Please find more information about each of the initiatives below!

Cycling for All

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SATs Support for Maths

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FEAST – Free activities during the holidays!

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Teacher Strikes

On 16 January the National Education Union (NEU), one of the trade unions representing the teaching profession, announced its intention to strike. Not enough members of two other unions voted in favour of taking industrial action (the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) and the National Association of Headteachers).

The NEU has said it will hold strikes on a number of dates, the following being ones that could affect us:

• Wednesday, February 1 (England and Wales)
• Tuesday, 28 February (Northern, North West, and Humber regions)
• Wednesday, 15 March (England and Wales)
• Thursday, 16 March (England and Wales)

While employees are not required to tell their employers whether they intend to take
strike action, headteachers are able to ask staff in advance if they intend to strike to enable them to plan how to manage the strike. At the point of writing this, none of the BAWB teachers has told me that they intend to strike and several have confirmed that they will not.

In the event of strike action within our schools, we will take all reasonable steps to keep our schools open for as many pupils as possible in order to minimise disruption to children and families. In the unlikely event of any disruption to our teaching arrangements on any of these dates, we will of course inform you as soon as is practicably possible.

Thank you for your understanding.

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Uniforms

To keep you all updated we are currently liaising with two local uniform suppliers and comparing cost and quality. After getting some excellent feedback at the Parent Forum we will be switching to sweatshirt-style cardigans, and will be using the BAWB logo without the school name underneath.

Eco Warriors

This week the Eco Warriors met at Askrigg as part of their plans to participate in the RSPB Bird Count! Things got a bit messy as they made bird feeders using pine cones and cups with a bird-friendly mixture of vegetable fat, raisins and mixed seeds! The Eco Warriors are hoping that they entice more birds to visit when we do our school-wide bird count in a few weeks!

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Calendar

Did you know you can synchronise our calendar with our school calendar? Click here to visit the calendar and click the link at the bottom of the page that says ‘subscribe to calendar’ – this will enable you to push events out to your personal calendars.

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Robins

The Robins have worked with great focus to make their own Chinese dragons this week in celebration of Chinese New Year! They have also been loving the new arrangement of the classroom. They are working very hard on keeping the sand tidy!

Owls

The Owls classified animals into mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds and then according to what they ate … carnivores, herbivores and omnivores.

Swallows

As part of the unit on animals including humans the Swallows have been thinking about the different stages of human life. Can you spot the grumpy teenager?! In History, the Swallows had a visit from Mrs Stone who talked about the toys she used to play with and to share artefacts from the Dales Countryside Museum. The Swallows enjoyed “examining” the old toys! They categorised old toys from the Dales Countryside Museum and discussed what they could learn from the toys about how children played in the past.

Kingfishers

In Science this week, the Kingfishers have been exploring translucent, transparent and opaque materials in preparation for our work on shadows next week. The children are working really hard to use scientific vocabulary to explain their findings when feeding back to the class. In their spelling sessions we have been looking at apostrophes for contraction. We had great fun during our ‘contraction surgery’ session cutting the letters out we didn’t need and adding the apostrophe to make words such as couldn’t, I’m, they’ll.

Golden Eagles

This week the Golden Eagles have thoroughly enjoyed creating storyboards to show how tornados are formed. 

Merlins

The Merlins were tasked with investigating the origins of the Middleham Jewel this week in History! This activity allowed them to carry out some historical inquiry just as a historian would. They were then tasked with drawing conclusions about the Middleham Jewel.

In PE, the Merlins participated in some last-minute netball! This proved valuable as one of the Merlins teams went on to win their group in the cluster competition with another team being narrowly beat 3-2 in the final. In the Year 6 booster session this week they focussed on equivalent fractions, decimals and percentages as well as looking at test technique for grammar.

This Term’s RESPECT Ambassadors

Robins	Owls	Swallows	Kingfishers	Golden Eagles	Merlins
Lexi M	Oscar H	Joey T	Maisie M	Lily D	Grayson A

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This Week’s Awards:

Pupil of the week
Robins (Nursery)					Sidney G for working hard on his listening skills and being an absolute star during tidy up time.
Robins (Reception)					Max D for making sensible and thoughtful choices.
Owls (Y1)					Ada for a mature and sensible approach to her learning.
Swallows (Y2)					Lizzy for fantastic enjoyment and expression in her reading.
Kingfishers (Y3)					Fearne for effort and enjoyment across all subjects, recalling prior learning and confidently sharing her ideas.
Golden Eagles (Y4)					Lily-Anne for her effort in English and using modal verbs correctly in her work.
Merlins (Y5)					Beatrice QB for always following the RESPECT code and being a perfect role model.
Merlins (Y6)					Isaac for displaying excellent teamwork, effort and enjoyment during the netball competition.

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Headteacher’s Awards
Bainbridge	Otis, for effort and responsibility. He wrote an extremely persuasive letter to me on behalf of the school council.
Askrigg	Aimee, for effort and talk. She shared some mature thoughts about equality when talking about Rosa Parks.
West Burton	Libby, for effort and enjoyment. Libby was really focussed on some independent work when I was in Owls class this week.

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Special Awards
Martha and Abe	Skiing award!

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Good Samaritan Awards	For courage, care, compassion (for the children, from the children).	Nominated by
Swallows	Lizzy for picking up her coat for her when it fell off the peg.	Martha
Kingfishers	Elsie for helping her to tie her shoelaces.	Florence
Golden Eagles	Otis for helping him in maths when he was struggling with column multiplication.	William
Merlins	Dylan for helping him when he twisted his ankle – Dylan noticed Theo had hurt himself and took him to a teacher.	Theo

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Other
Best Learning Space (classroom)	Swallows
Most Effective learning Environment (school)	West Burton
House Point Winning Team	Red Squirrels
Best Class Attendance	Kingfishers (98%)