It has been a really busy week in school this week and there have been, as usual, wonderful learning opportunities for our children to experience.

Years 2 and 4 have made a start on a wonderful arts project working in collaboration with 'Meadow Arts' and the Hay Castle Trust, alongside local artist Sarah and Suzy from the arts group to think about how different art activities can develop the link between nature and vocabulary.  You can see from the photographs the exciting experiences that have already been enjoyed in week 1 and the children are looking forward to what Sarah has planned for next week!

Years 2, 3, 4 and 5 continue to have a fantastic time working alongside Abi, our Herefordshire Cricket Coach. It is particularly inspiring for our children to know that Abi attended our school and to hear about the exciting opportunities that her passion for sport have enabled her to have as an adult. 

Our Year 5 'Warriors of Well-being' have made a start alongside Miss Brookes and Mrs Wood on their training working with Emily from WEST. This is a brilliant new role for Year 5 to be part of and will support children across school at lunchtime playtimes to have them to talk to and ask for advice as needed. Thank you to our 'Well-being Warriors', Miss Brookes and Mrs Wood.

We have been pleased to welcome our fantastic student teachers on their placements here at Kington. We welcome Miss Covey to Nursery, Miss Price into Year 5 and Miss Roche with Year 6. We know that they will have a super experience here and thank all of the staff and children for making them feel so welcomed.

In our assemblies this week, we have started to think about 'The Zones of Regulation', which we are all starting to use in our classrooms to support everyone in understanding different emotions which we can all experience at different times, and ideas about how all of these emotions are OK to have and how to deal with them. We have also celebrated the writing of the poets who entered the recent whole school competition and the winning entries have been shared in our school library for everyone to see. Mrs. Welson had a lovely time reading over 30 poems which had been entered. Congratulations to all of our talented poets.

Today we have all enjoyed hearing about the achievements of individuals in each class, and we were impressed to hear about children who have shown wonderful writing skills this week, demonstrated beautiful friendship qualities, been very brave when injured, shown super confidence when answering questions in class, for giving 100% effort and for showing wonderful progress in their maths.  A huge 'Well Done' to you all.

This year in the UK it is the 'National Year of Reading' and we have exciting plans for further developing reading across school, in particular reading for pleasure. We would like to signpost families to the reading resources available through our school website, which can be found under the Parents tab/ supporting the curriculum/reading at home. We would also like to highlight the 'Books for topics' website, which has an enormous number of resources to support reading at home and has booklists of suggested books for each year group. These booklists are also on display around school to support our readers with their reading choices. 

Best children's books - National Year of Reading Booklist

We would like to share further photographs of our building project. Our building is really changing now each week, and it has been exciting to be able to have a look at the different spaces as they are starting to be decorated, to walk through the doors which have been fitted and to see the new light system which has been installed. Thank you as always to our build team, who are so positive to have as part of our school community.

In the photographs you will also see some community news. WEST have sent us updates on some interesting parental workshops coming up to share with you.

We hope that everyone has a lovely weekend, and we look forward to seeing everyone on Monday ready for another busy and productive week.