I am sad to tell you today is Mrs Lisa Thomas’ last day with us at William Ransom. She is retiring and moving away to Cornwall which is rather too far for a commute to Hitchin!
Mrs Thomas has been with us at school for over 15 years, in various guises, teaching all classes at Key Stage 2 and she will be greatly missed by us all. However, we all wish her well in her new venture and hope she and her husband will be very happy.
I am delighted to tell you that we have appointed Mrs Alex Gibson to replace Mrs Thomas and she will be starting with us straight after half term. She will take over Mrs Thomas’ teaching commitments in Maple and Cherry. I am sure you will all join me in welcoming Mrs Gibson to William Ransom and hope she will enjoy her time here with us.
Hasn’t the weather been dreadful this last half term? Let’s hope that the worst is behind us and that Spring is just round the corner! It would be great to see some of you joining me on a Wednesday morning for the Daily Mile! The gates will be open from 8.15 and all are welcome for a brisk walk or a run round the building. 5 times round is a mile! The children do need to be supervised so please do not use this as an excuse to drop your children off at school early!
We have had lots of positive feedback about the move to Beat stocking our school uniform. I hope you will find that it is more convenient for you all and that it is still competitively priced. They are selling off our remaining stock before they start to supply their own. During the next half term we hope to set up our second hand uniform shed and details about this will follow shortly.
Once again BBC Radio 2 have launched their 500 Words competition and as many of your children write excellent stories we thought this would be a lovely competition to enter over half term. This is completely optional but it does compliment the work we have been doing in school on story writing. The children will need your permission to submit their stories online and they can also send me a copy to head@wransom.herts.sch.uk and I will put a book of stories together to celebrate them all. Many of the classes have been working on this so half term would be an ideal time to get going with these.
Why not get involved? It really is a great competition!
Once again World Book Day is creeping ever closer and we would like to invite children to come to school dressed as one of their favourite book characters. It must be a character they know, they need to bring the book with them and be able to talk about it.
This is purely optional but has proved to be very popular in the past and has produced some lovely English work.
Once again we are having problems with traffic around the school gates, in Stuart Drive and in Holdbrook. The school car park is for staff and visitors only. Some external agencies deliver children to the school in the morning, they are allowed to park in the car park, and a few parents / grand parents have a parking permit as for health reasons they cannot park further away. These are the only people who should be parking in the car park. I realise this makes things difficult in the roads leading up to the school and I appreciate it is frustrating if the car park looks to have spaces but very often we have staff who start slightly later who have nowhere to park. Please park a little bit further away and walk in – Park and Stride! If you are running late, please do the same. We would rather the children arrive safely and a little late than not at all! We have noticed parents dropping children off at the gates and in the car park which is not safe. Please do not stop in the school grounds.
Remember, we are happy for you to drive straight through the car park to avoid turning round in Stuart Drive. If you are coming into school during the school day you do have to turn round in the car park as the Holdbrook gate is locked.
Please remember we are doing this to keep all your children safe.
We are very lucky with our neighbours close to the school; they keep an eye on things for us when the school is closed! However, that means I would like to help them in return! Please do not allow your children to run up and down private driveways before and after school and please remember currently there are many people who work from home and become very aware when it is home time! Please help me to help them by keeping your children with you and by clearing the area by 3.50pm.
Thank you
We have noticed a few ‘different’ items creeping onto the playground at breaktimes. The children are only allowed fruit during this time. KS1 are given fruit through the Free Fruit for Schools initiative and there is often enough for many of KS2 as well. However, we would still encourage all children to bring in extra fruit if they would like to. There are always adults out on duty to help with peeling! Cereal bars and similar do not count as fruit so they should not be brought in. Dried fruit is fine if it is natural, not crystallised. Please remember we are a ‘nut free’ environment and no product containing nuts should be brought into school.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that we have launched our new website. Robin Clark has been working hard to put together an accessible and informative website which will keep all of you up to date with the happenings in school. We are delighted with the result and hope you will be too. Thank you Robin for all your hard work!
I should also like to take this opportunity to thank Dean Fox publicly for his amazing work with our old website. He built and has managed it for the last 9 years. He has always been there when we have had any questions or difficulties with the site and he has put up with my endless questions! Thank you Dean, we are all extremely grateful.
We are looking forward to welcoming you to Parents’ Evening during our first week back. Please remember if you have any concerns about your child at school, share these with your class teacher or come and talk to me during the evening.
I hope you all have a lovely half term and we look forward to welcoming the children back to school on Monday 24th February 2020.