The Chronicle

‘I am not a teacher, but an awakener.’

– Robert Frost

Dear Parents 

  
I would like to start this week’s newsletter by thanking everyone for their understanding whilst we navigate the unfortunate sickness bug that is currently affecting school. Only last week I reminded families of our school policy regarding sickness, and it certainly proved to be timely. I realise that some may have felt that we were sending out too much communication, but we were following UK Health Security Agency directives. As of today, I am pleased to report that we appear to have seen the end of cluster absence and the trend is showing that children are now returning to school. We will continue to maintain the enhanced cleaning for the next two weeks to minimise any future reinfection. I do hope all staff and children are healthy and symptom free to enjoy their weekend.   
We have not been able to participate in external fixtures, competitions or receive visitors this week and we rescheduled where possible.  
 
The PTA meeting also had to be changed to an online meeting this Wednesday and I was interested to hear discussions regarding future events. The forthcoming Christmas Fair will be the next fundraiser which can be enjoyed by all families. This will be held on Saturday 3 December between 1.00pm and 4.00pm. The PTA are very much hoping that as many families as possible can attend at some point during the afternoon and would like to hear from anyone who might possibly be able to spare some time to help on a stall (for about an hour and a half).   
  
Due to the cancellations of external providers’ clubs and fixtures, we saw a noticeable increase in children attending aftercare this week. I would like to remind parents that Mrs Walter and her team can only accept children into aftercare who have been booked into the provision in advance, or who are taken to the provision by a member of staff, after the end of carline.  Booking is necessary so that we can manage numbers, ensure children are in the right place at the end of the day and to order the necessary catering provisions. This in turn will also ease carline congestion and save unnecessary waiting for parents and pupils. Pupils have also commented that they like to know in advance what their end of day arrangements are. All pre-booked after care will receive the snack prepared by the kitchen staff, but this cannot be guaranteed for bookings made after 2.00pm (although we will always endeavour to give the pupils something to eat). I hope that this explains the provision, but please do not hesitate to contact the school office or aftercare@crackleyhall.co.uk if you have any questions. 
  
Following advice, we did not hold Celebration Assembly this morning but teachers have awarded Stars of the Week to children and I will award certificates next week when we resume our usual activities. I visited classes today to congratulate this week’s Stars and, as mentioned, will formally present their certificate next Friday. Well done to Rosie, Bracken, Imogen, Marley, Ryan, Hugo, Sophia, Angelica, Felix, Theo, Ding, Wade, Grace and Georgie. I look forward to congratulating you all next Friday. 
  
Next week we hope to return to ‘normal service’ and all clubs will resume. We will also be wishing Junior 3 and 4 ‘the very best’ for their LAMDA exams which take place on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Also on Friday next week, we have been invited to sing at the switching on of the Kenilworth Lights in the High Street from 5.30pm.  This will take place in the old town and is always a lovely evening with our Choral Group helping to add some festive spirit. 
 
I hope that sports fans are ready to enjoy the Men’s Football World Cup and the Autumn International rugby matches this weekend. Congratulations to England on winning the T20 Men’s Cricket World Cup. Wishing you all a happy and warm weekend. 

God bless,

Rob Duigan

Our school photography company Gillman & Soame have sent through proof cards for the Individual and Sibling photographs. These have been distributed amongst the year groups ready to come home from today. 

The Class photographs will not be ready until next week, as they are not yet approved. 

If you require aftercare for your child, please ensure that you book them in by calling the office on 01926 514444 or by emailing aftercare@crackleyhall.co.uk or receptionist@crackleyhall.co.uk.

If you have booked an aftercare session, it would also be helpful to let your child know.

Please also note that permanent bookings are only valid for the term, due to club and activity changes.

Any children who are not collected from carline, for example if parents are stuck in traffic, will be taken to aftercare at 4.15pm, when carline finishes and charged accordingly.

Aftercare runs from after school until 6:00pm, with charges being £4.75 per hour or part thereof.

Childcare vouchers can be used as payment or part payment for aftercare.

As the office now closes at 5.30pm, please call aftercare directly on 07391 407808.

The School Immunisation Team will be attending the school on Tuesday 29 November to carry out the flu vaccinations for all children in Reception through to Junior 6.

Prior to this day, they require the e-consent link to be completed. Please click on the below link, and you will be able to consent or decline to the flu vaccination.

Unique consent link 

Once the form is completed, please ensure that you note the Unique Submission Number before closing the web page down, in case you have a query.

The e-consent link will close on Sunday 20 November and will not be able to be extended.

Please note that the e-consent link has been set up and is managed by the NHS Immunisation Team, and that the school does not have access to see who has or has not completed the form. Therefore, it is imperative that you note your Unique Submission Number as stated above.

The School Immunisation Team will only be referring to the completed consent link, therefore if you do not complete then your child will not be able to have the flu vaccination. Consent in any other format will not be accepted by the Immunisation Team.

If you have any queries regarding the form, please contact either the school office or the School Immunisation Team, details can be seen in this Flu Vaccination Letter

Our Stars of the Week this week are:

Congratulations to them all!

As we approach Advent, we help the children to understand that it is a time for preparing for Christmas, both practically and spiritually. During our RE lessons, drama and assemblies we think about the true message of Christmas.

This year we have decided as a school, to take part in a Reverse Advent Calendar.  This is when the pupils and staff each pick a number from 1 – 25 out of a hat. They are then asked to bring either an item of food, a toiletry product or a small toy.

The donations will be collected by the class teachers who will put them in a box in the classroom.  These will be displayed on the Advent Mass and the final assembly of the year.

All donations will be collected on Friday 16 December and taken to Kenilworth, Leamington and Warwick Food Banks to help communities in need. Please check out www.warwickdistrict.foodbank.org.uk to find out more.

Donations particularly in need are:

• Long Life UHT Milk
• Washing up liquid
• Male & female deodorants
• Shower gel
• Packets of instant mash
• Tinned vegetables
• Jam
• Toothpaste

Please do not send in these items if at all possible:

• Dried pasta
• Baked beans
• Soup
• Tea

If you have any questions, or indeed any suggestions in ways we could help our local community, please contact me at sjacksonmayne@crackleyhall.co.uk.

Thank you for your support.

Over the Michaelmas half term pupils were challenged to create their own project on Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Mrs Allen asked pupils to investigate the Queen’s extraordinary life and to find out more about her, to choose interesting facts and to present them in a creative way.

We had lots of entries from pupils from Reception up to Junior 6 and they covered lots of aspects of her reign including her love of animals, the countries in the commonwealth as well as her sense of style and the secret codes in her handbags! The super projects have been on display in The Gables – if you get chance, please do take a look. You can see some off them in the gallery.

A huge well done to all the participants in the Junior da Vinci challenge, every pupil who submitted a project has been awarded a creativity strand for a History Junior Da Vinci and some of the most outstanding entries will receive a full Junior Da Vinci award. These will be presented during upcoming assemblies.

To kick start Anti-Bullying Week, the children came to school wearing odd socks on Monday. Odd Socks Day reminds pupils that they are all allowed to be themselves and helped us mark the start of Anti-Bullying Week in a fun and positive way.

Odd Socks Day was just one part of Anti-Bullying Week here at Crackley as the school joined in the national initiative that encourages children to embrace their differences and report bullying behaviour.

Christmas Holiday Club will run from Monday 19 to Friday 23 December. It will also be open on Tuesday 3 January 2023. Bookings are now open for days that are jam packed full of activites and trips. The trips will incur additional charges 

Monday 19 December - Jam Jam Boomerang £7.50

Tuesday 20 December - Christmas Cookery 

Wednesday 21 December - Vue Cinema Leamington £5 (entrance fee, popcorn and a drink)

Thursday 22 December - Jump In, Warwick £10 (entrance fee and socks)

Friday 23 December - Christmas Arts and Crafts

Tuesday 3 January 2023 - Magical Land at Studio Megastar £8.50 (exclusive use of this venue)

Daily rates - Special Offer Book the Whole week Mon-Fri and save £10! 

9am-5pm which includes hot lunch £30 per child 

Breakfast Club 8am-9am which includes breakfast £5 per child 

Teatime Club 5pm-6pm which includes hot tea £5 per child 

Due to adult/child ratios early booking is advised. 

Please book via the Holiday Club email address - holidayclub@crackleyhall.co.uk

We accept chilcare vouchers or holiday club fees can be added to your termly bill. Thank you.

The Crackley Hall Junior da Vinci programme encourages all pupils to be inspired to be the best that they can be. The Junior da Vinci programme embraces three adapted principles - Creativity, Practice and Mastery - that the children demonstrate in their learning. This year we are ensuring that all pupils in the school have opportunities to achieve Junior da Vinci awards. This link provides more information about this programme. Look out for children achieving Junior da Vinci's in the Chronicle over the year.

In English this week, Junior 6 have been stepping into the shoes of ‘Jim’ from The Christmas Truce. They have constructed letters to home explaining what happened on that eventful day, exploring how to show their emotions and feelings in their writing. Their descriptive phrases and emotive language have meant some very poignant and heart-felt letters to home, showing great improvement in the maturity of their written work. The Junior 6 children will be continuing this theme next week, with their work being put on display for everyone to enjoy.

On Monday morning, it was fabulous to see the children arrive wearing their brightly-coloured odd socks to mark the beginning of anti-bullying week. This year’s theme is Reach Out, focusing on how to help yourself or others who are being bullied. The children have enjoyed many activities throughout the week, including an anti-bullying assembly, a PSHE lesson, various lively discussions, role play activities, as well as designing their own pair of odd socks. Well done Junior 5!

Despite it being a strange week with numbers very low, it has been learning as usual in Junior 5. In English, the focus has been on narrative writing based on a picture prompt. Why not ask your child to share how they interpreted the visual stimulus? In Maths, the children have been learning about multiplication and division in readiness for the next topic - fractions - which we will begin next week. 

We wish all the children, and Mrs Wildey, a speedy and healthy recovery.  

Junior 4 sang their hearts out this week practising for Young Voices in readiness for Resorts World Arena, Birmingham in January. We travelled Over the Hills and Far Away to Flanders, Portugal and Spain where Queen Anne commands. We then crossed the Irish Sea for a traditional Irish song of Molly Malone, also known as Dublin’s Fair City, before setting off again to Scotland with The Skye Boat Song, where loud the winds howls and loud the waves roars and thunderclaps rend the air – a 19th century Scottish song recalling the journey of Bonnie Prince Charlie. With dance routines and actions at the ready, we sang and danced to Rockstar, We are Family, and the ever popular 1978 disco song Le Freak.  Well done, Junior 4 – we are all music and dance superstars. Remember to keep practising at home!

This week in Junior 3 we have been soldering on with our understanding of subtraction. We have looked at ‘exchanges’ in both the tens and the hundreds and why and when this is needed. With the help of Tiny the tortoise and our place value counters, we have made our own exchanges and then applied this to completing accurate formal written subtractions. There were a lot of steps to success and a lot of brain power invested. We have also been reviewing the suffixes ‘er’ and ‘est’ in our English lessons and using these adjectives to write sentences linked to our story Lila And The Secret Of Rain which is set in the hottest and driest village in Kenya. We have missed our friends who are recuperating this week and are looking forward to being a whole class again very soon.

This week in Junior 2, it has been all about dragons' eggs! The children received a letter from Professor Hanan al-Hroub from Warwick University. She is conducting a very important experiment. She believes that the character of a dragon is changed by the environment in which the egg lays and she is hoping that by having the eggs in our classroom for two weeks, the baby dragons will be born with a kind and hard-working nature. The egg will have to be returned to the university before it hatches, but we will receive news and possibly some pictures following the birth. The only problem was that the eggs disappeared! Thankfully, we found them and we are keeping them safe, showing them how to love and care for each other so that when they hatch, they will grow to be as wonderful as the children are. We have written some amazing dragon poems and created dragon world landscapes to help ignite our imaginations for our English lessons next week. 

Junior 1 have spent their Maths lessons learning about 2 and 3D shapes. Not only have they learnt the names of the most common shapes, they also counted how many sides, vertices and faces each shape has. This led to sorting them according to their different properties and learning that sometimes there is more than one way to sort a group of shapes! Geography led us to learn about animal farms and what animals give to us. There were some surprised faces when they learnt that leather, cheese and yoghurt all come from cows! In History we took a trip back to the Victorian times and compared a Victorian breakfast with one we eat today. Did you know in the Victorian times you could only eat bacon for breakfast if you were going out to work?

In Reception this week we have been learning about Autumn through the story called Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. We have been sorting leaves and comparing colours and shapes. We then used the leaves that we found in forest school to create our own leaf characters and animals. In Literacy we had a go at writing where the Leaf Man went on his journey.

Please click on the link for this week's newsletter.

Please find information below:

Children's Liturgy

We hear a story about Jesus on the cross. We think about what type of king Jesus is and about how we can share His love with others.

Activity Sheet

Please click on the link below for this week's Weekly Mission:

Weekly Mission

On Saturday 12 November, eight U9 boys travelled to Repton Prep for their annual football festival. The aim of the day was to develop and grow as a team, show off their skills as individuals and have a great time playing football. The boys played five matches in total and didn’t disappoint. Having conceded a goal very early in the first game, they showed brilliant character to respond positively, recovering to end the game with a draw. After that, they continued to improve and although they lost the next game, their attitude was then rewarded with an excellent 3-1 win against a good opponent. All of the boys were outstanding and a special mention must go to Junior 3 pupil, Rory, who earned plaudits from the onlooking spectators. Well done team!

Why not start the festive countdown by building your very own Lego Advent Calendar? That’s exactly what we did in Lego Club this week! It proved trickier than we first thought, but this didn't deter us one little bit. Packed with inspirational thinking, excitement and wonderful surprises, we decided to base our Calendar on a Star Wars theme, with turtles and seals making the odd appearance. We built a stormtrooper, a Tusken Raider, a starfighter plane with blaster powers, a festive looking Bo the seal, and Darth Vader looking less mean than usual dressed up as Santa Claus and not forgetting our weekly Lego chess set. We also included a hairdryer for those last minute brush-ups and a bunch of beautiful flowers. However, the undeniable highlight was on the 24th window where we had an adorable minifigure of Baby Yoda, in a festive jumper, lying in his own red pram and being cared for by Kevin from Home Alone!  We even wrote our own easy-to-follow building instructions to go behind each window.  Who said Advent Calendars were just made of chocolate?! 

The PTA Christmas Fair could not take place without your help and generosity. Can children in the below years please bring in either chocolates or a bottle for the tombola, depending on what year group your child(ren) are in, the week the 28 November please.

R, Y1, Y2 – Students to bring in Chocolate 

Y3, Y4, Y5 – Students to bring in Bottles  

Get into the festive spirit with Artlab's Bauble Decorating Workshop! This will take place during the Christmas Fair and if the session fills up - more will be put on! 

Learn how to use acrylic paints to make your very own Christmas designed paper mache baubles. 

Enjoy a relaxing 45-60 minute session while Libby from Artlab guides you through this step by step workshop creating four hand painted baubles presented in a lovely gift box. Parents and children will need to a sign up directly with the link below.

No experience necessary! Please click here to sign up.

Did you know you can find us on Facebook?  Search Crackley Hall PTA to keep up with our events and what we are doing to help enhance your child's experience at Crackley Hall.

A big congratulations to our October 200 club winners!

£100 - Andrew

£75 - Maggie

£50 - Matt

You could be the next big winner as the 200 Club November enrolment is now open and the next draw will be on Friday 25 November in assembly - now £45 to enter for the rest of the academic year

For £45 you will be entered into a monthly draw from November to July for a chance to win £100, £75 or £50.

We absolutely love giving back to the families and can’t thank you enough for your support, enrolment via the link below:

200 Club

Good luck!

Saturday 3 December 2022 - 1.00pm to 4.00pm - Volunteers Needed! 

We look forward to seeing the whole family at the annual PTA spectacular Christmas Fair this December!

We are very excited to finally welcome back everyone for some festive fun and we hope to see as many families as possible at the annual PTA Christmas Fair on Saturday 3 December.

We are still looking for help to run the stalls and we would be very pleased to hear from volunteers if you could spare some time. 

Santa will be on hand to make sure he is checking his naughty and nice list and the Crackley Hall staff team will also be helping on the day but any help you can give will be much appreciated. There are many slots on the day of the fair that need to be filled to even put this event on. As a thank you, every volunteer will receive a free drink from the bar or hot drinks station. If you are able to help, please use this sign up link to select a volunteer slot.

We look forward to seeing you there.  

Kind regards 

Crackley Hall PTA

Note: No hot food will be sold this year but there will be plenty of festive food and drinks. 

The engraved Crackley Hall reusable coffee mugs are back! These are perfect for bringing to assembly or when you are out and about and are £10 each. 

Please use this link:

https://www.pta-events.co.uk/crackleyhall/index.cfm

Please see the attached dates for your diary. We also have a Facebook page - Crackley Hall PTA, please join us to keep an eye upcoming events. 

The Big PTA Christmas Raffle is Back! Can you help us reach our goal of 500 tickets?

We are excited to join The Big PTA Cash Draw. After the last couple of years, we are determined to get our fundraising back on track and this is an opportunity to have some fun and raise money for our school.

For every ticket purchased, you will have 12 chances to win up to £5,000!* At the same time, we will raise 50% from every ticket sold supporting our PTA. It's a fantastic way to bring parents, carers, teachers and the wider community together, in partnership with our PTA, and at the same time give something back. We hope to raise funds that can support and enrich the education of our children – we aim to provide extra resources for the children, improve the school environment, as well as run extracurricular activities such as music, art and sport.

Your support is greatly appreciated and we wish you good luck! Please copy and paste this link into your browser to enter:  

Big PTA Cash Draw

We now have many sports and uniform items back in stock. If you have any orders you would like to place, please email uniform@pta.crackleyhall.co.uk - we are volunteer run and aim to get back to you within seven days.

We are also always looking for donations of items your child has outgrown. Please drop these in the box labelled ‘PTA uniform’, located in the front porch of the school. 

As always, we thank you for your support and couldn’t run the second hand shop without your generous donations. 

We would also like to say a huge THANK YOU to our PTA members in charge of the second hand uniform shop who work so hard for us all!

The next uniform sale is at the Christmas Fair, this is along with the Xmas jumpers. We are still in need of xmas jumpers for donations if any child has outgrown theirs, as always thank you for your generosity, we will be selling Christmas Jumpers just in time for the school wide Christmas Jumper day on Friday 9 December!

Thursday 1 December  - 9.00am

We look forward to seeing you on Thursday 1 December. Our monthly coffee meet ups are a great way to meet other new parents too.

Do please note the recent change of venue.

Crackley Hall PTA - Kenilworth needs your help!

Sign up to easyfundraising and raise FREE donations every time you shop online with over 6,000 retailers. John Lewis, Argos, Uswitch, eBay and many more are waiting to give a free donation.

Plus, once you’ve signed up and raised £5 in donations, easyfundraising will give us an extra £5 bonus donation!

Sign up to support us here – Easy Fundraising

We regularly recruit for a variety of roles, please do share news of the vacancies with interested friends and family.

• Nursery Manager - Litte Crackers
• Teacher of Mathematics (Maternity Cover) - Princethorpe College
• Exam Invigilators - Princethorpe College
• Nursery Assistant - Little Crackers
• Library Assistant - Princethorpe College

Further information and application forms on all roles are available on the Foundation's website - www.princethorpe.co.uk/join-us