Dear Parents and Carers, 

What a scorcher! We are sorry for any disruption caused by cancelling our sporty outdoor clubs; however, ensuring the safety of the children and staff had to be our priority in the heat. 

On Tuesday, Reception had a wonderful time on our trip to the Look Out Centre in Bracknell. The children loved all the science experiments, the water play, light and colour room, and the construction area. Both classes did a ’bugs and beasties’ workshop where they learnt more about bugs and went bug hunting. The children had fun using nets to catch bugs, and bug pots to take a closer look at what they had caught.   

We have all really enjoyed House Music at the Juniors this week. It was a wonderful celebration of a range of musical performances from singing, instrumentals, solos and duets - what a talented pupil body we have!  

Great news – the Fun Run has now been re-scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday 21st September, in Stoke Park. This will be a great community event to start the year and welcome new families and an opportunity for our leaving Year 6 to get together again.  

We are incredibly grateful to both FOPS and HTSC for their dedication in organising a fantastic range of community events and for raising additional funds for those valuable ‘nice to haves’ throughout the school year. We appreciate that everyone is juggling busy work and home lives, and we understand how precious spare time is — which is why it’s becoming increasingly challenging to find volunteers to staff school events. 

With this in mind, we are planning to merge the two parent groups into one unified PTA from next academic year. This new PTA will include representatives from both the infant and junior schools. We'll put together a calendar of events in advance, giving parents the opportunity to sign up to help with planning and running activities. 

However, we still need to fill the key roles of Chair, Secretary, and Treasurer. Ideally, we’d love to see each of these roles shared between parents from both the infant and junior schools — and avoid the awkwardness we experienced at the 'Meet the Team' meeting last September! If you're interested in getting involved or would like to learn more, please speak to the current FOPS and HTSC teams. 

After working hard on creating the new classes for September, we will provide an opportunity for the children to meet their new teacher and classmates before the end of term. At the infants, this will happen on Tuesday morning and at the juniors, it will be Thursday morning. As you may already know, we ask our junior school children to identify which are their friends across the year. We do ensure that they have one friend at least with them in next year’s class. Please do help them if they are anxious about this, speaking positively about change; making new friends is all part of our school values. We talk often about “embracing the future with hope and confidence” and sometimes a new mix of different characters is exactly what children need to thrive and flourish.    

Have a wonderful weekend. Hopefully, see you at Sports Day on Wednesday. 

Vicky 

Thought of the Week: Live simply! Are you trapped by materialism?   

Whole School Notices: