Thank you to all who came to watch the show. Well done choir and band children-you were amazing as always! All children who represented school were awarded the bronze star. We are so proud of them all!
We are in need of developing our outdoors area. This area will be used by children in breakfast and after school club, baby and toddler groups (which will hopefully start soon in school), all children in the school and children of the Parish on a Sunday. It will not be restricted to infants only. We hope that this will be at the back of Father’s garden, where the EYFS and infant outdoor access areas already are. The fenced in space for Pendle Class is limiting and is simply not big enough. We would turn that space into one big messy play area and the Pre-School children would share this communal area too. We use all school grounds for outdoor learning but the children deserve even better. Big ideas need to be put into reality for all of our children and we need help. Behind Father’s garden is a huge space and our children deserve the very best. We want to have outdoor art spaces and create zones for messy play, bird watching, physical development and everything that is creative! A few years ago, Mrs Kerr visited Melbourne to explore and learn about their outdoor spaces and the pictures are incredible. I will put some of these pictures on another post for you to see our vision. Our outdoors are beautiful and we want to create natural areas in keeping with school. There are a few examples below of projects other schools have completed. I have put a bid in for The National Lottery in hope we are granted £10,000. The last bid I put in was refused due to where our school is located. We were told that not enough people from the community would benefit from this for it to go ahead. If our new bid is successful, the entrance to after school/ breakfast club will be through this new area and not through school anymore. They will use this as their outdoor space daily. We will have lighting and seating areas in this space for all to enjoy. The PTFA are supportive of this and I hope that you will all understand how much this is needed to move our school forwards for our children. When we created the Pre-School secure entrance, I could not extend this space any more than it is due to the oil tanker that needs access to the back of Church. This is why the Pre-School space is situated where it is. It would be wonderful for them to use a rich and diverse learning area close to their classroom.
The title of this blog reflects the whole week. Why not dance at every opportunity when you are 2 years old? Yesterday rounded the week off with laughter, a conga and new 1970s dance moves. I like The Eagles earliest songs and Nat King Cole but music from the 70s makes me want to dance too! Fairsnape’s music lesson in the hall was interrupted by Pre-School’s conga. If you are going to do an unplanned conga you have to do it right and let everyone know about it. Making our own see saws has been a feature of outdoors and the children’s happiness has brought us great smiles.
This morning as I was happily gritting, I was called a ‘Jack of all trades!’ A couple of you had commented that it was quite a comical blog yesterday as it highlighted just how diverse my job actually is. Being a head teacher is far removed from the days of teaching. You really do have to know things about things you didn’t even know existed. I was speaking to Mr. Gilmour about this today because the drains in the playground had flooded again. For that job, the animal net remained redundant and the long prodding stick came out. It was not glamorous in any way but it got the job done. Playground safely gritted and drained-for now!