We’ve just received the latest newsletter from the Coventry school nursing team. There are lots of interesting sources of information and support that you can follow up from the information below. (Scroll through or download the newsletter from the link below.)
Coventry Music Hub is running a free music workshop linked to Handa’s Surprise for children aged 4-7. This is a great chance to join a music session and have fun during half-term. See below for further details – no booking is necessary.
SENDIASS are offering a session on reading and spelling aimed at supporting families to help children who have additional needs. They are offering information and discussion on a multi-sensory approach to make spelling and reading with your child more fun and more successful. For further information, see below.
We have been working hard over the last year to establish Thrive support in school. It is a great way to understand how children’s needs are expressed through behaviour and support them to build confidence and manage challenges more successfully. If you would like to find out more, please follow the links below find out more about the Parents’ Thrive workshop.
Thank you to everyone who supported our Macmillan Coffee morning and our after school cake sale on Friday. Our new leadership ambassadors did a fantastic job helping our visitors and making everyone feel welcome.
Together, we raised just short of £113 for Macmillan!
Thank for helping us to support this great cause to provide valuable care for so many families living with cancer.
There are two age groups for the competition:
5-7 year-olds and 8-11 year-olds.
Use your creativity and imagination to write a story you would love to read
The competition will be judged by the well-known authors, Malorie Blackman, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Lenny Henry, Charlie Higson, Francesca Simon,
There are some amazing prizes on offer this year, so why not write a story and talk to your teacher about sending it in?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/500-words/about-500-words-collection/zj9b8p3
50 finalists, along with their parents or carers, will be invited to attend a grand final next February at Buckingham Palace!. The bronze, silver and gold winners of each age group will have their stories read by celebrities and published with illustrations by famous illustrators Joelle Avelino, Axel Scheffler, Fiona Lumbers, Sue Cheung, Jamie Smart, and Steven Lenton. There will also be a special ‘500 Words’ programme with the The One Show, on World Book Day on 7 March 2024.
You could also win a pile of books the height of Lenny Henry, Queen Camilla or an average 7- or 11-year-old!
This year, there will also be an amazing random draw prize. Every story submitted will be entered into a random prize draw. One lucky winner will receive a ticket to the final and a bundle of books, and their school will also be given 500 books and a literacy wall art – of their choice, to promote the love of story-telling.
If you like historical fiction and exciting action and suspense, this new adventure story by Lindsay Galvin could be for you. Most suitable for Y5 and Y6 readers, it draws on the real story of the sinking of the Titanic and the imagined experience of a 3rd class steward on board at the time of the disaster that is based on Sid Daniels – the last crew member to survive the Titanic. Alongside Sid’s part-fact/part-fiction story is the dramatic imagined tale of 12-year-old Clara Scott who is fed up with being told what to do at home and desperate to see the world. In a split second of anger with her family, she decides to hide in her cousin’s trunk and run away, but finds herself locked inside the trunk and at sea on RMS Carpathia. Little does she know, that quite apart from her own troubles, she is about to get caught up in the Titanic rescue mission…
Facts are interwoven with imagination to create a fast-paced story which draws you quickly into the tension of the Titanic’s tragic voyage through the eyes of stowaway Clara and Sid’s imagined letters and evidence to the US Senate Inquiry into the disaster. Several of the characters are based on people who really were involved in the Carpathia rescue. We also meet a very lovable Newfoundland dog, Rigel (rhymes with Nigel!) who looks like a bear and plays a vital role in the story and helps to solve a rather fantastical mystery that has been intriguing Captain Rostron of the Carpathia and Clara.
If you enjoy this story, why not try another book by Lindsay Galvin? Her books are typically rooted in real events from the past and build on imagined lives of people who were actually alive at the time to develop exciting fantasy and adventure stories. As well as being dramatic, these tales also make you want to find out more about the characters and settings that they are based on…
Washed ashore on the Galápagos Islands after a violent storm, former cabin boy and now assistant to the young naturalist Charles Darwin, Syms Covington, encounters a mysterious lizard-like creature and some intriguing golden eggs. He faces a huge challenge as he tries to survive on the island and then find his way home… and make the difficult decision about what to do about his amazing discovery…
While 12-year-old Lavinia (Vinnie) Fyfe’s mother is unexpectedly away in Paris, she stays with her aunt and begins work in the aquarium tea shop in Brighton. She makes friends with Charlie, the aquarium keeper’s nephew, and Temitayo, the African ward of an English gentleman, and together they develop the confidence to challenge some of the social expectations of Victorian England. A new exhibit arrives – an enormous and intriguing giant octopus – and Vinnie begins to build up a special relationship with it as she develops her talent for art. As this bond grows, Vinnie and her friends become more determined to solve the mystery of her mother’s sudden departure, and work out what to do with the disturbing discoveries they make about Victorian fashion and the lives of the children who work in factories to produce it…
Why not give one of these great stories a try?
