Wellesley Park

Primary School

Headteacher: Carly Wilkins

Wellesley Park Primary School

Homefield, Wellington

Somerset, TA21 9AJ

Message from Mrs Hartley-Criddle - Deputy Headteacher and SENDCo INCLUSION UPDATE: Meet and Greet Coffee Morning! Tuesday 24th September 9am - 9.45am Hello everybody! Firstly, I would like to say a huge thank you to everybody for making me feel so welcome, while I settle in to my new role at Wellesley Park. Even though it has only been 15 school days, I have already managed to teach lots of your lovely children and touch base with quite a few parents and carers. Hearing many positive messages of support, along with your kind understanding that it will take me a little while to get to everybody, has meant a great deal to me. As a Deputy Head Teacher and SENDCo, my role in school is to work alongside Mrs Wilkins and her incredible team of teachers and support staff, in order to ensure that Wellesley Park becomes well known for its inclusive approach to education; thus ensuring that every child is supported and encouraged appropriately, in order to thrive. As always, your first port of call should always be your child's class teacher - as they are the ones that know your child the best and are working with them on a daily basis and class teachers will always come to me if they have a query about any child's social, emotional, physical or academic progress - as well as if you have raised a query of your own. However, you are of course always welcome to contact me, via the school office if you have a more serious concern, I will return your call as soon as I am able to. Over the next few weeks, I shall be completing 'check-in' phone calls with the parents / carers of any children who are on our main register for children with special educational needs and disabilities - just to see how your child has settled and to help me to build up a better understanding of your child's needs. I hope that this will be a positive experience for us all and allow you the opportunity to have a chat with me! Finally, I am also very excited to say I will be holding an informal, half-termly 'Inclusion Coffee Morning'. The first one of these will be quite simply a 'Meet and Greet your SENDCo' - a chance for us all to get to know each other a little better. I would love for these get-togethers to be a positive, fun, friendly and informative gathering and the more of you who can / would like to come, the better!

The first of these will be on Tuesday 24th September - so next week!

If you would like to attend, please could drop in your name (along with the name and year group of your child) to the school office with the email heading 'Inclusion Coffee Morning' - by lunch time on Monday - so that I have a rough idea of numbers for refreshments please!

That's all for now, I hope to see many of you next week!

Mrs Hartley-Criddle Deputy Headteacher and SENDCo

My Quote of the week come from Benjamin Franklin:

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

Safeguarding

If you have children, it is understandable to have concerns about the films and TV shows they watch, as well as the games they play. In the attached guide, we take a look at the two official ways you can assess if a particular title is suitable for your child. Both the BBFC and PEGI have search facilities on their websites that can be used to look up individual titles so you can check their ratings. (Please see guide attached).

Attendance Data

Attendance by class for the period 02/09/19 to 13/09/19. These will be updated fortnightly.

Elmer 84.7% BFG 95.9% Akela 96.9%

Gruffalo 95.6% Matilda 100% Bagheera 99%

Jasper 98.2% Gryffindor 97.3%

Kipper 99.1% Hufflepuff 99.2%

Mrs Tiggywinkle 94.6% Thorin 98.8%

Peter Rabbit 98.3% Galadriel 94.8%

Wellesley Park is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of the children and expects all staff to share this commitment

20th September 2019

Midday Supervisor Vacancies We currently have several Midday Supervisor vacancies for September. Further details and the application form are available on the job vacancy section of our school website: https://www.wellesleyparkschool.com/our-school/vacancies.htm

Jessica Vickery’s Trampoline Success! Congratulations to Jessica Vickery on becoming a Double Mini Trampoline English Champion. Jessica competed in Sheffield and was the only girl to qualify in the mixed age group 9-10. She managed to smash her personal best in the final and beat the boys to the title of English Champion. In addition, Jessica qualified for the trampoline finals in 4th and ended up 6th in England. Her next goal is to compete well at the British Championships at the Birmingham Arena at the end of September. Well done Jessica and we wish you all the best for the British Championships!

Pre-School This week at pre-school we have continued to focus on settling in the new children.

We have also been enjoying the children’s stories and rhymes and have been reading the children’s

favourite books. We have particularly enjoyed ’The Tiger Who Came To Tea’, ’Elmer’ and ’The Gruffalo’.

The weather has been lovely so the children have had lots of

garden play, water fun, bubbles and bikes.

We have a new Nursery Rhyme display that the children have

been learning.

We are now looking forward to Autumn and going on our nature walks.

Reception

We have had such a busy week in Reception! Everyone has been at school all day and this has given us more time to have fun!

We have added actions to our Little Red Hen story as well as practising retelling the story.

We also went on a Welly Walk to see if our school grounds were like the farm that the Little Red Hen lives on! Some of us have made leaf pictures, or had a go at leaf rubbings and lots of us have enjoyed exploring the conker tree outside.

We have been talking about numbers and watching Numberblocks, learning new letter sounds and doing Dough Disco to strengthen our hands.

Some of us have also been eating hot school dinners and everyone has been fantastically well behaved eating in the hall.

Year 1

Over the last few weeks in Year One, we have started our English ‘Defeat The Monster’ unit, focusing on

the story of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. We made a story map and added in actions to support the children in

learning the story; we have been overwhelmed by the fantastic videos and photos of the children using

their story maps at home to tell the story to their families!

We have also been developing our writing skills by ensuring that our sentences have the correct

punctuation, including capital letters, finger spaces and full stops.

In Maths, we have been trying really hard with forming our digits correctly in our brand new maths books!

We have also worked on our counting skills and accuracy.

Year 2

In Year 2 we have been having great fun learning the story of the 3 Little Pigs using our story map and the actions. We have particularly enjoyed being big, scary wolves. In Maths we have been focussing on place value and what each digit is worth in a number. The children have had great fun using lots of different ways to make numbers. In Science we have been looking at the properties of materials and what can be made from them. We decided that making a cup from tissues was really not a good idea!

Year 3

We are really impressed with all of the fantastic costumes that the children wore for ‘Heroes and

Heroines’ day today. Thank you so much for all of your effort.

Matilda class have been investigating Friction, using a character from the story that we have read –

Traction Man. We have enjoyed experimenting to find which surface would make scrubbing brush travel

the furthest distance.

Year 3 have also been learning how to partition numbers into hundreds, tens and ones, as well as ordering these on a number line. We have spent lots of time practising our story the cobbler of ‘Krakow and Smoke The Dragon’, exploring nouns and adjectives that could be used to help us describe these characters and using thesauruses to explore alternatives words to make our writing even better. Thanks to all those who shared photos and videos of the children reading their story maps. We have also spent time learning how to use dictionaries and finding out meanings of new words as well as recapping and practising alphabetical order.

Year 4

We have had a great couple of weeks in Year 4 and have started a lot of new things already this term. Our first clarinet lessons are sounding amazing and the children are already improving on the sounds that they can produce. The children listen carefully and take instruction well, making us feel very proud. They are also enjoying our weekly swimming sessions and are growing in confidence in the water. All children are being taught by an instructor from the pool and we look forward to seeing the progress they make each week.

We are also very fortunate to be working with the Archie project this year, and have already had two visits from the supervisor there, teaching the children about dementia awareness.

In November, we will be visiting the residents of the dementia ward at Oaktree Court, where the children will be able to chat and sing to the residents.

Here is a photo of one of our Archie sessions, where Hollie and Nirvana were dressed up as scarecrows, just like Archie!

Year 5 Year 5 have had a really exciting couple of weeks! They had

their first Forest School session with Lee, the weather was

amazing and there were plenty of frogs and mud to keep every-

one entertained! Just a reminder for all children to wear wel-

lies and have a waterproof if it rains.

We hope you have enjoyed hearing about the story, ‘Perseus

and Medusa’ and hopefully have learnt some of the actions.

Both classes have been focussing on the vocabulary in the story

this week and using dictionaries and a thesaurus to find

synonyms and antonyms for various words.

Congratulations to those children who applied to be ‘mini-police’ – you all have a place! PCSO Simon Bramley will be in each Tuesday afternoon to work with the children.

Year 6 Year 6 have had an exciting 2 weeks and have made the most of the good weather enjoying Forest School and P.E. outside. In English we have continued our Talk For Writing text of Perseus and Medusa, hot-seating Perseus and finding out exactly how he felt on his quest.

In Guided Reading we have been enjoying the song Pompeii by Bastille analysing its literary features and making inferences from the text. We have used exciting language to create character and setting.

In topic we are enjoying finding out about Sir Francis Drake. All the children are looking great dressed up for our ‘Heroes and Heroines Day!

In Maths we are continuing place value and have focused on negative numbers.