Numeracy will take place from Tuesday 7th May until Tuesday 14th May.

Please note that no holiday will be authorized for the month of April leading up to these tests.

Parent Governor

Mrs Anna Khan has ended her term of office as a Parent Governor and, consequently, we have a vacancy on our Governing Body. A letter about this will be sent home tomorrow.

On behalf of pupils, staff and Governors, I’d like to thank Mrs Khan for her very committed and passionate support for the school during her period of office and also for her hard work on behalf of the school!

Future Dates

  • Our final INSET day of the year will be on Thursday 4th April, when the school will be used a polling station for the bi-election in Newport West.
  • The World of Work in Wales Fortnight takes place from Monday 18th March until Friday 29th March. Thank you very much to parents who have offered to help with this. It should be a great project.

Yours sincerely,

H Vaughan

Headteacher