Headteacher: Mr Oli de Botton Middle School NewsletterTo our Middle School Community,It's an exciting, jam-packed week for Middle School in the run up towards the Years 6 to 8 Festival of Light concert! Everyone is very excited to be preparing for this amazing event. Please remember to get your tickets through ParentPay. Also this week we will have our combined Christmas Jumper day and the kitchen will be putting on a special Christmas Dinner for all students as well. The best Christmas jumper in each coaching group will win 2 free children's tickets to Vue Cinemas to use in December! Please remember to bring in your gold coin donation as well on Friday for the Save the Children charity. Finally, please remember that your initial point of contact with the school if you have a question or concern is your child's coach or class teacher. As a reminder, contact details for each class are below: 5 Machu Picchu - Ms Kenshole (akenshole@school21.org.uk) Dates For Your Diary Friday 7th December: Last day of Clubs (Motown band still running Tuesday for Festival of Light rehearsal) Monday 10th December: Year 6 Pantomime trip - Sleeping Beauty at Theatre Royale, Stratford. Please note 5:00pm return time.Thursday 13th December: Festival of Light Concert 2 (Year 6 to Year 8) from 6:00pm - 8:00pmFriday 14th December: Christmas Jumper Day & School Christmas Dinner (Please bring £1 donation for Save the Children)Tuesday 18th December: Autumn Term Best Class Attendance Reward Trip to Zap Space Wednesday 19th December: Exhibition of Beautiful Work 4:30pm - 6:30pm (Letter with further information coming home this week) Thursday 20th December: December Above and Beyond Out and About trip Friday 21st December: Last day of term (school finishes at 1:00pm) Monday 7th January: INSET Day (School Closed for Students)Tuesday 8th January to Friday 15th February - Spring Term 1Chewing Gum: Chewing gum at school is not allowed as it often ends up in unfortunate places and leaves a big mess. Please support the school by reminding your child about this rule. Students found to be chewing gum at school will have to complete a break or lunch time service, helping to clean up around the school. Parents will be contacted if students repeatedly break this rule. Thank you for your support with this matter. Uniform reminders: Please ensure your child is leaving for school each morning in the correct uniform:
We appreciate your support with this matter. Conduct outside of school We ask families to support the school in ensuring your children are representing School 21 appropriately, sensibly and safely before and after school. We have had reports of students outside of the school gates using inappropriate language before school, and also for not demonstrating appropriate conduct at local shops on the high street after school. We will follow up these reports with calls home to parents. Please be aware that the school advises local residents and business owners to contact the Police if they feel students are not conducting themselves appropriately. Please ensure you take responsibility for your child and speak to them about expectations when they are travelling to and from school. This will be addressed as well during assemblies at school. Please remember to ensure your child has a water proof/resistant coat with a hood each day as we still go out for break and lunch in light drizzle. This is important as the weather gets colder! Thanks Elly for modelling for us! Middle School Class Attendance Winners (wc 26/11/2018)Year 5 - 5 SNO - 98.4% Year 6 - 6 EVE - 94.8% Year 7 - 7 ROC - 99.6% Overall Middle Winner Year 8 - 8 FUJ - 96.0% The class with the highest attendance all term will be treated to a Zap Space visit on December 18th. The winning class will be announced next Monday when letters will also be sent home regarding the trip. The Million Words Club! Huge recognition to four fantastic readers in our Middle School - Mimi and Kajya from Year 5 and Angelina and Zak from Year 8. All four have reached 1,000,000 words read through our Accelerated Reader program. When you reach the Million Words Club you're entitled to pick a book of your choice to keep. The reading culture in Middle School is strong - keep going everyone! Thank you to the English team and Ms Fisher for their support. Festival of Light... Part 3! This week sees the Year 6 - 8 Festival of Light. It is important that all students attend as everyone has a part in the concert! School will end as normal on Thursday with students expected between 5:00pm - 5:15pm. They will need to come to their coaching / class rooms before heading over to the main hall. Please drop them off at the middle school doors at this time and head to the main hall to get your seats. At the end of the concert the Year 6 children can be collected from their classroom doors, the Year 7 and 8 children will be dismissed through the Middle School doors. Please meet your child at these locations after the concert ends. Keep an eye out for more detailed communication regarding the event from Ms Crowhurst and the music team. Kevin and the Mayor! One of our Year 7 students has had a great achievement outside of school. Kevin in Year 7 is involved in the Shpresa Programme, an organisation that promotes the participation and contribution of the Albanian-speaking community in the UK. Y7 iPad Update We need to send home a HUGE thank you to our Year 7 families for your patience and understanding around the roll out of the 1:1 Devices last week. The last few will be sent home this week. We sincerely apologise for any extra delays you've experienced during this process and appreciate your understanding. Please note that first payments will be taken a month after the original order, which will be after Christmas. If your child is bringing in their device from home, please remind them that they need to take these to the IT Department to install the school profile so that they can be used on the school wifi. This week saw teachers start using the devices to support learning in lessons. Below is Mr Bromley's art class creating 2D shape mock ups of their character creations using their iPads. Year 5 Reimagine the Future as Illustrators... This week we have been drawing pictures inspired byThe Rabbits story by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, but we are changing these into a space story because we are looking at modern colonialism. NASA has a space probe on Mars to see if Mars is habitable. In our picture the aliens don’t know what we have done to our planet. We are going to evacuate our planet because of pollution so we are going to their planet to decrease risk of death. NASA is spending over $300,000,000 on the mission! This picture is
for our class book that we are all working on for the exhibition. Year 7 Abbey Gardens Event Year 7 will be holding their major end-of-project event at Abbey Gardens next week on Tuesday 18th December. Please see the flier below for more information and we hope to see you there! This is the evening before our whole-school Autumn Exhibition. Salesforce CAD WorkshopLast week a selection of students from Year 6 and Year 8 took part in a workshop run by Salesforce volunteers. The students were able to experiment with Computer Aided Design (CAD) software and will be able to 3D print their designs on our new printer, donated to Middle School by the Salesforce team!RecognitionLast week was full of incredible above and beyond examples from across the school. Check this week's recognition boards for your name.Being Share Aware: supporting your child to be safe onlineDuring the Middle School years many children become active on social media. It can be hard to keep track of what your child is doing on social networks, apps and games. Or know how best to keep them safe. The NSPCC provides guidance for parents to help untangle the web and on how to teach your child to be Share Aware. Follow this link to explore popular social networks, games and apps and to learn more about these to help support your child. Click on the image below to access the site. Overdue Library BooksPlease return your overdue library books! We currently have over 500 books overdue. This means that students are unable to borrow popular books.Students are allowed to borrow up to three books for a loan period of one month and can be renewed after this period should the need arise. Any books that are lost or damaged must be replaced.Mrs Fisher
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