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school Council
8/11/22 – Networking!
Wow, what a great meeting this week! Miss Tart had to go to a different meeting so Mrs Larcombe and Mrs Smith took the School Council children over to the junior school to have a very special meeting with Mrs Donovan’s Community Council. We introduced ourselves and spoke about the kinds of things we have done in School Council since September. We were excited to hear about all the things the Community Council has done, too. This was the start of a great relationship – watch this space!
22/11/22 – Spotty Mad
This week we all knew that a very important day was coming up…Pudsey Bear day, to raise money for Children In Need! We talked about the charity and how it can help children and their families. We then created some Pudsey Bear posters to put up around school, reminding the rest of the staff and children to wear something spotty and bring in a donation this Friday. We took a poster back to our classes so we could remind our classmates too. Great work!
07.11.2022
Busy Bees!
Wow, it’s been a very busy few weeks for School Council! The children have been busy brainstorming with Miss Tart to come up with some fantastic opportunities for the children here at Willesborough Infant School. The children helped Miss Tart to organise for a real-life drummer to come in and perform. We are all very excited! The children also helped Miss Tart to organise regular, bi-weekly visits to one of the local care homes where lots of children get the opportunity to interact with some of the residents, play games, drink tea and biscuits and just have a friendly natter! So far we have been on two visits there and all children involved have really enjoyed it. Great work School Council – what brilliant ideas you have!
Work, work, work!
School Council felt very important when they were approached by the English leaders this term. The English leaders asked School Council to come up with a ‘boys books’ survey in order to find out about the different genres and types of books that the Willesborough boys love to read. Once Miss Tart had typed up the survey, School Council then went back to their classrooms and gathered some information about the boys in their classes. They then passed this information back to the English leaders in order for them to improve the selection of the books in the library even more!
The last week and a half we have also had the very, very important job of selling poppies to the children in the school. We know how important it is to raise money for the Poppy Appeal and more importantly, why we do it, so we thought it was only natural for us to take the lead in selling poppies around the school. We haven’t counted how much money we have raised yet, but the pot is feeling quite heavy already! We still have one more week of poppy selling to go, so stay tuned.
29.09.2022
Welcome!
Wow, it’s that time again…sixteen new representatives for school council have been elected and they are raring to go! Let us introduce ourselves…
Giraffes: Nancie, Joshua
Elephants: Bethany, Lewis
Pandas: Sulaiman, Brianna
Koalas: Marcus, Isobelle
Wright Bros: Chloe, Muskan
Darling: Misha, Myla
Vivaldi: Vienna, Vinci
Cousteau: Emily, Isaac
We have been very busy in our meetings for the last two weeks. We discussed lots of our ideas and ways that we can make our school even better for everyone. We decided our first job would be to focus on creating some playground rules and giving the children ideas of some different, sensible games they could play outside. We created a document for the teachers and the school council children went back into their classes and spoke to their peers all about this. They have also invited the midday supervisors for a meeting to share this with them as well! Great work so far, School Council. Start as we mean to go on!
Playground Games
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Good Games
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Games We Cannot Play
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· Duck duck goose · What’s the time Mr Wolf · Hide seek · Stuck in the mud · Mums and dads · Snakes and ladders · Use the playground markings · Tag · Catch · Hop scotch · Follow the leader · Simon Says · Fox and Boxes · Wink wink murder · Corners · Queen Victoria
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· Zombies · Fighting games · Youtube games · No kicking games · No karate games · No grabbing games · No army games · No games with guns/swords/light sabres · No Fortnite games · No shark games |
Playground Rules
- 1) Kind hands and feet always.
- 2) We let everyone join in our games.
- 3) We always take turns.
- 4) We share equipment and treat it with respect.
- 5) We respect everybody on the playground.
7.06.2022
We had a very productive school council meeting today discussing all of the different club opportunities that we have had over the last year. We listed some of our favourite ones and then we came up with some suggestions for next year. We thought it would be a good idea to not only get our opinions but also the rest of our classes’, so we agreed to speak to our friends about what they enjoyed and Miss Tart emailed the teachers asking them to give us some time during the week to do this in our classrooms. We’re excited to get the feedback from our classes!
14.06.22
School Council arrived at our meeting this week absolutely buzzing to share the feedback from their discussions with the rest of their class about clubs. General feedback was that the variety of clubs on offer this year were great and children particularly enjoyed sewing club and computing. We had a few suggestions for some different clubs for next year which Miss Tart has passed on to the grown-ups.
We also had a great discussion about the recent changes to our PE kit policy. The children all agreed that wearing their PE kits to school on their class PE day was saving them lots of time and they all enjoy wearing them. We decided that it might be useful for us to draw some pictures of what the PE kit consists of so that children and grown-ups know exactly what they need to wear. We really enjoyed doing this!
10.05.22
School Council have been extremely busy this week working with more subject leaders. We bought our own Let’s Explore books to the meeting and did a very important ‘book look’ and checked the books had the correct subject content in them. We compared it with the science yard stick and had a look to see if we could find the evidence of the lessons in the book. We had lots of fun doing this and we really enjoyed seeing each other’s amazing science work. We were very impressed with the work that we saw and some of the brilliant lessons that were evidenced in the book. It was clear that we have some super scientists here at Willesborough! School Council agreed that science was definitely a highlight of our curriculum and there were lots of “I love science” and “science is my favourite subject” comments heard
3.05.22 - Books, Glorious Books!
School Council have been very busy this week liaising with the Miss Hall and Mrs Scott, the school English leaders! School Council went on a learning walk around both the infant and junior schools with the focus of looking at how effective the reading areas are across both schools. We really enjoyed seeing the inspirational displays and the amazing variety of books that are on offer to us. We also gave the Miss Hall and Mrs Scott some brilliant ideas on how to make the book areas even more amazing – in which case they’ve definitely got their work cut out!
26/04/2022 – New Term, New Us!
We have welcomed our final cohort of school councillors in today’s meeting. We got our super shiny school council badges and put them straight on our uniform. We are going to wear them with pride! We discussed some of our new and fabulous ideas and decided on the agenda for the next few meetings. We are very much looking forward to working with the junior school council to make the Willesborough Schools even better!
Introducing, our new school councillors….
Isla and Fred – Krakens
Riley and Madeline – Unicorns
Jessica and Freya – Phoenix
Amber and Fletcher – Dragons
Harry and Maisie – Pandas
Ruben and Emma – Elephants
Adam and Haddassah – Giraffes
Esther and Edward - Koalas
We also decided it would be nice to thank the lovely Folkestone and Hythe Swing Band for coming in and playing on the last day of last term at our Easter Bonanza. So many of us and our grown-ups thoroughly enjoyed listening to and watching them perform and we really hope we can continue this fantastic relationship. We decided to design them a thank you card to express our gratitude! Miss Tart is going to deliver them along with some gifts very soon.
Visit to Brabourne Care Centre
During lockdown we published our own book, we visited the care centre to deliver complimentary copies of the book to the residents
Yard Stick Inspection – 22.03.22
We had yet another important job to complete this week during our School Council meeting…
We thought it would be a good idea to look some of the foundation subject yard sticks that the teachers use, to see if we could find all the evidence in the children’s books. We focused on history and geography this time and we used a grid to fill check the curriculum coverage (see below). We were very impressed at what we saw and we could remember lots about the different topics that we’ve covered so far in history and geography. We remembered that Florence Nightingale was famous for her nursing work during the Crimean War, and that the Wright Brothers were the first people to build and fly a real aeroplane! We loved looking through our books and felt extremely proud about all the knowledge we have gained since September.
Exciting Environments – 15/03/2022
Today’s School Council meeting was...a learning walk! The children suggested that we have a wander around the year one and two areas, focussing specifically on how the learning environments looked. We got our clipboards and had a look in each classroom, as well as the main shared areas for both year groups. We were very impressed by what we saw. We came up with a couple of development points too. We felt very important!
9/03 – Brabourne Care Centre
Wow – what a shiny day! The sun was beaming on our walk to Brabourne Care Centre. When we arrived we got to enjoy an amazing buffet of jam sandwiches and homemade shortbread that the lovely staff at the care centre provided for us. We sat in the gardens, shared the Lockdown Learning Books that we donated and we chatted to some of the residents about these. We had such a wonderful time and we felt incredibly lucky to be able to visit and donate some of our lovely books. Thanks for having us, Brabourne! What a day
1/03/2022 – Arts Week!
What a jam-packed meeting School Council had today. Firstly we discussed some books that we might like to put on our wish list for the Willesborough libraries. We made sure that we had spoken to our classes before we came to the meeting so that everyone had a chance to mention any particular books or authors that they would like. We then discussed how we could spread the love of books within our local community. We came up with a great idea to contact some local places like an elderly care home, the local children’s centre and the local library to see if they would like us to donate a copy of our wonderful ‘Lockdown Learning’ book. We wrote an important email and sent it off. We look forward to hearing from them soon.
18.01.22
New Year, New Us!
11.01.22
We would like to introduce the newly elected members of Willesborough Infant School Council:
Giraffes – Tiwa and Amelia
Elephants – Hazel and Zackary
Pandas – Nathaniel and Amelia
Koalas – Anna and Alex
Unicorns – Freddy and Mia
Phoenix – Nancy and Isaac
Dragons – Joey and Isabelle
Krakens – Bella-Rose and Ralph
We got straight on with some very important councillor jobs. The children had a good discussion about how to make lunchtimes even better for the children at WIS. We then came up with a brilliant idea…get the year six children from the junior school involved! We wrote an email to Mrs Kelsey, who is in charge of year six, to see if we could organise a meeting with some of the year six children to discuss this. Watch this space!
16/11/2021
It’s a very important week this week because…we are raising money for Children In Need! We spoke to our classes and decided that we should have a ‘wear something spotty’ day on Friday where everyone can bring in a donation and dress up! We made some flyers and took them back to our classes where we got a chance to speak to the rest of the class and remind them to bring in a donation and wear something spotty this Friday. We can’t wait to see what everybody wears and how much money we raise! Here’s a picture of us working together to create some of our lovely flyers.
12/10/21 – 19/10/21
Brrrr, it’s getting chilly! Over the last couple of weeks we have been thinking really carefully about how to keep everyone at school safe, and what we can do to make sure that everyone is coming into school to join in with their learning. We noticed that as the weather changes the nasty germs can make an appearance, so we went back to our classes to ask them what they thought we could do to make sure that we are preventing children and grown-ups from getting poorly as much as we can. When we got back together and shared our ideas we decided to make some really bright, colourful posters to put up in each class to remind everyone about how important handwashing and sanitizing is to stop the germs from spreading. Our posters were beautiful and Mrs Larcombe even managed to get them laminated for us!
5/10/2021
After writing a great email last week, School Council are pleased to announce that they have helped to organise….for a real life jazz band to come in and play for our school! We are very proud of ourselves for helping to do this and we cannot wait to break the news to the rest of our friends back in our classes. What an exciting opportunity for everybody this will be!
WIS Needs You…
Wow! What a fantastic first few weeks back at school. Not only have we been busy settling into our new classes and getting to know our new teachers, but we have also been nominating ourselves to be members of the new school council! We had to fill in a form with our name and class, as well as a comment explaining why we think we would make fantastic school councillors. We posted our forms into the ballot box in the Year One corridor. All of the slips were then put into a big pot and our teachers picked two from each class, so... meet our brand new school council members!
Theo and Adheeya – Elephants
Louie and Mikaela – Kangaroos
Michelle and Nancy – Koalas
Olivia and Mylee – Phoenix
Max and Nancy – Unicorns
Joshua and George – Dragons
Edward and Isabelle – Pegasus
Lewie and Lauren – Giraffes
18th September 2019 - Welcome!
In our first meeting we got to know each other a bit more by introducing ourselves and sharing our fantastic ideas about school council. We talked about some very pressing issues, like how we can keep the school even tidier and make it safer for everyone. We also spoke about how we can make sure that everybody is staying well and looking after themselves so that we are all in school and ready to have fun learning every day!
From our discussion we came up with a fantastic idea and now have our first, very important job coming up… can you guess what it might be about? Watch this space!
2nd October 2019
This week was a very exciting week for our school council. When we arrived at our meeting we received our very own, super special school council badges! They are very shiny and we feel extremely proud to wear them. We also had a special visitor… Mrs Larcombe came and joined us and she was very impressed by our fantastic ideas.
Miss Tart and Miss Healy shared some of our great ideas from our last school council meeting on how to make our school even shinier. We were given the job of choosing the prize for the ‘97% or more’ attendance draw, which will take place at the end of term. We talked about our budget for the prize and had a think about the different things we could buy with that amount of money. We used the iPads to have a look at different websites with things that we thought might make a good prize, and we even looked at some catalogues and magazines to help us decide. We had to be careful though, as we came to realise that some things that we thought would make a good prize were a little bit out of our price range!
It was a tricky job but we came up with some brilliant ideas for the ‘97% or more’ prize that we hope the lucky winner will LOVE. If you have 97% or more in your attendance then it could even be you! Stay tuned for the big reveal…
16th October 2019
Back To The Future
Wow, what an exciting week at Willesborough Infant School! The school council have been very busy organising bits from each year group to pop in our very own Willesborough Infant School time capsule. We brainstormed some ideas together about what things each year group could put inside. We came up with:
- Numicon
- Dienes
- Coloured paper
- Felt pens
- Photograph of an ipad
- Books
- Word mats – tricky word and sound mat
These are just some of the things that we use in school to help us with our learning. We did think about putting an iPad in too but these cost a lot of money so we decided on a photograph of one instead. We think that whoever finds this in the future might be slightly puzzled to find the Numicon and the Dienes… unless they still use them!
We then looked at a map of the school and put an ‘x’ to ‘mark the spot’ to indicate where to bury the time capsule. We all agreed it had to be somewhere where Rob can easily dig a hole for us. School council also took charge of deciding what was going to be written on the time capsule sign. In the end we decided on something quite simple but very effective…
’Willesborough Infant School Time Capsule 2019’
Our final job is yet to come… on Friday we will be collecting all of the bits from around the school that are going in the time capsule, including all of the letters from the children. We are very excited and proud to have such an important role in this exciting week!
11th November 2019 - Terrific Term Two
We have had a very busy and very productive start to term two here at WIS school council HQ! To kick start our term, we decided to raise awareness about two very special events coming up; Remembrance Day and Children in Need!
We talked about what these events meant and why they are important to us as a school. The school council decided to make special posters to put up around the school, to make sure that everyone knows about these events. We worked hard to make beautiful collages and added helpful information to the posters to remind children and grown-ups about what WIS are doing for Remembrance Day and Children in Need. Then we put the posters up all over the school so nobody could miss them! Look out for our amazing posters; I wonder how many you can spot...
25th November 2019 - WIS Wildlife Inspection!
With the days getting much colder, school council thought it would be a good idea to conduct a WIS Wildlife Inspection to see how wild-life friendly our school is. We decided to focus particularly on our hedgehog friends because we know that hedgehogs are endangered and they will be looking for some safe places to hibernate this winter! We thought carefully about what kinds of things make a ‘wildlife-friendly’ area and went around the school hoping to spot any of these features. We identified lots of things like birdfeeders and even a hedgehog house! Mrs Larcombe came with us and she was also very impressed. When we got back we talked about all the fantastic things we noticed and also thought of some ‘even better ifs’ to help make our school even more wild-life friendly. Miss Tart then helped us write up our findings from our inspection into a special report. We decided to give a copy of it to Mrs Rusbridge, the ‘Green Gang’ and Mr Greenfield (who is in charge of helping us create more ‘hedgehog highways’ around the garden) so that they could see all the super things we are doing at WIS to help look after our wildlife. If you would like to see our report you can find it in the school council folder in the foyer.
Happy hibernating, Hedgehogs!
11th December 2019
Festive fun!
We have been busy spreading festive cheer this week here at WIS. We had a chat about all the things we care about at Christmas, and how special this time of year can be for lots of people. We thought about how we could spread our cheer, not just at school but in our local community too… and we came up with a great idea!
We knew that the school choir were going to visit Montfort Manor care home in Kennington, so we thought that we would design and make some very special Christmas cards and decorations that can be put up there. We thought this might be a good way to spread Christmas cheer!
We got to work like little elves using lots of glitter, so now we have some fantastic Christmas cards and decorations to send. We will be sending our creations with Nancy, who is not only part of school council but is also part of the choir. She has kindly offered to deliver them for us as a representative from WIS School Council.
We have also been busy receiving our very special ‘WIS School Council Certificates of Excellence’, as our time as school councillors has come to an end! Miss Tart has been extremely impressed with our ideas and hard-working attitude and would like to thank all members of the school council for doing such a fantastic job over the last two terms.
Next term, Miss Tart will be looking for some new school council members… if you think you’ve got what it takes you will be able to nominate yourself in the new year. How exciting!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Miss Tart and the WIS school council members
New year, new us!
With the start of a new year comes some fantastic new school council members! We have been busy nominating ourselves to be members of the new school council by filling in a form with our name and class, as well as a comment explaining why we think we would make fantastic school councillors. We then posted our forms into the ballot box in the year one corridor. Then all of the slips were put into a big pot and our teachers picked two from each class….
After the school council members were announced they had their first school council meeting. We also have another very special member of school council… Mrs Rusbridge! We are very lucky to have Mrs Rusbridge as part of our school council. She is extremely excited to hear our amazing ideas.
Some of you may have also noticed that there are more school council members this term… that’s because Reception children have now joined! We are very lucky to have such responsible children here at WIS and we are excited for what’s to come.
Freddy and Lillian – Hedgehogs
Lydia and Charlie – Owls
Ruby and Zahra – Foxes
Ivy and Leo - Squirrels
Henry and Jasmine – Giraffes
April and Austin – Elephants
Swaranjan and Poppy – Kangaroos
Emilia and Ioannis – Koalas
AJ and Jeyda – Phoenix
Daisy and Cooper – Unicorns
Mia and Alice – Dragons
George and Zoe – Pegasus
22nd January 2020 - Welcome!
Our first school council meeting with our new members was a very busy one! We got to know each other by introducing ourselves and sharing some of our fantastic ideas for school council. Mrs Rusbridge explained that we are continuing to support our animal charity this term (the Blue Cross) and that she has bought some raffle tickets to enter us into a competition to win some money for the school. We thought about what we could spend the money on if we won and we came up with some fantastic ideas, like some new whiteboard pens or maybe even some laptops!
Mrs Rusbridge was impressed with our ideas and noted them all down to take back and discuss with Mrs Larcombe, our finance officer. We were especially concerned with making sure there are enough working whiteboard pens for each class to use, so Mrs Rusbridge was going to find out how much of our money is spent on new pens, and whether we could justify anymore. It was also agreed that to make sure we aren’t wasting any, we must make sure we always put the lids on properly and look after our things. We decided that we would remind the rest of our classes about this too.
We know that we might not win the money but even so, Mrs Rusbridge still has some of our amazing suggestions that could be useful in the future!
What an eventful first meeting! I don’t know about you, but we have a feeling that 2020 is going to be a busy one…
29th January 2020 - WIS Book Look
This week we all decided to bring our own ‘Let’s Explore’ books to share with the rest of school council. We were very excited to show each other what we have been up to since Term 1, it was especially interesting to see what we learn about in reception, year one and year two! We had a chat and thought about our favourite learning so far. We especially loved being geographers in year one and going on our local Willesborough Walk. In year two the puppet making had been very popular and in reception the Teddy Bear’s Picnic was a hit!
We loved seeing how much we have learned so far and how we build on our learning and make lots of connections from reception to year two! We also had a think about what we would like to learn more about and how we can make our books even better! Miss Tart helped us type this up into a special report for Mrs Rusbridge and the teachers.
Health and Safety Follow-up! 26th February 2020
After our successful health and safety inspection last week we invited Mrs Larcombe, the head of health and safety, to feedback what we found out. We were very positive because there were lots of shiny things that make our school very safe. We did pick out a few things to report back to Mrs Larcombe as some ‘even better ifs’…like thinking about how we can keep the cloakrooms even more tidy, and how we can prevent germs spreading around the school so pupils and teachers don’t get poorly. We decided that as school council members it was our duty to encourage children to keep their cloakrooms as tidy as possible and wash our hands with soap to stay healthy so we decided to make some posters to put up around the school to remind everyone of this. Mrs Larcombe thought this was a very good idea and was impressed with our feedback from our health and safety walk.
We also finally received our very special school council badges! We have been eagerly anticipating their arrival and now they are finally here we are very proud to wear them. Here is a photo of us wearing them proudly.
12th March 2020
This week in our school council meeting we were lucky enough to have Mrs Sparrow, our maths leader, join us! We decided that it would be a good idea to bring our maths books along so that we could have a look through them and think about all of the wonderful maths learning we do here at Willesborough Infant School. As we were looking through them, we noticed lots of really fun learning that takes place in our maths lessons where we have lots of opportunities to apply our knowledge. We really enjoyed talking to each other and Mrs Sparrow about maths and we loved being able to give our own opinions about our learning. Mrs Sparrow made some notes and will let the teachers know what we said so that they can continue to create shiny maths lessons for us!