Dear Mums, Dads and Carers,November 14th 2014
Welcome to the second half of the Autumn term!
Many of our new children have now settled in and we once again a full and busy nursery school. Here are some news items and dates for your dairy.
The Rolls-Royce Science Prize
As many of you will be aware, Kate Greenaway entered The Rolls-Royce Science Prize Competition for excellence in Science Teaching for 2014.
Out of 2000 entries we were in the final six and we were delighted with this. However, on Monday 10th November, our Science Team attended the prize giving awards at The Science Museum, hosted by Rolls-Royce.
We are absolutely thrilled to tell you that we were announced as the winners for 2014 !!
So thank you to everyone who helped and supported our efforts along the way with Science Saturdays and Forest School, we are really grateful.
Please see the Parents Board for photographs and press coverage so far.
Our New Deputy Head Teacher.
On October 17th we held interviews for applicants for the Deputy Headteacher post at Kate Greenaway. The panel was a mixture of our own and external Islington staff.
Joe Knutson was appointed as Deputy Headteacher and is now in post and working hard to learn his new role. I’m sure you will want to congratulate Joe who beat off the competition with an excellent interview.
We now plan to recruit a new nursery teacher as soon as we can.
Reviews
Every term we offer Parent/Key Person Reviews, these give you the opportunity to spend some time with your child’s keyperson in order to discuss your child’s development and the next steps for their learning. You will look at their Profile Books and think about their achievements over the term.
These reviews will take place over two weeks starting on Monday 1st December
Obviously in a busy nursery school we have to plan very carefully to release staff to prepare for these meetings and then to hold them so please do attend your appointment.
Look out for the appointment grid in the rooms and sign up to a time that suits you best.
Forest School Trips.
Our Forest School Trips have started again and take place every Wednesday morning. Joe, our Deputy Headteacher is leading on these trips and is always happy if parents can come along so please do try to join your children for at least one of the six sessions that they will have.
Venti, our gardening teacher is now Forest School trained and meets Joe and the children at Camley Street Nature reserve to offer them their fantastic Forest School experience.All this investment has been enabled by the Rolls-Royce Science Prize fund.
All our children who are leaving for reception class in September 2015 will have this experience before they leave Kate Greenaway. The children love Forest School and probably talk about it with you at home so do try to get involved.
Warm Winter Clothes
It’s getting colder and rainy! Please make sure that your child has lovely warm clothes for nursery, coats, hats, scarves etc. Also, we often find that children have very similar if not the same clothes, so please do label your child’s clothes if you can as it really helps if things go missing.
Closing the outside gate
A quick plea to remind parents to close the outside gate when they arrive or leave, everything helps towards the security of the children.
The Winter Social
We would like to invite you all our Annual Winter Social Event. This will take place on Saturday 13th December from 10.30am to 12 noon. We will have gifts for children, warm soup and bread for everyone and some lovely seasonal live music.
Please do come along and we would be very grateful if you could bring along a small food contribution to share! We had some wonderfully tasty things to share last year.
Christmas closure dates
Please be aware that the last day of term for our term Time Only children is;
Thursday 18th December .2014
We are closed to everyone on Friday 19th December 2014 as this is an Inset day.
The last day for our All Year Round children is Tuesday 23rd December 2014
We re-open to all children on Monday January 5th.
Getting Involved in decisions
And finally, we are looking for some parents to become part of our Governing Body. If you are interested please leave your name at reception. You would be expected to join one committee which meets three times per year and then the full Governing Body. The total commitment is six meeting per year.