Dear Parents

Welcome back, I hope you all had a relaxing holiday, even if you weren’t actually on holiday at least it was nicer to drive to work without all that school traffic.

It may be the final term for the year but there is still a whole lot of learning to take place before the year finishes. The inquiry topics are all planned around the theme ‘innovation and curiosity’ and look exciting. There is also learning around safety in outdoor pursuits – beach safety and Waterwise and bike safety for the Year 6 children.

The teachers will be doing a lot of testing and assessing during the early part of the term. There are two reasons for undertaking these assessments. Firstly to identify any gaps in learning and ensure the teaching programme for the term is designed to cater for these gaps. Also, to see what value has been added to each child’s achievement since the beginning of the year. We also use this data as part of attesting where children sit against National Standards. The data also gives us directions for professional development for staff and targets around student learning for 2016. As you can see, we don’t just test for the sake of testing, but use the information in a number of different ways.

What else do we have on this term? Athletics day at Millenium Stadium,Kiwi tennis, Carol service, gifts for the elderly, triathlon, City Mission appeal, Leavers’ dinner, activity day and assembly and of course prizegiving.

The councillors and house captains will be announced at a special assembly on 4 December. We are having dialogue with Baradene at the moment about a prizegiving date as their hall is not available for us to use on our preferred day. We are also looking for an alternate venue to hold the whole school as we prefer to celebrate success as a school rather than have separate assemblies. We are doing our best to get it all sorted out as quickly as possible and will let you know when and where.

It is going to be a great term.

Kind regards

Janice Adamson

Uniform

Please ensure that children come to school in their VAS school uniform, not their PE gear. Please also ensure that children are wearing uniform items, which includes white, blue or black socks.

A reminder that all children must be wearing a hat during this term.

Welcome and Congratulations

We are delighted to welcome Beverley Harper, new teacher of Year 0, it is great to have her on our staff.

Special congratulations to Kate Mullins, teacher in room 20, who got engaged during the holidays. Lovely news!