Dear Parents and Carers,
Welcome back to Park Street after what I hope has been a relaxing and enjoyable summer holiday for you. We have had a very successful first week, with all the children happy to be back and enthusiastic about their new topics. Thank you to all who attended the online ‘Meet the Teacher’ sessions; I hope you found these useful. Please read your child’s class newsletter if you haven’t already done so as these give you plenty of useful information about what is going on in your children’s classes, including homework and PE days. It would be really helpful if you could ensure that your children arrive on time for school. Learning begins in Key Stage Two straight away at 8.45, so the children need to be here ready to start then, not at 9am as was the case before the pandemic. As I’m sure you are aware, missing 15 minutes of learning every day very quickly adds up to a large loss of time!
We were delighted to welcome our new Reception children to school this week, for their ‘Stay and Play’ sessions. Their parents had a lovely time on Jesus Green, getting to know each other. The weather was beautiful and the PTA representatives excelled themselves in the provision of food and drink! It will be a lovely memory of summer, as the weather worsens. The children all settled well for their session and we are really looking forward to them taking their places as full-time members of the school!
Despite a few summery showers, we managed our first play on Jesus Green, with the whole school present (apart from Reception) since February 2020. It was wonderful to see how quickly the children made friends with children from the other ‘bubble’! We really hope that we will be able to continue this. We are also continuing Collective Worship here, while the weather holds – see the picture below, where we were discussing ideas for keeping our world healthy.
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Cambridge United Community Trust will be providing some of our PE provision this term – it was lovely to welcome David to the school today; the children enjoyed taking part in his activities, although they had to dodge the rain!
A key tool for keeping the virus at bay are the Lateral Flow Tests, that are available to all parents and carers. School staff are continuing to test twice weekly – it would be really helpful if you could do this too, to make sure that any positive cases are kept in isolation. If you test positive on a LFT, please get a PCR for confirmation. LFTs are not suitable for children’s use – if your child has any common symptoms, please get a PCR test. Our Covid-19 contingency plan is available here on the website:
https://parkstreet.cambs.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/Park-Street-COVID-Contingency-Plan-September-2021.pdf
Please could you notify us of any positive cases in your household or wider contacts, even though it is not usually necessary for children or vaccinated adults to self-isolate. This will just help us to ‘keep and eye’ on the prevalence of cases in our community, so that we are prepared should we need to re-introduce any measures.
I hope you all have a lovely weekend,
Best wishes,
Sarah Hawker