Open Evening

With the first phase of our building work now just about complete, we are exceptionally proud of what our school has to offer and keen to show the impact of the changes to the school community and prospective parents.  To achieve this, we are hosting an open evening on Thursday 8^th February from 4pm to 6pm.  During this time, we invite anyone yet to see the changes to our building into school for a guided tour.

Our future is dependent on us recruiting children and families into the area and then the school.  We have no plans to increase the school size, but we need to ensure we fill all our places.  We’d appreciate your support with this, if you know anyone who might be interested in visiting the school, please pass on our details or direct them to our website.  We’re also going to be increasing our social media presence over the next few months, you can help with this by liking and sharing our posts.

Parents Evening

Our termly parents’ evening will be held on Tuesday 13^th February and Thursday 15^th February.  Appointments can be booked by logging into the school’s booking system at https://wittonlewear.schoolcloud.co.uk/ If you are unable to get into school on these dates, appointments can be completed via video call, these can be attended by more than one parent.  Face-to-face appointments will be available between 3.30pm and 5.50pm each night.

We will provide a written report about your child’s behaviour, effort and progress in the week before the event; this is your chance to discuss this report and anything else you feel appropriate with your child’s class teacher.

Appointments are limited to ten minutes in length, we do request that in order to keep the event to time, that you arrive on time and don’t allow discussions to overrun.  If you would like more time with your child’s class teacher, please contact them via Class Dojo and an appointment will be arranged on a different day and time.  Thank you for your support and understanding.

Parents of children with Special Educational Needs will be contacted and invited by class teachers to a separate parent evening outside of this event.  Please monitor your messages in Class Dojo for this invitation and guidance on how to book an appointment.

Peer Mentors

During end of the Autumn term, 10 pupils were selected from classes 3 and 4 to be Peer Mentors.  They attended 7 weeks of training sessions so that they could learn how best to support their peers.  The training included learning about mental health and techniques to help themselves and others, managing feelings, how people express themselves and conflict resolution.

The Peer Mentors held a whole school assembly where they introduced themselves and talked about their role.  The Peer Mentors have a rota in place and will be available to anyone that needs a friend, someone to talk to, or play with each break time and lunchtime.  We are really excited about having our Peer Mentors officially starting their roles and believe that they will do a great job supporting everyone.

School Council

Our school council is now up and running.  Congratulations to the children who were elected to this role.  This year, we have bought into the Smart School Councils resource to help us run the meetings and make sure everyone gets a say.  The school councillors run a fortnightly class meeting to discuss relevant topics of their interest, feedback the results/outcomes before agreeing next steps.  Action teams are created to take any initiative forward.

In our first meeting this year, the children raised the possibility of us getting a school pet and the most popular choice, as voted for by the children, was a dog.  The children are excited about this idea and might talk about it outside of school.  I am researching how this process would work and arranging for a dog from another school to visit.

The concept would be a specially trained therapy dog who would support and comfort children at difficult times but also provide a positive environment for all the children and help them learn about caring for and looking after a pet.  Very early days in this project, but I, and I’m sure the children, will keep you updated.