That's it! 
The end of term has arrived. 
Thank you to everyone who has brought in gifts! Six weeks worth of chocolate and lots of other goodies! 
A final good luck to the Year 6 children and good luck wishes to Mrs Foote who is leaving the school today for a new role at a school in Ipswich. 
Have a wonderful summer! 
See you on September 3rd 2015. 

Mr Stock 

What a fantastic evening! The Year 6 Class put on an amazing performance of 'Aladdin'. The quality of the singing and acting was so impressive and considering the cast only included 19 children; it was amazing to hear the power of the children's voices. Some children had up to 5 different parts to play within the performance, but you would never had guessed - it was seamless! 

Well done to all involved! It was amazing! Thank you for your hard work and effort - it definitely paid off! 

Thank you so much for the super positive comments about today's sports day! I think it was a step up from last year and hopefully next year will be even better! 
I am so pleased that the rain stayed away and the children had an excellent day. It was so good to see you all at the picnic lunch too! That is one of the reasons that I chose to come along and work at this school - the sense of community!It was definitely there at lunchtime today! It was lovely! 

A huge thank you to all of the staff who helped coordinate and run the event, the PTA for selling coffees and cakes to make money for our school, the pupils and staff from Felixstowe Academy, the parents, grandparents and other family members who came along and were super supportive! And I haven't forgotten...the reason why we are all here... A massive well done and thank you to the children for creating an exciting, action packed sports day! 

Perseverance, being ready for challenge and dedication was seen by so many children and I am incredibly proud of all them. Sportsmanship was definitely in abundance. 

Hopefully, some of you used the car park for parking today. I am keen to make sure that we are respectful of the neighbours of the school so anything we can do to possibly reduce the amount of cars parked outside we will try. Apologies for the change of plan of where to pick children up from. As some parents had parked in the playground, I was nervous about releasing too many children in to that area at the end of the day. 

Thank you to Mrs Stagg for trying to help the traffic situation outside school which was always going to be busy on a well supported event like today. Made even worse by a combine harvester blocking the road at 3:35pm. 

Having won the Felixstowe Swimming gala this year, we were invited to take a squad to the Suffolk Sports Finals in Bury St Edmunds. At the event, all of the regional winners of sporting events this year, come together in a competition to find the best Suffolk team.

Our squad of 10 pupils have received some extra swimming session at Felixstowe Pool in order to prepare for this event and battled to secure a place in the final team.

Grace, Edward, Becky, Lauryn, Molly, Oscar, Danny, Zack, Olivia & Robbie made up the TSM squad and were on top form. Out of the top 18 school for swimming in the whole of Suffolk - we finished an amazing 6th place over all! 

So impressed with our little village school! We were up against schools from Ipswich and other parts of the county who are significantly bigger than we are. We did ourselves proud and I was so pleased to be there today with the team to see them swim their socks off!

Thank you to Mrs Matthews and the parents who came along to support!

Over the last few weeks, Mr Lewis-Lloyd and his choir have been rehearsing a number of songs from Oliver and Mary Poppins which they performed at the Orwell Hotel on Wednesday evening, at an event named 'Oliver & Friends'.
The benefits of the having someone working with the children, who can really sing well, makes a massive difference! Despite being the smallest choir at the production, the quality of our singing and way the children were able to project their voices was testament to the hard work put in by the children and Mr Lewis Lloyd. We kept our performance simple so that we could really concentrate on singing beautifully and we did just that!  

Thank you to those parents who attended and thank you to those who helped us get children to the Orwell Hotel for the rehearsals. Thank you to Mrs MacFarlane and to Mrs Matthews who also supported on the day.

Nightingale Class shared the work they have been doing about Florence Nightingale in an assembly. The assembly included scenes from the life of Florence Nightingale (all written by children in the class), music videos (directed and filmed by the children), singing and an explanation of the sorts of maths that Florence Nightingale may have done in the war hospitals. Very informative and lots of work clearly taking place in the Nightingale Class. Super job - well done!

Have a look at some of the maths work the children discussed during the assembly!

Take a look at writing produced by the children: the scripts and their examples of times when they were caring, compassionate or patient.

Team TSM competed at the Area Sports Competition. An athletics competition against the other schools in the Felixstowe Area.
There were some excellent performances from the team and some real stand out moments. We finished 6th out of the 7 teams. Kingfleet School were victorious and were amazing on the day.

We did well but lost a lot points from dropping batons in relays etc

Myself and Mr Childs have decided to bring forward our sports day next year (June) so that it falls before the Area Sports. This way the selection process will be much easier as the winners of the school sports day will go on to represent the team that competes in the area sports. It was also mean that children are much better prepared as they would have a practise run during our school sports day.

All had a fabulous afternoon, the weather was delightful and... as always... the children were incredibly well behaved.

I know that over the years there have been discussions about competitive and non competitive sports days. About 10 years ago, the traditional looking sports day disappeared and was replaced with an ‘everyone is a winner’ type of event. I have never been a fan of that approach for a number of reasons:


(a)Life is competitive! We have a duty as educators to help children to understand competition; What is it? What it’s not? How to cope with winning and losing? What to do if things don’t go to plan?

(b)We also believe that its important to teach the children that we are good at something's and perhaps need to practise on other things. Learning these skills is not just to improve sporting performance but also to enable our children to be ready to tackle the world. After all, interviews are competitive, there is competition within jobs, secondary schools and anything we do will have some sort of targets and goals!

(c)There will also be some children, who for them, sport is the thing that they are most good at! It would be wrong of us not to celebrate these children in the same we do in other aspects of school life.

Therefore our sports day has a mixture of competitive and non competitive elements. In most events, children will compete in their house teams and the bronze, silver and gold children will be identified. In Key Stage 2, the afternoon session will finish with some individual competition races which will include heats and finals.

In assemblies, in the lead up to the event, we will continue to discuss our key values with regards to sport. We will be reminding to the children, to encourage each other, to support their team mates, to give everything a go, to not give up and if they fall over to get back up, dust themselves down and keep going. I’ve included a photograph of Derek Redmond, an athlete famous for his perseverance. We will be showing the children a you-tube clip of the 1992 Olympic games 400 metres to the children in assembly. 

You tube clip

“When you don't give up, you cannot fail!”

I know not everyone will become Olympians, like Derek Redmond, but we hope that everyone learns to enjoy the challenge of sport whilst learning lots of vital lessons for the future. 

Mr Stock