Reaching high for the best for your child

Our value for October is freedom! As part of thinking about the value of freedom, we have been celebrating Black history month. Each year group will be taking a hero from Black history and learning about their story.

What do you know about Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Mary Seacole and Ruby Bridges?

A new year at Fairlands! There have been lots of exciting developments over the summer holidays - I am pleased to report that the window replacement project is going very smoothly and the whole of the Lower Building is nearing completion. There is only Nursery and the Family Room to finish off this week, in excellent time to welcome our new Nursery starters on Monday.

We have also widened the area we are now calling 'Statue Yard', which will make the start and end of the day much easier for families with children in Years 2, 3 and 4. Now that we have opened up the area around the statue, please do keep and eye on your children and make sure they play carefully please!

All the staff have worked very hard to get the school ready for the new term - thank you to them for all their time and efforts over the summer 'break'!

Fairlands Sports Day took place on Tuesday and was a fantastic day! With the Commonwealth Games coming up this Summer in Glasgow, all of the children were put into teams from Commonwealth countries. The atmosphere was absolutely brilliant and all of the teams were wonderful at supporting the members of their team during the races.

It was a very close competition and all of the children showed an enormous amount of resilience and determination during their races. In the end, it wasn’t to be for England though, as Scotland snatched first place in the last few races. Everyone in the Scottish team was thrilled and were called up to accept the Fairlands Sports Day trophy and as an added bonus, were able to hold up the authentic Olympic and Paralympic Games torches.

A huge thank you goes out to all of the staff who helped to organise and run the day, especially Miss Parsley, who is our PE subject leader, for 'making it all happen'! Thanks also to the parents who showed enormous support and to Fairlands Faces for running the refreshment stand on the day. 

Fairlands has a special visitor today to start off our Creative Writing Week - the inspiring author of a fantastic trilogy of children's novels called the SeaBEAN Trilogy! 

Sarah told us in assembly how she was inspired to write the novels when she heard about a real-life, mysterious island of St. Kilda, off the Western coast of Scotland, uninhabited since 1937. This barren island is the setting for the trilogy, where, on her 11th birthday in 2018, Alice finds a mysterious black box on the beach. She discovers it’s called a C-Bean and imagines it belongs to her. Together with her five schoolmates, they soon realise it has extraordinary powers and can transport them anywhere in the world, from Central Park to the Amazonian rainforest to the backstreets of Hong Kong, as they uncover danger and subterfuge threatening the world’s eco-systems.

The books are quite magical themselves, with an amazing heat-sensitive cover which changes colour when you hold it! The children were really excited to hear about how Sarah became an author, the inspiration behind the first two volumes in the series and how she is looking forward to November when the third volume is published.

Come along to an EXCLUSIVE BOOK SIGNING, after school today, where children can meet the author face to face, and get a signed copy of the books, at a reduced price of £8 each (rrp £9.99) or £15 for the first two volumes. For more info, take a look at the SeaBEAN website. 

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The whole school have learnt all about Tourrette's Syndrome (TS) this morning.

Mr Staples led an assembly to explain what Tourette's is, all about 'tics' and we thought about how we can make life a little easier for people with Tourette's, by not teasing them and standing up for them if we see or hear bullying. The children showed a lot of sensitivity when they were thinking about what it must be like to have TS, and one child was exceptionally brave and spoke about their own experience. We all agreed that it is OK to be different... and it is OK if you have TS.

We are looking forward to the sun shining and wearing green on Friday for our Ticnic to help everyone understand more about Tourette's! Thanks to Miss King for organising our special week!