We hope you’ve enjoyed this sunny week – this Indian summer.

Our Living and Learning theme has been a simple one this week: ‘I use good manners’. At school, this can mean greeting people politely (including adults as they arrive at school), saying please and thank you, and avoiding interrupting. Have a chat with your child about what it means at home, too.

Cooking

Over the course of the year, your child will enjoy three opportunities to prepare food…

• Year 1 and 2: fruit smoothies, overnight oats, and fruit bars
• Year 3 and 4: egg pots, chopped tomatoes and garlic, and savoury scones
• Year 5 and 6: vegetable and chickpea curry, pasta bake, and bread

We’ve a couple of requests, please:

Most importantly, please alert us to any allergies your child has. We’ll do our best to adapt recipes.

To make sure that we can continue to offer this, please make a voluntary donation of £3 to £6 to pay for the ingredients. We really appreciated your donations last year.

For more about our Cooking curriculum, please check out our Cooking and Nutrition Curriculum Guide – they include the recipes and background information including the food preparation skills children will practise. (We’re in Year B this year.)

Relationships and Sex Education

At the start of each year, we like to encourage you to be aware of our Relationships and Sex Education Policy. Later in the year, your child will have Relationships and Sex Education lessons. In those lessons, we’ll talk about anatomical terms and different relationships. However, we might need to use the terms at other times, such as when dealing with incidents of misuse or disrespectful language, and we’ll talk about lots of different relationships at any time of the year, too.

How we communicate home

Another thing we like to do at the start of the year is help you be aware of how we communicate home. Findings from our annual survey of parents and carers indicate the vast majority of you are happy with how we communicate, but we’re also aware of a small number of you who are less content. We do our best to stick to the following…

Texts

Anything urgent (such as the cancellation of an after-school club) or a quick reminder about something (like the photographer being in school) will be sent by text. If you have the School Gateway app, it might be useful to set it so you receive notifications of messages. Texts will automatically be sent to your app.

Emails

Our emails will usually be a longer message about one specific thing. We’re moving away from sending out hard copies of most letters (it’s better for the environment to send things electronically and things don’t always get to you if they’re sent home in book bags). Please try to check your emails daily, so you don’t miss anything important.

Weekly messages

Just like this one, our Weekly Messages usually contain more general information. They might include reminders, such as forthcoming events or policy details, but will mainly consist of other information that you might find useful. Usually, they’re published on the school website on Friday afternoons and emailed out a little later the same day.

Class news

For anything relevant to your child’s class, please check the Class News pages of the website (we recommend doing this at least once a week). Nursery and Reception classes use these pages a lot because there are often forthcoming events specific to the Early Years.

Homework

For children in Key Stage 1 and 2, your child should bring home a hard copy of their weekly homework, but you’ll also be able to find it on the Homework section of the website. (There’s no specific homework set for children in Nursery and Reception, but read the Class News articles for lots of ideas to help you support your child at home.)

Social media

Finally, we have Facebook. Messages on here are usually repeats of other communications, such as our Weekly Messages. Nothing urgent or particularly important will be posted only on social media because we know that not everyone accesses these things.

Healthier together

We’ve been asked to let you know about West Yorkshire NHS website Healthier Together.

The initiative was launched to provide families, children and young people with consistent, quality advice from local health and care professionals.

September can be a time when there are more common infections and illnesses amongst children. It’s important that families become familiar with different illnesses (fever, coughs, asthma, bronchiolitis, gastroenteritis…) and how to manage them ahead of the new school year.

And on that note, have a happy and healthy weekend, hopefully enjoying the last of the Indian summer!