Year 5 & 6 Making Movies

Our Year 5 & 6 children will be ‘Making Movies’ on Thursday and Friday 11th and 12th February.

It's all part of the Tyneside Cinema Newsreel project we've been part of and having a great time planning. We're all looking forward to seeing the end products in school!

Non Uniform Day

Next Friday 12th February there will be a non uniform day in school. Could we ask for a donation of £1.00 per child. Half of the money raised will be donated to the Haiti Disaster Appeal, the rest will go towards the cost of school trips.

Year 2 Class Assembly

Year 2 Parents are invited to join their child’s class to celebrate their work in Religious Education.

E.on Competition

As you know we pride ourselves at St. Mark’s by being eco friendly. We are inviting children and parents to become “Power Savers” by keeping a diary for one week and sharing your best energy saving tactic. This competition is being run by E-on and your child ,and school could win football prizes. You will find the activity sheet and further details on the reverse of this letter.

Five Star Kitchen

We would like pass on congratulations to our Cook Mrs Currie and her team who have been awarded Five Stars on the ‘Scores on the Doors’ a hygiene award run by Newcastle City Council. This confirms what we already knew, that our kitchen has very high standards of compliance with food safety legislation. Demonstrating best practice in managing and achieving this. Well done.

Class Trips

Our Year 3 children are visiting Segedunum this Thursday, 28th January to explore how the Romans lived here all those years ago. They are really excitied and are in for some real treats at he site of the end of the old Hadrian's Wall.

Our Year 4 class will be visiting the George Stephenson Museum in North Shields on Friday 5th February. can you please make sure that all EV7 forms are returned on time.

Early Bird Attendance Incentive

From Monday 22nd February we will be running an attendance incentive which will run for 4 weeks. We will be monitoring attendance and punctuality and a special treat will be given to the class who have the best attendance and punctuality at the end of the 4 weeks. We've had plenty of classes reach 100 % attendance for 1 full week- now we're aiming to have a full school week as close to 100% attendance as we can and lets see if any class can beat 100% attenadnce for 1 week and make it 2 or 3 o reven 4!

'What Can A Parent Do?' sessions

Caroline Slack, our Parent Support Advisor, will be starting her 'What Can A Parent Do?' sessions again. They will begin on Thursday 25th February and run from 1.15pm- 3.15pm. If you would like to join us or would like any further information please call into the office and see Mrs Slack or give her an email or phone call. Everyone is welcome to come along and join in.

Parents Evening

We will holding our next Parents Evenings in school on Monday 1st and Wednesday 3rd March 2010. The times for each night are different to allow more people to get into school to discuss their child's progress with the class teachers.An appointment sheet with available time slots will be outside your child's classroom closer to the time. If any parent is unable to make either date or time then please let Mrs Miller know. The dates and times are below.
Monday 1st March 2010            3.30pm- 5.30pm
Wednesday 3rd March 2010      4.30pm- 6.30pm

Useful Free Software

Parents and children have been asking about software which they could us at home which would help support learning. We try as much as we can to use recommended free software which does the job of much more expensive software. We'll post a different software title every week or so- one which is being used in school at the moment. Right now we have a group of children planning their own animation based on what it means to be Geordie. They will be using a free animation program called Helium Frog which makes stop start animation really easy. All you need is the program, a webcam and your imagination to get started- we've heard about episodes of Star Wars being re-created already using the software and lego Star Wars figures! The website Helium Frog contains the software and all the information you need to get started. Feel free to store any of your finished work on the VTLE and post here to let us know if you've done it.

http://www.heliumfrog.net63.net/heliumfrogindex.html