Welcome everyone to our weekly news. We would like to share with you some of the exciting things which we have been doing this week. 

We have had a great first week of the last half-term, and it has been so lovely to hear about all of the amazing things which everyone did over the half-term in the sunshine. 

We hope that everyone has enjoyed exploring our fantastic new playground markings. We are really pleased with them and are grateful to everyone that has supported our fantastic 'Friends of Kington Primary' group’s fundraising to support this, along with donations from other groups, including Kington United Charities. We are continuing to develop our garden area in the space created by our extension and look forward to using this as a new outdoor learning space. 

In Monday’s assembly we heard about our new value ‘responsibility’, thinking about what this value means. We were astonished to discover how many letters this value has, although we decided that this was quite right because it is such an important value! We also celebrated house point badges which children from Year 2 upwards had worked hard for, and it was lovely to acknowledge the first 50 house point badges just as much as the 400. ‘Well done’ to you all. 

We also welcomed Emma from the Kington Festival Committee (and many more organisations), who was able to share with us her recent well-deserved civic award and to share with us news about the upcoming Kington wheelbarrow race where lucky volunteers from Y6 can be part of the presenting of prizes. It was lovely to hear how Emma has been thanked by the town council for all that she does to help our wonderful town be the best it can be.

In Wednesday’s assembly, Hannah from ‘checkpoint’ shared with us her latest hero from the Bible, who was Moses. Everyone enjoyed either helping Hannah with the acting out of the story with the Egyptians and Israelites or by being part of the Red Sea parting and coming back together. It was interesting to hear why Christians consider Moses such an important figure. 

Key Stage Two have made an excellent start on their summer performance, and the singing is already sounding amazing! Year 6 are working so hard on the play itself and doing well to start to learn their lines. We look forward to sharing 'Pirates of the Curry Bean' with you in July.

On Thursday, we were really proud to take part in the Luctonians' annual rugby 'tagfest' and the team, alongside Mr Ward-Willis and Mrs Painter, were part of a Guinness World Record! This tournament had officially the most number of rugby players at a festival. Our team had a brilliant day and all enjoyed the matches which they were part of and, as always, represented our school fantastically.

Today in assembly we have been thrilled to hear about the reasons for being awarded headteacher stickers, including being enthusiastic about everything, for sharing amazing work this week, for trying their absolute best in all of the challenges which are given to them and being an excellent role model. We also heard how children had made progress with their reading, showing huge progress in how independent they can be, focusing really well on their own work and for asking for help when they have needed it. These are all wonderful reasons, and we congratulate you all.

We also heard how Year 4 had worked over the half-term to win the latest 'Battle of the Bands' on TTRS. We also said 'Well done' to the 3 children who had contributed the most points to the totals for their class. Year 3 also shared the exciting news that their poems had been chosen to be published in one of the 'First Writers' anthology editions.

We were also joined again by Emma from the Festival Committee, who had the important job this morning of choosing the Year 6 names 'out of the hat' to be the assistants at the upcoming wheelbarrow race. Our two chosen children were so excited and look forward to helping Emma and the other Festival organisers on the 13th June.

Today we have also been thinking about Mr Steve Gilling, who was a teacher at Kington Primary School. Sadly, Mr Gilling died recently, and it was his funeral today. As a mark of respect, our Year 6 children and members of staff stood respectfully as the cortège passed school. We know that this meant so much to his family at this sad time. Mr Gilling was a teacher at our school for 31 years and even when he retired, helped at many Harvest and Christmas performances both in school and at St. Mary’s. He will be both remembered and missed by many people in our community. 

We hope that everyone has a great weekend, and we will be pleased to see you all on Monday ahead of another super week together.