Dear Parents and Carers,

I hope you have had some opportunity to enjoy the sunshine this week. We have had a lovely week with Reception Aqua class delivering an amazing assembly. Their assembly focused on the life cycles of different animals. During the assembly, the children presented their very own nature programme, Nature News Live, which was full of fantastic facts about the natural world. The children also shared a letter they received from Ranger Jo at Clissold Park, who thanked them for the nature reports they wrote about the animals that make their homes there. Ranger Jo also set the children the challenge of looking after some caterpillars. Aqua class showed everyone how these caterpillars changed from crawly creatures into majestic butterflies. The children spoke very confidently and clearly. We are very proud of them and they should be very proud of themselves.

A group of Year 5 boys proudly represented the school at last Friday’s football tournament, showing great enthusiasm, teamwork, and determination throughout the competition. They played brilliantly against strong opposition, demonstrating excellent sportsmanship and skill in every match. The team performed exceptionally well and should be very proud of their achievements. We are incredibly proud of their effort, positive attitude, and the way they represented the school. Well done to all involved.

The fundraising by the children has already begun and we are so impressed. Emma, Alice, Ottie and Elsie from Cerise class set up a lemonade stand last weekend (with help from Iris y2 and Maddie y1) to raise money for the school. They raised £78 and had a lot of fun together creating their posters for the stand and making and selling lemonade after football in Clissold Park. Well done, we think this is amazing.

Last weekend, George (Year 4) and Max (Year 1), with help from Dylan (Year 4), Miles and Lenny (Year 1), put on their selling hats and sold lemonade on the street outside their house. They were really proud of their efforts and we are very proud of them. Thankfully, there was a long queue at the ice cream shop on Saturday, which made for a captive audience. They raised £115 from lemonade sales, which is amazing. Having caught the bug, Max headed back out on Sunday to sell some old toys and clothes. He raised a further £11. We think this is amazing and thank them all for their wonderful support. All money from both fundraising events will go towards their class totals for 20p day. Those classes are definitely off to a good start.

We were thrilled to welcome back the wonderful children's author Eric Huang this week, who previously visited the children as part of our World Book Day celebrations. We are excited to announce that Eric has officially taken on the role of Betty Layward’s Author-in-Residence. During his visit, Eric spent time with our staff to share his unique approach to generating creative writing ideas, and he has kindly agreed to run writing workshops for the children in the near future. We highly recommend checking out Eric’s fantastic novel series, Guardians of the New Moon, for reading inspiration at home.

We shared a video with the children about dyslexia and some of them have asked me to share it with you. Made by dyslexia's mission is to teach the world the brilliance of Dyslexic Thinking, and to empower it in every home, every workplace, and every school. Here is the link - https://www.madebydyslexia.org

We hope you have a lovely long weekend and see you on Tuesday.
Jessica