In Acorn class we kicked off the summer term with our learning all about dinosaurs. We have built an understanding of the ‘past’ and how things have changed over time. We looked at and read stories about the first female palaeontologist, Mary Anning and were surprised about how times have changed in a positive way. To drive enthusiasm for this topic we joined 2 other schools in the academy, Glebeland and Winterton primary schools, on a school trip to Cromer. We visited the Cromer fossil museum and had the opportunity to dig for, learn the different names of and observe ancient artefacts. After a session inside the museum and a look at the fossils we headed to the beach, accompanied by the experts, to hunt for fossils!

Everybody thoroughly enjoyed the day and the children learned lots along the way. They we’re impeccably well behaved and polite and represented the school and Trust beautifully. 

Our Year 5/6, Red Kite class, have been using their outdoor learning time to redevelop our outdoor areas. 

The children have been purposeful learners and have been working collaboratively in dedicating areas for groups to focus on. 

The children have been planting seeds, tidying up the outdoor area and ensuring the field is a safe space for all children throughout the school. 

The children have also been dedicating the end of break to ensure that all outdoor equipment has been put away sensibly. 

Glebeland are continuing on their journey with OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) to develop break and lunchtime provision focusing on Sense of Place

A working party involving SLT and TA's have created specific areas including: Glorious Mud - a mud kitchen with selected saucepans, utensils and baking trays,

Art Gallery - resources to create imaginative pieces of Art work. This half term we are using the medium of chalk.

Super World - a small imaginative world with trains, animals and blocks to purposefully create a world of our own imagination

Construction Site - A large collection of guttering, tyres, planks of wood, chairs, reels, etc.  Participating together to design and build on a very large scale. So Far we have had fortresses, super cars, tractors, robots and assault courses. 

Throughout the Summer Term we have had lots of opportunity at Helmingham to participate and demonstrate that we are respectful, active citizens.
Just before half term we took part in our outdoor learning launch week where we were all participating in a variety of activities including archery, pioneering and den building, orienteering (where some of us got a bit lost), craft activities and building fires to cook on. We had a real understanding of our sense of place in the community and the great outdoors as well as learning how to be responsible in different environments and with different resources. Everybody enjoyed the week and we are really looking forward to learning outdoors more often in the Autumn Term.

We also held our annual sports day last week. The children participated in different events and challenges throughout the afternoon and lots of families turned up to watch. It was a great community event with parents, grandparents and friends. We even had a cake stall at the end of the afternoon after we had all had ice lollies.

Recently our KS1 and EYFS children went on a local visit to Debenham. They visited the fire station and learnt about the roles that the fire fighters have and jobs that they do. They looked at the fire engines, uniforms and shared their understanding about the Great Fire of London. They also developed their sense of place by visiting local shops, the church and places of interest in the village.

In Eagles class (KS2), they have been learning about The Fairtrade Foundation as part of learning about being a respectful, active citizen and as part of their South America topic. The children are just about to write persuasive texts to Miss Hawes to convince her that we should get started on getting a Fairtrade School Award.

 Tuesday 20^th June was World Refugee Day.  Class 3 joined in with a live assembly from a refugee camp in Jordan. They learned about what it is like living in a refugee camp.

On Friday 16^th June, the FOHS held Father’s Day breakfast which was very well attended. The delicious smell of bacon wafted along the corridor for a good while afterwards!

There have been a lot of chances to participate so far this term with Sports Day and the U7 Cricket Festival.

Kirkley staff enjoyed a workshop around building resilience on our wellbeing day provided by the NHS wellbeing service. Following this we enjoyed a group lunch in the sunshine and participated in a team building escape room exercise.

We enjoyed our first trip to Kirkley Manor, the children and residents had a great time singing, drawing and building with Playdoh and blocks.  We are looking forward to our second visit where we will be making salt dough hand prints together.

The children in our Owls room have been planting and learning all about how we can help our plants to grow. They have been very responsible taking care of their sunflowers and strawberries. 

Last week we held our summer term parent sharing sessions, staff were delighted to discuss the progress children have made over the last term and how we are supporting our owls room children to be ready to start their transitions to school.  It was lovely to hear all the positive feedback from our parents.

This term the school have been busy in their Community links as we work together to create a Community garden where we will be growing several different types of produce to share with the local residents. As you will see the garden is in its early stages of development but we look forward to being able to invite our community to help themselves to produce. We have discussed with the children the meaning of being an Active Citizen in our communities.

We have also been busy increasing the external presentation of our school, being responsible for how our school looks to others. Mr Phil Carr, our new Caretaker, has helped us considerably with this.

Our Sycamore class, the oldest pupils in the school, have had the opportunity to participate in an Enterprise project. They had to write letters to appeal for funding and then when they were successful they began to plan and produce their goods for sale. Alongside all the Design Technology skills they also completed work in Literacy creating persuasive adverts which were then displayed on all of the classroom windows for our school families to see. The pupils appealed to parents in a Celebration Assembly and then opened up the school from 2:45pm for families to come and purchase. The whole class worked collaboratively on this project and the level of enthusiasm and excitement was maintained throughout and came at an ideal time for the Year 6 pupils, after they had completed their S.A.T’s tests.

They are also attending Crucial Crew where they will engage in debates regarding areas where they need to keep safe and understand the dangers in the local community and environment.

Developing our outdoor space

Following on from our last article for the Horizon publication for our families we write with an update of our outdoor space, which has developed into the most special and loved environment. 

The driving force behind our makeover was most certainly our parent community who took responsibility for the design and the sourcing of the many resources.  The very active community have been participating together to ensure we have a lovely looking environment and also a most useful learning space.  Our Key Stage 1 children have incorporated the development of our garden into their science learning for this half term and have benefited enormously for this hands on experience.   

All the lovely produce is now ready to eat and it was decided that we would make our very own little community kitchen/shop.  We are very much hoping that our families will make use of this lovely fresh produce and make donations if they feel they can.  We have also marketed our new enterprise/initiative in the local community and hope residents will take full advantage of this facility.  We know that the village community have been watching with anticipation as we have developed our outdoor provision.

At Rendlesham we have 4 Junior Road Safety Officers (JRSOs). They take responsibility for helping our pupils to understand why road safety is so important and what we can do to improve it in our community.

Our JRSOs are responsible for planning and resourcing their assemblies and then lead these once a half term to inform our pupils of road safety issues and to encourage the safe use of roads. This year they have highlighted the Green Cross Code and how to be seen in the dark in the winter months when out and about in the village. More recently in the summer months, their assemblies have focussed on why it is so important to wear a helmet when cycling.  They made a video demonstrating this by using an egg and and 'egg helmet'.  Their video clip had lots of views on our social media page.  

As a group, the JRSOs have taken a walk around the village to discuss how best to advise our pupils on road safety in the local community. One of the issues raised was speeding and they were really pleased to see the speedometer along our main road through the village. They discussed all the blind corners around the village and how important it is to find a good spot to cross the road with as much visibility as possible. They then also engaged with parents and carers via a face to face survey asking them whether they felt that their children were safe on our community roads. They showed excellent skills in being respectful, active citizens and also engaging in discussions with members of our community.

The JRSO's also recently appeared in our Rendlesham Community Magazine letting our local residents know how they help the children with best road safety practice. All pupils were also given the opportunity to participate in a competition for the best road safety poster so that we can display it around the school and community. 

We really are proud of our JRSOs, who feel so passionately about road safety, highlighting dangers and supporting us to be safe near the roads all year round. 

Presidents Sports Day - Wednesday 14^th June 2023 

30 children from Riverwalk attended the annual President's Sports Day at Breckland Leisure Centre in Thetford. It was an extremely well organised community event day with approximately 450 children all from special schools across the county with lots of professional coaches and leaders from a local high school. We were SO impressed with the children, how well they coped with the day, gave everything a go, were extremely polite and excellent at following instructions!

The children all loved it!

They had a taster of 5 different sessions - jujitsu, gymnastics, penalty shoot-out, bouncy castle obstacle course and pedal karts. We also managed to squeeze in going on a land train, getting candy floss and popcorn as well as enjoying a lovely picnic in the shade. 

We met some famous sports people who either founded or are patrons of the charity -Trevor Brooking, Peter Shilton and Frank Bruno. They were very impressed with how well our children were participating and confidently chatting.   

Everyone was so proud of their souvenir medals and t-shirts!  

This is a free event that pupils in our older classes attend every year.

West Suffolk College donate replica of Tower Bridge to Riverwalk School

Earlier this year, staff and students from West Suffolk College (WSC) created the seven foot  high homage to one of London’s greatest landmarks to showcase their skills to the public at the 2023 Suffolk Show. Visitors could then put their schools forward to win the finished creation and Riverwalk school was randomly drawn out of the hat. Representatives from WSC delivered the bridge to the school who were delighted to receive it and it now holds pride of place near the main gates. 

Ben Moye, 17 is a level two joinery apprentice who studies at West Suffolk College and works for Taylor Made Joinery (TMJ). Ben helped put the bridge together. He said; “It’s really good to see it on display somewhere. It was a real team effort and the school seemed pleased.”

Brian Tunbridge is a lecturer at the College. Mr Tunbridge said: “All of the students are current apprentices who work for Taylor Made Joinery. They worked hard on this project and I’m extremely proud of them. It’s great to team up with Riverwalk and it was a great moment to see the finished bridge take centre stage in the school grounds.”

Parts of the bridge have areas for plants to grow and staff and students at the school will be
maintaining these throughout the year. It's been overwhelmingly positive to receive the Tower Bridge. The staff and students were very surprised and happy to see it. As a school it’s important to maintain links with other institutions. A big thank you to the students who made it and to the College.”

The Trust Well-being Day – May 2023

As a team we engaged in a lengthy debate in how we could best use our well-being day to promote everybodies positive mental health and well-being.  It’s a difficult decision to call that suits everybody – for some a lovely walk along our beach would be the perfect tonic, for others, a jog along the prom would be more appropriate whilst others would settle for an afternoon tea packed full of naughty goodies. It’s hard to suit everybodies ideas on supporting well-being, but what did come through from our debate was actually having the day to sort out our school that over the years has become almost a museum for educational relics was going to hit helping the whole teams well-being.

Skips were ordered, plans for tackling target areas formulated and memos sent to come prepared in the scruffiest attire ready for a very active, hands on day of clearing, sorting and organising!

Nine hours later our school was completely transformed.  The skip, although being very late to arrive, was completely full and the team felt the day had been extremely therapeutic.

Not to mention we all now have a really good understanding of the resources we have in school!

A major part of our project for that day was having a good sort through our library.  We were ruthless – throwing old, out-dated and damaged books away.  We identifed gaps in our topic books and know that the diet of books we have available of new, current literature for our upper key stage 2 could be greater.  In developing further our links with our local community we have secured a very generous donation from a local Masonic Lodge.  This money has been earmarked to develop our library making sure we plug some of our gaps and also expand our books that celebrate diveristy and equality.     Mr Johnson, from the Martyn Lodge, presented the cheque to our Head Boy and Head Girl.  We are extremely grateful for their kind donation!

The day was not all hardwork – we did enjoy a coffee at the The Canteen – the local community Hub located in the Old Hospital, all funded by our well-being budget from The Trust.  We can certainly recommend the cheese scones – they are delicious!

During the summer term our pupils and staff have been engaging in many exciting activities within our local community.

Many of our Pupils and families were joined by staff with their own families to participate in Lowestoft’s First Light Festival. This included our pupils being invited to join the opening parade for 1 mile along Lowestoft’s seafront behind Farrah the Fox. Pupils proudly wore their hedgehog masks that they had been making at school in the weeks leading up to the festival.

Barn Owls class have been enjoying many local educational visits, including a trip to the cinema, bowling & walks at Carlton Marshes. Barn Owls are looking forward to their upcoming trip to the Sea Life Centre Great Yarmouth.

Whale Sharks class have recently finished a 6 week course of horse riding at a Pakefield Riding School, all of the pupils were delighted to receive a rosette to celebrate their achievements throughout the last few weeks.

At the start of this month, the KS1 and KS2 children from Winterton Primary School performed at the Drill House in Great Yarmouth, with other local schools, as part of the Let's Enjoy Sharing Event. This event was fully funded and even our coach transport to the event was paid for. 

The children performed Under The Sea from The Little Mermaid, as well as  Water Is Wide and Away From The Roll With The Sea. 

In preparation for the event, the Norfolk Music Hub worked with the children in school on two different occasions to develop their singing and to teach them how to use body percussion to accompany their performance. 

There were a number of other schools participating in the event and parents from all the schools were invited to watch the performance which meant there were hundreds of other children and a large audience at the venue. During the rehearsal with all the schools and the actual performance, our children were a credit to our school. They demonstrated excellent behaviour, good manners, as well as collaboration and participation with the other children, and showing appreciation for the other performances. 

This term Yoxford & Peasenhall have been busy improving the front garden with the support of the school community. Over the coming weeks and months the space will be used for story-telling and mini-beast hunts as the bug hotel and nature area becomes inhabited.

Also, with our school community, we’ve enjoyed celebrating sporting achievements at our annual sports day where this year Yoxford & Leadenhall joined with Middleton Primary for a shared afternoon of sports.

We have enjoyed many visits out into the local area, including: Banham Zoo, Minsmere Nature Reserve and Easton Farm Park.

Looking forward, we are excited to be joining other schools as part of the Big Sing and welcoming new staff into our setting with new connections to further enhance the curriculum offer to our children.