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OCTOBER 2024

Welcome!

Dear Parents and Carers,

What an extraordinary start to 2024 we've had at Prescot Primary! The corridors are once again filled with the joyful sounds of learning and laughter as our pupils settle into their new classrooms and embrace fresh challenges.

Our new little learners have adapted beautifully to school life, making friends and discovering the excitement of learning. It's heartwarming to see our Year 6 buddies taking such wonderful care of them during lunch breaks and helping them to build relationships with their new friends.

The past eight weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. Our Prescot Pilot programme is up and running with over 100 Pilots completing their activity logs. Our busy after school activity clubs have been as popular as ever with our teachers striving to offer plenty of extra learning opportunities outside of the school day. Y3 have taken responsibility for their brand new iPads and we have a new team of Pupil Rights Respecting Leaders - congratulations to our new 'Changemakers'!

A special thank you to all parents who attended our Parents' Evening or Y6 Review Day this week. Your engagement and support make our school community stronger. As we look ahead to the second half of the autumn term, we have many exciting events planned, including Children in Need and our annual KS2 Talent Show.

Read on to find out more about Autumn Term 1...

Early Years Update

Wow, what a fabulous and super first half term it’s been for our younger learners.

Our Nursery children have settled back in beautifully and have adapted to their rules and routines. We are extremely proud of them! It’s been a busy and exciting half term too as we covered the topic ’People who help us’. We have been so lucky to have Mrs Collis, the Dentist and the Police come into the nursery to speak to us. We listened really well and loved to sit in the police van, feel all of the different types of teeth and make Mrs Collis' baby giggle. Well done and keep on being superstars!

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Reception Badgers have made lots of new friends and have been busy talking, sharing, observing, comparing and building. We love having new families to share our school with and hope you have settled into life at Prescot Primary.

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Y6 Tigers PGL Adventure PCPTOP50

We always start the Y6 year with a four day adventure to PGL Boreatton Park in Shropshire. This year's trip was another one full of personal success as the children faced their own challenges and grew in confidence. We kayaked, walked, climbed, swung, sang, balanced, laughed and cried together - such a wonderful bonding experience!

The PGL experience is just one of our 'Top50' opportunities that are additional to the curriculum offered in class at our school. Other 'Top 50' activities include Kingswood Colomendy in Y4, trips to Liverpool, working with community groups, volunteering, leadership and let's not forget the trip to the 'Magic Postbox' in Nursery. All of these help to strengthen the cultural capital on offer for our children.

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^{Breakfast Club and After School Club}

We are very proud of our Early Birds and Night Owls provision as it offers a warm and friendly space before and after each day of classroom learning. Familiar adult faces greet the children and work alongside them, creating many happy experiences - we even have children wanting to come to our wrap-around clubs even if they don't need them! We watch with a smile as the older children interact with the younger children, leading their play and taking joy in all the new relationships that are formed in these additional hours of the school day.

Thank you to the families who use BC/ASC, book on time and drop-off and collect on time. We appreciate it.

The booking window is now open until Christmas.

If you would like your child to join our wrap-around provision, please call the main office who will book you in for an induction meeting and/or taster session.

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SEND Update

Our SEND children have settled in brilliantly during this first half term, and we are thrilled with how smoothly the transition back to school has gone. The "Team Around the Child" approach continues to be a great success, ensuring that the children are supported and thriving in their learning environments. Please keep an eye out for upcoming dates for our SEND coffee afternoons, which are a wonderful opportunity to connect with other parents and share experiences. If you have any questions or concerns about your child's learning needs, please don't hesitate to reach out to our school SENDCOs, Mrs Blackburn for KS1/2 and Mrs George for Early Years, who are always here to help.

Over the holiday, you may want to look at community spaces and clubs that also go the extra mile for children with additional needs.

You may want to explore:

https://www.thesensoryhive.co.uk/

https://homestartknowsley.org.uk/the-jigsaw-project/

https://www.familyfund.org.uk/

https://www.act-for-action.co.uk/

https://meadowparkknowsley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/SEND-Drop-In-flyer-The-Pride-Feb-24.pdf

http://shortbreaks@knowsley.gov.uk

https://www.addvancedsolutions.co.uk/services-for-families/families-in-knowsley/

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Attendance

Attendance in our school is crucial as it lays the foundation for essential skills in literacy, numeracy, and social interaction. Regular attendance fosters a sense of routine and responsibility, enhances engagement in classroom activities, and promotes the development of social skills through interactions with peers and teachers. Our attendance this half term is 94%. If we all ‘work like clockwork’ we will easily reach our target of over 95%. Remember, every day missed impacts your child's education.

Good punctuality - arriving before the gate closes and staying until the very end of the day - is also crucial.

The diagram below helps to simplify the attendance percentages.

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Reading Update

Welcome back to another year of reading at PCP. We are so happy to see that many of our children continued to read for pleasure over the summer holidays, keeping up their good reading habits which will help them to achieve well in many other areas of their lives. It means we have already read nearly 10 million words between us which is a great start to the year.

As usual, we have our reading rewards all in place to celebrate our bookworms’ botheredness as they make progress towards their targets. This year, the children will receive their rewards for the previous half term when we come back after our break. This gives them the maximum amount of time to reach their targets and maybe a bit more. We love being able to share our children’s successes with them, and to be able to assist them in becoming settled and happy readers. Our children are given enough time in class each day to reach their reading goals but reading at home really supports this, and gives parents and carers an opportunity to check in with them about the books they are bringing home. We always suggest bedtime as being a particularly good time to read, as it helps us to wind down, relax and drift off into a good night’s sleep.

Our library continues to grow, and continues to be one of our favourite shared spaces within the school. We continue to receive generous donations of pre-loved books and we thank our families for these. Please continue to consider us when you are ready to pass on any books your children have outgrown.

We await with baited breath the news of our first Word Millionaire. Past years have shown that once we get the ball rolling they come along thick and fast. As always, we can’t wait!

Academisation Update

Our journey towards becoming part of The Rowan Learning Academy Trust continues, with lots of work being completed behind the scenes. We do not expect to fully convert before 1st february 2025 but will keep you updated. If you would like to look again at our chosen trust, click here:

/www.rlt.education

If you have any questions about our academisation, please email admin@prescotprimary.org.uk

Rights Respecting School Update

We are pleased to announce that our new RRS Pupil Leaders have been elected by their classes and are excited to start their first project under their new name... 'The Changemakers'!

Their first project will be centred around the theme of healthy eating as we prepare to start our 'Healthy Schools Award'. We want pupil voice to be heard as we evaluate how healthy our school currently is - and how we want to improve. We have already sent out a survey for parents and carers to complete and have had some interesting results which the Changemakers can analyse.

Look out for our first Rights Respecting Coffee Morning, invites to year groups will be sent out throughout the year.

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Black History Month

As a Rights Respecting School, we talk about respecting the rights of everyone in our school and follow the 'No Outsiders' approach, welcoming any opportunity to celebrate difference. Our children know about people in history wh have had to overcome adversity in order to make a change for the better. We call these people our 'Rebel Heroes' and some of them had to fight discrimination and racism in order to have their human rights upheld. We have recently been sketching some of these remarkable people, including Maya Angelou and Lilian Bader.

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Prescot Pilots

We love hearing all about the learning successes of our Prescot Pilots that take place outside of the school hours and walls! Please continue to share these on twitter as we add them to displays around school - we love any opportunity to shout about the 'botheredness' of our children!

Please let the main office know if your child is a busy bee and would like to be recognised for their achievements - you just need to record activities on a termly 'Pilot Log'.

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Apple Distinguished School 2024 - 2027

We are so proud to have received our ADS status for the fourth time, making us one of the longest-accredited out of the 889 ADS schools worldwide! If you haven't yet had a chance to watch our successful application video, click here to find out more:

https://youtu.be/8Exv3J43ynY

We are particularly proud of this award as it allows us to demonstrate how iPad technology supports, accelerates and personalises learning at our school. If you ever wonder why our iPads are so important to us, just ask our children and staff!

Our Y3 Pandas are the newest year group to take responsibility for their new devices and will taking them home for the first time over the half term break. WE take online safety very seriously and have daily conversations that help to prepare our children for life in the digitally complex future.

https://www.apple.com/education/k12/apple-distinguished-schools/

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