Junior School

Congratulations on a fantastic start to the year! 

Year 7 students have settled in well and the Year 8s have shown moments of great leadership and maturity. 

The first two weeks have been about getting back into good learning routines and building up our capacity to stay focused and productive for a full 75 mins period. 

Teachers have spent time highlighting 3 expectations around arriving to class ready to learn, which include:

1. Arriving on time with the correct materials
2. Actively listening when the teacher is talking
3. Staying in class and not asking to leave for toilet of drink breaks

Most students are doing well with this, but some are still needing to go back to their locker to get items they have forgotten. Lockers can’t be accessed between periods, so students need to collect everything they need for period 1 and 2 at the start of the day. If parents and carers can talk about organisation strategies that will help avoid this, that would be great. 

We have been talking a lot about taking pride in our learning spaces - congratulations to 7G for having the neatest classroom so far this term! They will be getting Zoopa Doopers as a reward for their efforts.

We would also like to congratulate students on the proper wearing of masks. In the vast majority of cases, this has been done without any reminders.  However, a small number of students are constantly forgetting their masks and asking the school to provide one. This is totally fine on the odd occasion a mask is forgotten or gets broken, but it shouldn’t be a daily occurrence: this is a friendly reminder for families to pack spares in case of malfunctioning or lost masks. 

Now, as far off as it may seem, we are already thinking about how we can improve how we organise the start of next year. To help with this, we’d really appreciate your feedback on how you went this year. If you could complete this short survey, that would be great. 

It has been a pleasure being back on site with the Junior students, and we hope to see them continue their great start to the year. 

Kind regards,

The Junior School Team