Our termly Readers Leaders Assembly took place today (Wednesday 8th July) to celebrate the reading achievements of our children. Each term, every class teacher nominates the child who has passed the most quizzes to be their class Reader Leader. The trophy is also presented to the class who passes the most quizzes overall.

We all gathered excitedly in the hall this morning, to see who Mrs Kinsey would present the awards to this term. Congratulations to Rosie in Reception, Aliyah in Year 1, Hannah in Year 2, Emma in Year 3, Ryan in Year 4, Jake in Year 5 and Chloe in Year 6 who all won a book voucher. A big WELL DONE to Year 1, who won the class trophy for the second time, with an amazing whole class quiz pass rate of 97% this term. Special congratulations also go to Max in Year 5, who joined our exclusive Millionaires Club, by reading one million words!

Anyone can win the trophy, so keep reading and taking care with your quizzes and you may be your next class Reader Leader, or even help your class to win the trophy next term!

We all had a brilliant time on Sports Day. The races were excellent and everyone took part in the activities on the field, including the traditional egg and spoon race (although the egg was replaced by a harder to break golf ball!)

Well done to all our children, who competed with fairness  and sportsmanship and thank you to all the families who came to support them. The Green Team were the overall winners this year – congratulations to them!

We have recently subscribed to Purple Mash, an online learning platform that contains a wide variety of excellent content. The site is designed for children and is safe for them to use and contains many tools they can use to follow their interests and enhance their learning. We will be using Purple mash in school, but they can also access all of the content at home.  Your child’s login for the site will be sent home by their teacher soon.

The link to our Purple Mash portal, where they can use their login to sign in to use the program can be found on our Useful Links page.

Durham Police have advised us that there have recently been cases of children being sent inappropriate and potentially illegal images by people they do not know, through the Instagram and Snapchat apps. We are also aware of adults being sent these images.

Durham Police have advised that they would like all such incidents reported by contacting them on 101, so they can be investigated. It is important that the child understands that it is not their fault.

If you use Instagram or Snapchat we recommend you check your privacy settings to ensure you cannot be contacted by strangers through the apps. Instagram and Snapchat have produced leaflets to help you do this, which are available to download from our e-Safety pages.

Please do not hesitate to contacts us in school if you need any further help or information.

Well done to our football team, who have won the Bishop Auckland and District PSFA Summer League. They have had a brilliant season, losing only one match out of the eleven they played and conceding only one goal whilst scoring 28. We are very proud of them!

Our winning team!

Some parents have recently mentioned the ‘Talking Angela’ app to us and expressed concerns about its use by children.

To help you decide whether it is safe for your child, we recommend you check the following websites:

http://bit.ly/1K81YWn

http://bit.ly/1dM3nTb

These articles both discuss concerns surrounding the app and how to set parental controls.

We would always recommend that parental controls are set on any device or app used by a child, to ensure their safety online. Vodafone have an excellent website called Digital Parenting, where advice on setting parental controls on a wide variety of devices can be found under the ‘How To’ tab at the top of the page. The website also contains a wealth of information about keeping everyone safe online. It can be found at the following link:

http://www.vodafone.com/content/parents.html/

This link also appear on our school website under Parents – e-safety.

Should you require any further help, please do not hesitate to contact us.

As always, summer term is very busy. Here are some important  dates:

Tuesday 7th July – Sports Day (in the afternoon)

Friday 10th July – Moving up day. Annual School Reports sent home

Wednesday 15th July – Proms in the Playground (in the afternoon)

Friday 17th July – Break up for Summer Holidays

Thursday 3rd September – Return to school

The UK Safer Internet Centre has produced checklist for popular social media sites. If you or your older children use any of these sites,  you will find them useful for checking privacy settings and checking who can view your posts. They can be downloaded from our Parents’ e-Safety page, or by clicking the links below:

Facebook Checklist

Instagram Checklist

Snapchat Checklist

Twitter Checklist

Our Junior Road Safety Officers have been taking part in an inititive to improve global road safety. Together with other local schools, they participated in the third United Nations Global Road Safety Week.

Read the Northern Echo report here