Dear Parents and Carers

Happy New Year to you all! We hope the year has started well for all our families. The new year has brought lots of new and exciting innovations to Manor.

The first day back for staff on Inset Day saw teachers working to organise our newly purchased curriculum support packages from Kapow. We have spent time looking at different ways to support our teachers in their planning and preparation of lessons and Kapow offered us excellent subject knowledge support, excellent mixed age long term coverage of the national curriculum and exciting lessons that our teachers can adapt to the needs of our children. We will be using Kapow for history, geography, art, design technology, RE, French and science. It will take time for every class to transition fully to this scheme for all of these subjects but I saw some wonderfully engaging lessons being taught this week using Kapow and children and teachers are loving it so far.

Marvellous Me

The change that you will have noticed at home will have been the rolling out of our new parent/school communication package, Marvellous Me. Hopefully you have all been able to get on and access the app on your devices. If you have struggled or you know someone who hasn't got on it yet, please do pop in to the office and Mrs Everett would be happy to help where she can. We hope you like it and will get lots of useful information about what your child is doing in school as well as messages from teachers that will keep you up to date. The system has four main elements:

1. Thumbs ups: These are awarded for good behaviour, good work etc. They are often linked to the school values and are the equivalent of our House Points. In fact, the children have been put into their houses on the system so these are now to become our virtual house point system that the House Captains will announce each week in assembly. Parents don't receive a notification every time these are awarded but they can see a running total for their child on the app until they get reset periodically.
2. Badges: these are like a postcard home or a certificate. Staff will award these to individuals or groups for going above and beyond. We have badges linked to our Manor Values as well as a Star of the Week badge. You may have seen that parents were awarded a 'super-parent' badge for accessing the system. These will send a notification to the app so parents can meet their child knowing they have received a badge that day and what it was for. For now we are still awarding Star of the Week certificates but will review this before we buy some more.
3. Activities: Teachers will send a couple of these a week. It may be a message about what the children are learning so you are able to talk to them about it at home (this may replace the curriculum coverage part of this newsletter to avoid staff having to duplicate work). It might include suggested activities to do to support learning in school and it might include attachments such as spelling lists.
4. Messages: At last we have a quick and easy informal system for sending reminders, requests and other messages from the teachers or the office. This is a one way messaging service but there are also quick links added to the app such as our website calendar and the office email.

We hope you enjoy this new system and find it useful and easy to use. We would always welcome any feedback both positive and ways we could further improve our communication.