Dear Parents and Carers,

the wind is absolutely howling around me as I write this. I do hope you are all safe and warm and no one is losing slates off their roofs. It has been a week with a great deal of weather but there has been lots of fun and lots of learning at Kenton Primary and a great deal to be proud of. One of my happiest moments of the week was watching Nursery acting out Handa’s Surprise with Lydia taking the lead role. I’m so sorry I don’t have a photo of that to share with you all!

New Ipads

This week we’ve been really enjoying getting familiar with our set of thirty brand new Ipads.  Children have been using them to research topics, to access apps like Timestables Rockstars and NumberClub, take photos of their work to share on Seesaw, zap QR codes to access resources, practice handwriting, take and edit videos as part of their computing curriculum, take Accelerated Reader quizzes and more.

The purchase of these Ipads was organised centrally by the trust and are a really big step up in the schools tech capability and has, astonishingly, cost us nothing from our own school budget. It’s a real game changer for how our teachers can use technology in the classroom.

Musical Fun

It’s lovely to see the children getting so much enjoyment out of our set of boomwhackers – colourful plastic tubes that make an accurately pitched ‘bonk’ when struck. There have been some really fun lesson activities going on. Perhaps they’ll give us a performance soon.

Ordering Meals on Arbor

Just another plea for parents and carers to, please, take five minutes to order children’s meals on arbor. It genuinely saves us so much time in the morning and makes for a much calmer and more productive start to the day if teachers don’t have to go round the class reminding children what the choices are and asking them to make a decision. It means we get numbers to the kitchen in Kenn School that much quicker too which makes life so much easier for them. There will a great celebration for everyone on the day we find that all meals have been ordered in advance!

Biscuit Questionnaire

We ran a rollover week on the Biscuit Questionnaire and we managed to collect a reasonably convincing eighteen entries by the end. W3e asked people what they were hoping for in 2026 and we enjoyed the range of answers very much indeed. We had someone who is hoping to get better at tap dancing, someone planning a dream trip to Disneyland, someone who wants to reconnect with family, someone hoping for peace and togetherness, someone hoping for a government that puts children first and much more.

The biscuit winners were chosen by a human random number generator (thank you Elizabeth), this week the lucky winners were Bo and Jazz from Willow.

To take part in this week’s Biscuit Questionnaire just CLICK THIS LINK.

Gymnastic Joy

The children are loving Andy Tyrell’s gymnastics lessons at the moment. Andy puts his heart and soul into his work and brings our children so much happiness. It’s a real pleasure to see.

Thanks

There’s always people to thank around the school. Two for this week –

Thanks to Miss Phippen for some truly amazing, transformational work. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve seen some children in her class turn from determined non-readers to absolute super readers. At the same time some of these children have made absolutely astonishing changes to their handwriting. It’s genuinely gob smacking. Poor old sentimental Mr Finch has shed more than one tear seeing all the hard work paying off and seeing the very great pride that these children have in their work. Thank you Miss Phippen

Thanks also to Eliza’s dad who pointed out to Mr Finch that the school website is enabled with Google Analytics – something he’d somehow failed to notice before. As a result, Mr Finch has figured out that he can see how many people are looking at the website and visiting the newsletter blog. It’s a good deal more than we’d imagined so that feels much more purposeful. SOmetimes a quiet word from someone who knows their stuff is all you need. Thank you! One thing that puzzled me is that Google Analytics teels me that the vast majority of you are accessing the site via a desktop computer rather than a mobile device. That astonished me – can it be true?