Middle School Newsletter

To 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) 
5 Matterhorn - Ms Hartzell (rhartzell@school21.org.uk)
5 Snowdon - Mr Starkey (jstarkey@school21.org.uk) 
6 Everest - Ms Chartres (cchartres@school21.org.uk) 
6 Kilimanjaro - Ms Ejvet (aejvet@school21.org.uk)
6 Kosciuszko - Ms Barron (kbarron@school21.org.uk) 
7 Ben Nevis - Ms Bannis & Ms Linehan (lbannis@school21.org.uk / alinehan@school21.org.uk)
7 Himalayas - Mr Bromely & Ms Silvain (sbromley@school21.org.uk / asilvain@school21.org.uk)
7 Rockies- Mr Thompson & Mr Sanhaji (dthompson@school21.org.uk / fsanhaji@school21.org.uk)
8 Fuji - Ms Druce & Ms Mclear (adruce@school21.org.uk / smclear@school21.org.uk) 
8 Olympus - Ms Jenkins & Mr Ward (gjenkins@school21.org.uk / hward@school21.org.uk)
8 Mont Blanc - Ms Freed & Ms Graham (afreed@school21.org.uk / egraham@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 - 8:00pm

Friday 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 

Tuesday 18th December: Year 7 Abbey Gardens Project Event 11:30 - 3:15pm / 3:15pm - 5:00pm

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 1

Chewing 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:

• On PE days School 21 polo shirt, black tracksuits and black trainers only

• Winter coats instead of hoodies.

• It’s very important that uniform items are clearly labelled. Looking after pieces of uniform is the responsibility of the students. Labelling items helps us if they are misplaced.

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.

Kevin is a key leader at Shpresa and he is heavily involved to get Albanian language as GCSE. 
He recently participated at London Mayoral accountability assembly where, amongst other people, he had the role of the roll call, representing the organisation as well as speaking to the Deputy Mayors and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan!  

Congratulations to Kevin on his achievement! If you have something fantastic to share in our community newsletter from outside the school, please email us with pictures and information!

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.
                                                                                                                                                                - Natas & Shahan

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 Workshop

Last 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! 

Recognition

Last 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 online

During 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 Books

Please 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
Librarian

This Week's Lunch Menu is Week 2!

Dear Parent/Carer,

FREE ‘Magic Breakfast’ for ALL Children!

We have been given a grant to support us with our new Breakfast provision which will start on Monday 26th November 2018. This grant runs for 18 months but we hope to continue after that time.

Our Breakfast Club will be open from 7:45am every day. No children from 8:10am will be able to go through the School Reception Office. All children must enter via the School Reception Office to be registered. The children can tuck in to a healthy breakfast, enjoy a variety of fun activities including arts and crafts, books and reading, sports and exercise, and then go on to their classroom, ready to learn by 8:30am.

There is no cost for this fantastic morning session, we only ask for your kind volunteer donation. There will be a donation box in the School Reception Office every morning. To make it easier for us, please register your child by emailing Miss Dilger but you can just turn up on the day!

But that’s not all, every morning, we will have bagel station open. One outside the Primary entrance at 8:15am and one outside the Secondary entrance from 7:45am where pupils can take a fresh plain bagel. This will be available to all children in the school free of charge.

Our bagels are specifically made to be “child friendly” and are low in sugar and low in salt.

Research has shown that children who have a healthy breakfast achieve more at school – make sure your child doesn’t miss out!

We look forward to seeing you at breakfast!

Miss Charlie Dilger
Primary Deputy Head

Christmas Jumper Day Is Coming!

The nights are drawing darker, the lights are slowly appearing in shop windows, cups in our favourite places are becoming more festive which can only mean one thing... There's two weeks until 2018's Christmas Jumper Day! As always, we will be donning our Christmas jumpers all in aid of Save The Children. You can make it, decorate it or use an old jumper you've worn before for a suggested donation of £1 and spread the seasonal joy whilst raising money for a great cause!