Weekly Newsflash! 6th September 2024
Coming up next week…
| Monday | – N/R/Y1 Sports Club @ Bainbridge |
| Tuesday | – EYFS Balance Bike Sessions – Forest Skills Club @ Askrigg |
| Wednesday | – Singing Club @ Askrigg – Y2/3/4/5/6 Sports Club @ Askrigg |
| Thursday | – Clarinet Lessons – Cycle Club @ Bainbridge |
| Friday | – Science Club @ Bainbridge |
Calendar
We know our calendar is looking rather bare at the moment, but it will be updated very soon!
Headteacher’s Message
Dear families,
It was lovely to come back to school this week and see so many happy children playing with their friends, enjoying their lessons and making their new class teachers (and me!) very proud. I hope you enjoy finding out what they have been up to in the class updates below.
We have particularly enjoyed using our new classrooms in The Annexe and we would like to invite parents to come and have a look round them on the 19th September from 6.30pm. This will also be a chance to meet our friendly PTFA. They will be holding their Annual General Meeting from 7pm to 7.30pm and you are all encouraged to come along and find out more. Your children would be welcome to come and play with their friends (under my supervision!) during the meeting. We will even provide some tea and biscuits!
On Sunday 13th October, I am hoping to hold the inaugural BAWB Schools Fun Run to raise funds for the PTFA. This will be a low-key event open to children of any age who are invited to run, walk (or hop or skip!) round a short course at Askrigg. They can do as much or as little as they like, with the intention being to have lots of fun. No one will come first (or last!) but everyone will receive a small prize and a free PE T-shirt with a special ‘Red Hot Runners’ logo that they can wear to PE lessons for the rest of the year. I will be inviting families to sponsor the participants and there will also be a small entry fee of a £1. If you would like to support this event, please click on this link to register and I will send you a sponsorship form.
This year, we are changing the way we do Celebration Assemblies. There will now be two Celebration Assemblies each half term, one for Nursery to Year 1 at Bainbridge and one for Years 2 to 6 at Askrigg. They will be a chance for children to share their learning and celebrate any out of school achievements. This half term, the Bainbridge Celebration Assembly will be on Friday 18th October and the Askrigg Celebration Assembly will be on Friday 25th October. Both will start at 3pm.
Swimming
Please be aware that we have reorganised our swimming provision. I want to fine tune what we do to make sure all our children reach the National Curriculum targets of swimming 25 metres, using a range of strokes, and performing safe self-rescue by the end of KS2. The National Curriculum further states that all schools must provide swimming instruction either in key stage 1 or key stage 2.
Starting this academic year, we are going to take Years 3, 4 and 5 swimming in the Autumn term. We will also take any Year 6 children who haven’t yet attained the National Curriculum targets. If, after that set of swimming lessons, we still have Year 6 children who haven’t met the targets, we will provide them with more ‘top up’ sessions and will be in touch with parents directly to discuss that provision.
Swimming was also take place at Catterick swimming pool this year as it entails a shorter bus journey.
This year, the swimming sessions will be on Tuesday mornings, starting on September 17th. Please send your child in wearing their swimming costumes/shorts under their uniform. Please refrain from putting girls in tights as these can be difficult to get back on after swimming! Please also send your child with a towel, goggles and a labelled water bottle.
PE lessons at Askrigg will alter due to the introduction of swimming, but emails will be sent with more detail next week.
PTFA Update!
The PTFA AGM (Thurs 19th Sep) is the time of year when the current committee stands down and a new committee is elected. While we have some members happy to stand again, the chair Helen Dinsdale and secretary Beth Daley have both decided not to stand again, and unfortunately not all of the people we had hoped could take over are now able to.
This means that we are looking for new committee members who might be interested in taking on roles, particularly of secretary. This person is primarily responsible for organising meetings, including preparing agendas and minutes, and liaising between the committee and the BAWB team. So if you’re an organised person who is good with documents and email, this could suit you. The role can also be shared if necessary between two people. The current secretary will help with supporting whoever takes on the role, so please don’t worry that you’ll be thrown in at the deep end!
If you’d like to ask questions (with no obligation attached!), please get in touch as soon as possible. Without a full committee, the PTFA can not continue its work.
For parents who are new to BAWB and would like to find out more about the PTFA, please take a look at our page on the website and join our Facebook group.
Parent Carer Voice
Parent-Carer-Autumn-Term-LetterRobins
What a wonderful week our Robins have had! From fantastic jumping in PE…
to getting a bit wet by practising our squeezing and pouring!
We got a little bit messy in the mud kitchen… and in the normal kitchen making play dough!
And of course, no week in the Robins is complete without building some models!
Owls
What a wonderful start to year 1, the Owls have worked super hard with lots of fun along the way.
Of course we have started the year with the Owl Babies story, listening carefully, joining in with repeated phrases and retelling using owl puppets. It was lovely to see Willow drawing her own illustration of the story in her own time later in the day. It was also lovely to see children enjoying other story books in their own time too.
The Owls have been super excited to start their science lessons, this week naming and labelling body parts as part of our work on the Human Body unit.
In maths we are looking at place value sorting and counting objects, we have been very impressed by everyone’s careful counting and sorting.
Swallows
The Swallows have had a wonderful start to the year and are already working hard and having lots of fun.
In English, we have been practising our spellings in different ways. William and Albert really enjoy tennis spellings and challenging each other to tennis spelling matches of different words.
The Swallows really enjoyed their music warm up. After they moved to the pulse of the music they warmed up their faces, stretching and then scrunching them up. The Swallows also improvised on xylophones and listened and responded to a song that we will be learning over the next few weeks.
As part of our enquiry into what is history?, we are looking at our holidays, thinking about how they are an event that has happened in the past and how photographs and souvenirs can be a primary source of historical events.
To help with this it would be fantastic of the Swallows could bring in some photographs or souvenirs from past holidays. Photographs can be sent in or emailed to [email protected]
Golden Eagles
This week, in PE, the Golden Eagles have been learning about Netball. We have been practising our passing and moving skills to keep possession and to create opportunities to shoot and score.
Herons
The Herons have had a fantastic first week in year 5. We love our new classroom and have already been busy across the curriculum.
We have been writing our own stories in English to be entered into the UWNL competition. These have been really creative no two stories are alike. We have also enjoyed maths and have particularly like Roman Numerals make sure to ask us about these at home!
We have had our first PE session with Mr Bullock looking at communication and tactics in a football environment.
We have started our new history unit on Vikings and created some timelines showing key events.
Merlins
What a fantastic first week we’ve had in the Merlins!
We started our first science topic of year six ‘Living things and their habitats’. We discovered that something needs to ‘GREM’ (grow, reproduce, excrete and move) in order to be classed as an organism. We explored living and non-living things within our school grounds and recorded how many of each we could find.
We are also just loving our new space! 😊
