What a fantastic start to the new year we have had. The children have all settled incredibly well in their new classes and the progress they are making is superb.
Thank you to parents for all your hard work on reading, spellings and homework with your children. It allows the children to become more confident learners when given the practice to embed their learning independently at home. The next half term we will be focusing on Reading daily at home and we have rainbow readers coming up.
After half term we have some new and exciting adventures for our children. We will be launching Marvellous Me for 2019-20 and your if you can’t access this the new codes will be sent home.
I am delighted to say the parent drop ins every Friday are working well. You can come every Friday to speak to your class teacher, look at their books and discuss if you have any concerns or want to share information. The door is always open so we look forward to seeing you. This half term over 40 parents have attended to look at learning or speak about next step targets.
This year we are working on sharing our best practice – a recommendation from our fabulous Ofsted inspection. Please make sure you read the report. It is on our website if you want to read it. We have so far supported 42 schools this half term.
We have an external review booked with an inspector separately in February 2020 to ensure the exemplary teaching and learning is still maintained and we are highly confident that the school is still improving beyond our recent outstanding. The report will be published when complete as always to share what is working well and what our next focus priorities will be.
We have held some lovely community events and workshops already this year. The children and parents who participated in the ‘seeing is believing sessions’ have commented how useful they have been. We want you to come into school to see how fantastic the staff and pupils are, you will be amazed by the teaching styles and I am confident you will leave thinking – I am proud my child goes to Waterside – which is how it should be!
I will keep you updated on the school extension. We are awaiting further information from the local authority at the moment on the phase 2 - hall extension. I am sure you will all agree this is needed. We have currently admitted in September an additional 81 pupils. Once the classrooms are complete, this will see an additional 109 pupils attending Waterside.
Thank you as always for supporting our school community.
Mrs Knowles and the Droplet team