The Government have recently announced that next year May Day will take place on Victory in Europe (VE) day to celebrate the end of World War II . This means that the bank holiday will be Friday 8th May 2020 and not Monday 4th May 2020. Therefore we will be open as normal on Monday 4th May 2020 and closed on Friday 8th May 2020.

School Holiday Term Dates 2019/2020

We have some event dates for your diaries. They are: –

• Summer Fair – Thursday 4th July at 1:30pm
• Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 Sports Day – Tuesday 9th July at 1:30pm
• Nursery and Reception Sports Day – Wednesday 10th July at 1:30pm
• Parkside Induction day for transferring year 6 pupils – Thursday 11th July
• Year 1 and 2 Sports Day – Thursday 11th July at 1:30pm
• Reception Graduation – Wednesday 17th July at 10:50am
• Year 6 Leavers Assembly – Thursday 18th July at 1:30pm

Congratulations to our year 6 children who have finished their SATs! You have all worked extremely hard and we are incredibly proud of you! The class celebrated with a visit from the ice-cream van! They have worked incredibly hard all year, particularly over the last couple of months and this has been reflected in the amazing job they have done in their SATs this week. The effort and determination displayed by each and every one of them has been utterly awe inspiring and they ought to be incredibly proud of themselves! A huge thank you to them for their hard work, effort and patience and an even bigger WELL DONE!

To enhance year 5’s topic of ‘Life in Victorian Killhope’, they visited Killhope Lead Mining Museum. During the visit, the class experienced what life was like for children and miners. They had to find lead ore (Galena) throughout the day by: sifting, raking, breaking rocks and mining. They visited the ‘mine shop’, which wasn’t a shop at all but a small building where the workers and boys stayed during the working week. The children thoroughly enjoyed the visit and the class were commended on their excellent behaviour, knowledge and inquisitive questions.

Reception class received a very special package. The Hancock museum sent a dinosaur egg and asked if the children could look after it as their paleontologist was away on holiday. In literacy the children wrote instructions an how they could care for it and decided to keep it in their dinosaur museum!

Our Performing Arts Club will be live on stage performing The Amazing Adventure of Super Stan in school on Tuesday 25th June at 1:15pm and Wednesday 26th June at 5:30pm. Please come along and support our very talented children and see the show. Tickets are on sale now from the school office costing £1.50 each. All proceeds will be donated back to the club for future productions.

Mrs Littlefair hosted a holiday club during Easter. Children participated in various sporting activities over 3 days and lunch was provided in conjunction with 3-Towns Partnership. The club proved to be a huge success and we hope to have more in the future.

Year 5 participated in a workshop to encourage them to express, debate and voice their opinions about the changing role of women in UK society through creativity. The class viewed and listened to historical footage of local pioneers before splitting into groups to discuss and vote on who had the strongest ideas. They were then given black and white images and each child created a proggy mat to be included in a large scale collective artwork based on the children’s ideas. A local artist will be collating this information from all schools involved to produce a large scale image which will be unveiled at Redhills where children will add their squares to the image.

Due to European Parliamentary Elections the NURSERY ONLY will be closed to pupils on Thursday 23rd May as the area is being used as a polling station (as requested by Durham County Council). The remainder of the school (Reception class to year 6 ) will remain OPEN as normal.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

All children in school (including nursery) are invited to take part in a ‘Decorate an Egg’ competition which will be held on Thursday 4th April. Please bring your decorated eggs to school on Thursday morning. The best decorated egg in each class will win a prize which will be awarded in our assembly on Friday. All eggs should be your child’s own work.
As children put so much effort into decorating their eggs we will be putting them on display for all to see. We would like to invite parents/carers into school on this day from 2:30pm.