Thank you all so much for your donations throughout Advent for our reverse advent calendar.  We donated an amazing 44.7 kg of food to the Forest Food bank which undoubtedly helped out numerous families during this festive period.

The snow days seem like a life time ago now but we definitely made the right to decision to close the school for two days.  I would like to express my thanks to David and Kate Nelson-Brown for giving all members of Clearwell Primary School free entry to Perrygrove on Tuesday so that we could make the most of the snow.  I know that my own children loved it and by the looks of these photographs your children did too!

We had a wonderful time at the Pantomime but didn’t manage to take any photographs because we were too busy enjoying ourselves!  We loved our ice-creams or sweets and were particularly vocal when required.  Mrs Lawrence really enjoyed the dancing at the end!

Our Reverse Advent Calendar is looking really healthy and we have filled two boxes so far.  I am hoping that in the last few days of term we can try and fill another box.  We never know when we will need support from charities such as the Forest Food Bank hence our decision to support them at this time of year.

Celebrations

We have extra celebrations this week because we have awarded children who have read at least three times a week every week.  This is what we expect at Clearwell and are really pleased that a number of children have succeeded in doing this.  We are hoping for even more children to be awarded certificates at Easter – by the end of January we should have all of our new books in school. Children from year 2 – 6 have weekly spelling tests and we have awarded a certificate to the children who have the highest average score for their year group.  I don’t think that there is any surprise that all of the top spellers also read at least three times a week.

 

Our 100% attendance and Headteacher awards will be given out at the end of the Carol Service at the church on Wednesday.

 

After the wonderful financial news shared with you all last week, I am sure that you are all aware of our success at the Coleford Light Switch on. We could not believe it when Roger Drury announced Clearwell School as the winners for the best lanterns, especially when there were some amazing large lanterns created by other schools.  Thank you to everyone who brought their children to the event, a number of people commented how many people were representing our school.  The children had a wonderful time and were so proud and excited to appear on the stage and receive the cup, which has pride of place in our corridor as you enter school.

 

Music Celebrations

Mark Bick has been working with a number of our children teaching them a range of musical instruments.  Here is a QRcode which you can read with a QR reader and watch the music show if you missed it or want to watch it again.  There were lots of smiles and rounds of applause, we were all very proud of their achievements.

The children in Oak Class have been busy recently and have created their own representations of the Christmas Story.  These can be seen in St. Peter’s Church in first window on the right.  They will still be there when it is our Christingle and Carol Service.

Today brought a lot of excitement today!  Every time the snow came tumbling out of the sky there were wails of “It’s snowing!”.  All of the children had a magical time, for some it is the first time they could remember snow falling out of the sky onto them.

Our Celebrations

Funding!

What an eventful week we have had this week!  With Christmas quickly approaching and the children getting more and more excited something happened today that made the staff jump up and down with joy!  A couple of months ago we placed a bid with the National Lottery Big Fund for £10,000.  It was to enable us to replace the boggy grass in school with an all-weather surface that the children can use for their play times and PE lessons all year round.  Today, we got confirmation that we have won the bid!  We will be getting this work carried out as soon as feasibly possible.  If anyone is interested in the large wooden seating structure that currently sits on the grass then please let me know as we need to remove this ourselves if we are to keep costs down.

Christmas Bazaar

WOW!  What a successful event this proved to be.  Our little school was transformed into a bustling market place welcoming lots of our school community.  I would like to thank Kat Nelson-Brown, as Chair of Friends, and all of the team of parents who worked so hard planning, setting up, running and then clearing up the event.  I was astounded at the generosity of people in their donations and the selling and purchasing of raffle tickets.  It was lovely to see that there were so many bottles to raffle that everyone who bought a ticket won a bottle!  The chocolate hamper raffle was highly popular, the largest one was donated by Sam Howells and then the others were made up of chocolates donated by everyone.  This is definitely one to run again! I cannot list everyone who supported our event in terms of prizes as there were too many to mention and I am sure that I would miss someone out, so

THANK YOU.

The grand total raised was:

£899.65

This is incredible and will go into the School Friend’s account to buy things for our school.

 

Celebrations