It has been so lovely this week to welcome back everyone ready for our new half-term, and we have had a busy week together. We would like to share with you some of the activities which have taken place this week across school.

On Monday, we started our learning for the new half-term by focusing on money. In our 'money Mondays', which take place on the first Monday back to school after each half-term, we were exploring together ideas about saving, budgeting and how to get the best value for things with our money. Our children were really interested to consider how families have to budget and amazed at all of the everyday costs there are involved in many of the things which we can all take for granted. This was a really positive focus across school.  

Our Reception class visited the Kington Fire Station on Wednesday, although the visit had to be cut short due to an emergency call out. The lovely firefighters have invited our Reception class back on another day for a longer visit. Reception really did not mind as they were very impressed to see our important emergency workers responding so brilliantly to their call.

In Year 1, they are busy learning the traditional tale 'The magic porridge pot' and as part of this they have made and tasted porridge this week! The Year 1 team were so impressed that everyone tried the porridge and some even went back for more, choosing from some very exciting extras to add to their porridge!

In Key Stage 2, our Year 3s and 4s have started their swimming lessons at Presteigne and Year 4 have also had their last Forest School session with Vik. It has been super to see how much our lower Key Stage 2 children have engaged with these exciting learning opportunities.

Our building project continues to take shape and, as you can see from the photographs, there have been some significant changes over the half-term. We would like to thank again our great build team who continue to work so thoughtfully around our learning.

In our assemblies we have started to think about our new value, 'peace', which has clear links to this time of the year but is an important value to explore, including and beyond the remembrance events which take place in November. We started on Monday with Mrs Bretherton thinking about what we understand by the word 'peace' and how that might feel to us individually. In our Wednesday assembly, Hannah shared a story from the Bible which is important to her and brings her a sense of inner peace which gave us all a chance to think again about how peace can feel to us.

Today we have celebrated our weekly Headteacher awards slightly differently by hearing about them in classrooms. It has been so fantastic to hear about the amazing reasons for the stickers this week, and they have included wonderful early writing showing great understanding of the sounds in words, for a really positive start to the new half-term with fantastic listening, for settling so well into our school, for demonstrating our value of 'peace' so beautifully and for completing some wonderful maths work. Stickers were also given for sharing fantastic friendship qualities and for being a super role model for others. Congratulations to you all.

We will be very proud on Sunday to be part of the Kington Remembrance march and have a great group of Y6 children who have volunteered to represent our school alongside Mrs Bretherton and Mrs Welson. This is always such a moving and important community event, and we are honoured to have been invited again. Our Y6 will be part of the march and some will be reading a poem when we are at the memorial. 'In Flanders Fields' by John McCrae is the poem which we will share and ends with the lines '....though poppies grow In Flanders' Fields' and is a poem which is sharing the importance of both Remembrance and the symbol of the poppy.

We wish everyone a 'happy weekend' and look forward to seeing you all on Monday ready for another great week together.