Maybury News
Believe. Achieve. Succeed.
Issue 4
December 2022
A message from Mrs Merritt
Its been a wonderfully festive month at Maybury full of many wonderful learning experiences and opportunities for all the children. It filled me with such joy and pride when I watched the children preform in their Christmas performances, it was amazing to see how many confident and talented children we have here at Maybury! We also had a thoroughly enjoyable time at the New Victoria Theatre last week where we watched Cinderella the Pantomime. We also enjoyed a delicious Christmas lunch on Thursday.
This week we say farewell to Miss Nabbi our Nursery teaching assistant who is leaving us after 20 years at Maybury, we wish her every success in her new role. We are looking forward to welcoming our new Nursery Teacher Mrs O’Brien who will be teaching Wednesday afternoon, Thursday and Friday in Nursery, Mrs Gigg will teach Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Our new Assistant Headteacher Miss Moore who will also be teaching in Dolphins class on Monday and Tuesdays also starts in January. She met the children last week and is very excited about joining the Maybury team.
As you are aware there have been outbreaks of Scarlet fever in Surrey. Scarlet fever is also a mild childhood illness but unlike chickenpox, it requires antibiotic treatment. Symptoms include a sore throat, headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, followed by a fine red rash which typically first appears on the chest and stomach, rapidly spreading to other parts of the body. On more darkly-pigmented skin, the scarlet rash may be harder to spot, but it should feel like 'sandpaper'. The face can be flushed red but pale around the mouth. As the rash fades the skin on the fingertips, toes and groin area can peel.
If you think you, or your child, have scarlet fever:
See your GP or contact NHS 111 as soon as possible
Make sure that you/your child takes the full course of any antibiotics prescribed by the doctor.
Stay at home, away from nursery, school for at least 24 hours after starting the antibiotic treatment, to avoid spreading the infection
This month we also had a very successful external safeguarding audit so I wanted to share the following feedback with you. “The School’s safeguarding approach not only encompasses the pupils but also reaches out to the families and community, with a lot of proactive and worthy work being carried out to support the wider family.” “Children feel safe and supported at School and see it as a place of safety where they are listened to and valued. They are confident in how to address concerns either for themselves or their peers.“
I wish you all a restful break and a happy healthy new year. School closes at 1:30pm on Friday 16th December and reopens at 8:35am on Wednesday 4th January.
Mrs Merritt, Headteacher
Early Years Foundation Stage Update
Rainbow Fish
Starfish
Nursery is feeling very festive! The children enjoyed decorating the Nursery and putting up the tree. They love dressing up and pretending to be Santa’s helpers.
As the weather gets colder, the children still love being outside and were excited to find the Nursery
covered in snow.
The children worked hard learning the Christmas songs that we shared with families. Thank you to
everyone who came along and supported the children. We hope you made some special memories.
We hope you all have a relaxing break and wish all our Nursery families a very happy 2023.
There was much excitement in Starfish Class when Santa sent us one of his Christmas elves to check that we were being good and installed a ’Santa Cam’. Every morning the elf is found somewhere in our classroom doing something different, and the children have enjoyed finding him.
Starfish Class have been comparing Christmas to other celebrations. They had fun decorating Christmas trees, playing Christmas games, wrapping presents and writing labels. They even helped Santa to deliver presents to the correct houses and designed and wrote their own Christmas cards.
Starfish enjoyed learning different Christmas poems and performing them in front of all our school families. The children were very brave, used their loud voices and entertained everyone with their different personalities.
We all had a great time at the Pantomime in town. This year it was Cinderella. We enjoyed booing the ugly sisters who were mean to Cinderella and joining in with the pantomime language and silly games which we found very funny.
Key Stage 1 Update
Seahorses
We have been working really hard with our writing this half-term and are becoming more independent. The children are working hard to remember their capital letters, full stops and finger spaces and have started to use adjectives to describe nouns. They watched the John Lewis advert about give a little love and wrote about the things they saw independently. The children are now starting to write words using their Fred fingers and can use the sound mat to help them if they are unsure of how to spell words.
The children have been making their own moving picture in our design and technology lessons. We have learnt about mechanisms and they have been making sliders, pivots and flaps. They had to concentrate really hard and learn how to use tools safely. We look forward to sharing our completed work with you.
The children enjoyed visiting Christ Church in Woking as part of our RE lesson. We learnt about the Christmas tree, the advent candles, the nativity and why they are important to Christians. The children acted out the Christmas story and got to see different objects and artefacts in the church.
Jellyfish
This month, Jellyfish have been writing instructions in Literacy. We have been looking carefully at imperative verbs and time connectives. We also talked about how important it is to write the steps clearly and in the right order—we helped Mrs Zalman make a jam sandwich but it went very wrong when our instructions weren’t clear enough! We then planned (we had so many ideas!) and wrote our own instructions for making pizza, a smoothie, a fruit salad or a trifle and we made sure to be clear this time!
In Science, we have been finishing off our Everyday Materials topic with some experiments. We tested whether we could change the shape of some materials by bending, stretching and squashing them. We also learnt about how different materials are recycled and talked about why it is important to recycle as much as possible. We used this learning to sort pictures of materials into the correct places.
In geography, we were comparing our lives to the lives of people in the Maasai Mara. To do this, we looked at jobs, school, how houses are built, what roads are made out of, wildlife, vegetation and crops and mountains. We learnt and remembered so much information about the Maasai Mara.
Key Stage 2 Update
Manta Rays
It has been a busy time in Manta Rays this month! We all enjoyed taking part in the Christmas play and singing our songs about how Christmas is celebrated in Australia. The children did so well and we are really proud of them.
In Science, we have been learning about magnetic poles. The children had fun exploring the poles and finding out that like poles repel and opposite poles attract. They then created their own magnetic mazes using magnets that attract.
We have continued to learn about fractions in Maths and have been finding out about equivalent fractions and ordering and comparing fractions.
In DT, we have designed and built our own pneumatic monsters. The children have loved this project and each made their own monster which they designed themselves.
In Computing we are continuing with our Scratch unit. The children are becoming confident at programming a sprite to move and make sounds.
Angelfish
Angelfish have been very busy this month making marble runs out of cardboard tubes for their DT project. Firstly, the children evaluated an existing product by building marble runs and testing how long it took the marble to complete the course. The children spent a lesson planning their marble runs on paper; thinking carefully about the materials they would need, how they would piece together, the angle of the bridges and the colour. We had great fun making the marble runs and testing them to see how they worked. It is great to see how different they all look!
In Science, we have continued to learn about states of matter. We recently completed an experiment about ‘wonderful water’ where we learnt about the different processes water goes through to change state. We observed freezing, melting, evaporation and condensation.
In Maths, we have been learning about coordinates. We have really enjoyed them as they are very fun and there are lots of games that we can play to learn how to read, write and plot them.
In Computing, we have been coding using Lego Wedo. Each session the children work with a partner to follow instructions to build a Lego model and then connect it via Bluetooth to the Chromebook to code it.
Sea Turtles
This month, in Sea Turtles we have spent time practising for our Christmas performance. The children wrote their own song about Maybury Primary School to the song, ‘The Twelve days of Christmas’, they came up with their own actions and performed amazingly! I am very proud of their creativity and confidence!
In literacy we have been writing letters about plastic pollution to important people, the children decided who they would like to write to, we have sent the letters off and are hoping for some responses. The children worked hard to make sure they had lots of factual information to back up their points.
In maths we have been looking at angles. We identified the types of angles, we then estimated their size and finally measured using a protractor.
Dolphins
In Year 6 we have had a very busy month. We were rehearsing for our Christmas performance. We decided to create a class acrostic poem all about what makes Christmas special to us. We voted for our favourite ideas for each letter and put them together for the show. We also chose an upbeat Christmas song we know the audience would love, ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town.’
In DT, we have finished our healthy packed lunch learning journey. We have researched what would make a good healthy packed lunch, looked at the differences between processed, precooked and fresh foods. We then created a questionnaire for a friend to find out what they would want in a healthy packed lunch. We then used that information to plan what we wanted to include and created shopping lists to take home. We also constructed nets to hold our packed lunch items.
This week it was finally time to make our healthy packed lunches. Unfortunately we had a lot of absences on the day so the children adapted their plans and created their own packed lunch. The children did so well sharing ingredients and working together! It was a great day.
In Literacy we have been creating our own Christmas adverts, we wrote the script for our groups, made props and then recorded them and shared them with the class. It was great fun and the children loved performing them.
In computing we have wrapped up our spreadsheet lessons with a big event! The children needed to plan and budget for a big party. They had a pricelist of items to choose from and they worked with a partner to create their spreadsheet using the function inputs we had learnt about.
Parent Workshhops
Thank you to everyone that completed the recent parent survey regarding parent workshops. We have now booked the following workshops in:
Wednesday 25th January at 9am on maths KS2 only.
Wednesday 8th March at 9am on phonics.
Please come along to these sessions to discover more about the topics and how we teach them at Maybury.
School Dinners
Please can we remind parents that school dinners should be paid for in advance. Please ensure that payment for the week ahead is made by the Monday morning, the cost for one week is £12.25 (£2.45 per day). Please also note that it is also possible to pay for more than one week at a time.
Please click here to view the menus via our school website - School Meals
Absences
Surrey Inclusion Services have informed the school that any absences for the last week of term (Week commencing 12/12/22) and the first week back (Week commencing 02/01/23) will be marked as unauthorised. This will include holidays, illness and appointments unless medical evidence/appointment cards are provided.
Fixed Term Penalty Notice
We are aware that the pandemic has had an effect on families, but the expectation is still that every child should now be attending school full time. If you consider that there are exceptional circumstances relating to your request, please let the school have full details. Each application for a leave of absence will be considered on a case by case basis.
Penalty Notices to Address Poor Attendance at School
A Penalty Notice may be issued as an alternative to the prosecution of a parent/carer for their child’s unauthorised absence from school (absence without the agreement of the school or not covered by a medical note) and will be used by Surrey County Council in the following circumstances :-
1. Pupils identified by police and Inclusion Officers (formerly Education Welfare Officers) engaged on Truancy Patrols and who have incurred unauthorised absences.
2. Leave of absence in term time (5 days or 10 sessions or more).
Please be aware that The Education (Pupil Registration)(England)(Amendment) Regulations 2013, which became law on 1st September 2013 state that Headteachers may not grant any leave of absence during term time unless there are exceptional circumstances.
The Headteacher is also required to determine the number of school days a child can be away from school if leave is granted.
In such cases the Headteacher/Governing Body must decide whether there are exceptional circumstances. They may request that the Local Authority issue Penalty Notices when the absence is not authorised.
Warnings will not be given where it can be shown that parents have been notified that such absences will not be authorised.
3. Finally, the issuing of a Penalty Notice will also be considered where it is judged that a parent is failing to ensure their child's regular school attendance.
This will be considered when a pupil has incurred 7 or more unauthorised sessions in the previous 6 school weeks, which may include a pupil arriving late after close of registration.
If you believe at any stage that your child’s absence from school may leave you liable to receive a Penalty Notice, it is extremely important that you act without delay to secure their regular attendance.
If you have any questions or require further support to achieve an improvement in your child’s attendance, please contact your child’s school or the Inclusion Officer.
Penalty Notice relating to Exclusions
If a child is excluded from school, Section 103 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 places a duty on parents/carers to ensure that their child is not in a public place without justifiable cause during school hours.
This duty applies to the first five days of each exclusion. Failure to do so will render the parent/carer liable to a Penalty Notice. (Alternative education provision will be made available from the sixth day of any exclusion.)
Amount Payable for a Penalty Notice
The amount payable for a Penalty Notice issued in any of the above circumstances is currently £60 if paid within 21 days of receipt of the Notice, rising to £120 if paid after 21 days but within 28 days.
If the Penalty Notice is not paid, the local Authority must consider a prosecution in the Magistrates Court for the offence for which the Notice was originally issued.
Please be aware that each parent is liable to receive a Penalty Notice for each child who incurs unauthorised absences, for example, if there are two parents and one child, each parent will receive one Penalty Notice.
If there are two parents, and two children incur unauthorised absences, each parent will receive two Penalty Notices, which in this case would amount to £120 each if paid within 21 days.
Advice and support is available from an Inclusion Officer by contacting your local Education Office as follows :-
North West - Tel: 01483 518130 South West - Tel: 01483 517179
North East - Tel: 01372 833588 South East - Tel: 01737 737777
Nursery Parents - Reception School Places
A reminder to all nursery parents to register your child's Reception school placement. The deadline is 15th January 2023 via Surrey County Council's website. Please also see information below:
Emotional Wellbeing and Mental Health support in Surrey
Christmas can be a difficult time for some, below are local sources of support that will be available through the festive holidays for children, young people and their families in Surrey.
For children and young people in crisis
Mindworks
If you are worried about a child or young person aged 6 plus, please call Mindworks 24/7 mental health crisis line free on 0800 915 4644 to talk with a trained call handler who will provide advice, support and signposting to a range of community services. It’s open all day and all night, seven days a week. You can use the number whether or not you are already receiving mental health services. No formal request for support is needed.
In an emergency, please dial 999 or 112 from a mobile.
Advice and support for children and young people
Mindworks Surrey
Mindworks Surrey is the emotional wellbeing and mental health service for children, young people and families. It offers an extensive range of advice, support and treatment provided by an alliance of NHS and voluntary sector providers. Families can request support themselves or through their school or GP. Call the Access and Advice team on 0300 222 5755 or go to theMindworks website.
Kooth
Kooth provides a welcoming space for digital mental health care, available to all.
You can access further advice and support through the Healthy Surrey website.
Every Mind Matters
The NHS’s Every Mind Matters has some very helpful videos aimed at young people, especially on self-care tips to help manage emotional well-being.
For an extensive list of local and national support through the festive holidays please visit Surrey Youth Voice.
For parents and carers
For parents and carers that may need support with their own mental health and emotional wellbeing please visit the Healthy Surrey.website. The Wheel of Well-being is a tool which can help you improve your wellbeing in six different ways.
Eikon Parent Webinar
Please see below some information regarding an upcoming parent webinar. This is free for all parents and carers in Surrey. Please click on the Eventbrite sign-up link to book a space. Details can also be found on the Eikon website Parent Webinars - The Eikon Charity
Supporting your Child with the Transition to Secondary School
Thursday 23rd March 19.00-20.00 register here
· Focusing on resilience
· The resilience framework
· Growth mindset
· Friendship worries
· Organisation
· Helping your child know their strengths
PE Timetable
Please see below for PE days after the Christmas break.
Maybury Heroes
It's nice to be nice and if a member of Maybury Primary staff made you smile then let us know and we will pass on your comments to them. It can be for absolutely anyone in school and for any reason - we'd just like to know! Maybe someone in the office was super helpful, someone made your child smile, your class teacher or support staff went the extra mile, or you were helped by the Home school Link Worker, Inclusion Leader or Senior Leadership Team or you just want to say thankyou. Please click on the link and fill out the form it will take you to, then just add in the information about the Maybury Hero. We will share these nominations with staff each week in our staff meeting!
The form can be found here: Maybury Heroes Form
Online Safety Guides
Useful Dates - Spring 2023
Please bear in mind that all of these dates are subject to change
Term Dates 2022/23
Autumn Term 2022
1st September 2022 to 16th December 2022
Half Term 24th October 2022—28th October 2022
Spring Term 2023
3rd January 2023 to 31st March 2023
Half Term 13th February 2023—17th February 2023
Summer Term 2023
17th April 2023 to 21st July 2023
Half Term 22nd May 2023 - 2nd June 2023
(Please note May half term will be for 2 weeks)
INSET Days (School closed for training)
Thursday 1st September 2022
Friday 2nd September 2022
Monday 31st October 2022
Tuesday 3rd January 2023
Friday 21st July 2023
Our Values - Autumn Term
Equality
This half term’s value is Equality. Through this value children explore their own and others individual needs and identifies. Children will talk about how everyone should have an equal chance to reach their potential regardless of characteristics such as gender, race, religion or disability. At home you can:
Talk about your child's unique qualities and those that they share with other family members and friends.
Encourage an environment where they can celebrate their differences.
Research the lives of famous civil rights activities such as Harriet Tubman, Jesse Owens or Malala Yousafzai.
Books you could share at home
Early Years
Key Stage 1
Key Stage 2
Resilience
This half term’s value is Resilience, the ability to bounce back after hard times or disappointment. Resilience develops when children experience challenges and learn to deal with them positively. You can support children to become resilient by:
Sharing stories of your own setbacks and how you overcame them.
Praising children’s efforts when they keep trying.
Encourage them to try new activities.
As a parent, it can be difficult to watch your child struggle, but it important that they solve problems themselves. You are their greatest cheerleader!
Books you could share at home
Early Years
Key Stage 1
Key Stage 2
Please remember that school will close on Friday 16th December at 1:30pm
We wish all our families a restful and safe break.
We look forward to welcoming the children back to school on
Wednesday 4th January 2023
