This week we have welcomed to our school community Mrs Rosie Langmore. She is teaching full-time in Year 5 Sapphire Class and we are delighted that she has settled into our school routines so quickly. If you see her on the playground do say hello and give her a lovely Cardinal Newman welcome.
It was a busy week to join the school with both Y2 and Y6 completing national assessment tests. The children were well prepared and approached the tests with great confidence. We will look forward to hearing the outcomes when the reports come out in July, but the children have worked hard and done their best, so they can be very proud of all their achievements.
Some of our children from Year 4 were invited to an Able Maths Day at St George’s, Weybridge this week. They enjoyed developing their skills among able mathematicians from different schools in the area and we were grateful to St George’s for this opportunity. At Cardinal Newman, we are also continuing to host “Able, Gifted and Talented” (AGT) workshops, with Maths, Science and Writing days being hosted here this year for different year groups. We have agreed to continue to be a host school next year and look forward to many more opportunities for our children to work with different children from local schools on exciting challenges.
Next week, children from all year groups will have the opportunity to broaden their experiences during our Creative Arts Week. A timetable for this was sent out last week. The week is themed around the book, “Dinosaurs and all that rubbish” and the children will be considering ideas about the environment and recycling, linked also to the papal letter on the environment, “Laudato Si” which reminds us of our responsibility to take care of creation. A children’s version of this letter can be found here.
During Creative Arts Week, we are very fortunate to have a visiting music teacher who is with us on exchange from a primary school near Berlin, Germany. The exchange is organised through “UK-German Connection” (a German embassy scheme) and will give our children the opportunity to have some taster German sessions, as well as preparing German food and having the chance for a cultural exchange of ideas with the older children. The German teacher, Mrs Hermann, will be sharing in our different Creative Arts activities through the week – if you see her, do make her feel welcome and let her know what a friendly school community we are!
As we await the date for the Canonisation of Blessed John Henry Newman (expected to be in Autumn 2019), the Catholic History Society is holding an evening close to London Bridge where you can find out more about our patron (soon to be patron saint!). See the link below for more details – booking is required for this event.
Finally, I thought it might be a good plan to have some kind of a forum for parent questions or discussion about the school and have pencilled in a Coffee and Conversation parents’ forum in the second half of this term on Tuesday 18 June between 8:30am and 9:15am. The idea is to talk about broader issues for the school (not relating to one individual child/class) and any questions from parents should be put forward in advance (by 3:30 on Friday 14 June). It would be great to have some parent collaboration on some of the questions that staff are working on too, such as developing the wider curriculum and making use of the local area to support children’s learning. We know that collaboration between school and family benefits our children enormously and we hope this will be one way of developing this. Minutes from the meeting will be sent out to all parents to try to keep everyone in the loop as much as we can.
All best wishes
Catherine Burnham
