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Marsh Baldon School News April 09
MARSH BALDON SCHOOL NEWS Spring seems to have appeared at last and it is certainly a very busy time at the school. The better weather recently has meant that the children have been able to enjoy being outside. We held our ‘Great Outdoors' Photo and Art competition recently and had some fantastic entries. The winners were: Photographs Yr R-2 Holly Howard Yr 3-6 Lillie Cook Family Iain Downton Art Yr R-2 Martha Keegan Yr 3-6 Jessica Druce / Harriet Ball We are improving our school grounds at the moment. The ‘Outside Area' of Class 1 has had a lot of attention and we have plans to put in a vegetable garden so the children can experience growing some food that they will eventually eat! (we hope!). The children have been on visits to the Botanic Gardens in Oxford, the Northmoor Trust and the River and Rowing Museum in Henley.
Our Year 3/4 Football team took part in the Wheatley Partnership Indoor Tournament and came a very creditable 3rd. The Year 6 children also took part in an Authors Workshop where they met and worked with children's authors John Townsend and Julia Jarman. We have also had visitors into school to work with the children on Healthy Eating and Tag Rugby. Colin the Bishop of Dorchester took an assembly on the theme of ‘Friendship'. Recently we have made two very enjoyable visits to the Village Hall to sing for Senior Citizens of the Day Centre. It was great to see the children chatting to everyone. A real community event. This term, the whole school took part in National Doodle Day. Everyone produced a ‘doodle' (drawing) and £60 was raised for the Epilepsy Action charity. Recently, the children wore red and funny things with their uniform and told jokes to their classmates as part of the Red Nose Day. We raised £105 for Comic Relief. We do have a very exciting website where you can find out all about our activities. Please visit www.marsh-baldon.org As a school, we are very aware of the impact of cars both moving and parking outside the front of the school. We are doing everything we can to make life as easy as possible. Our main initiative is our ‘Walking Bus' where children can walk to school under supervision. Our ‘Walking Bus' meets at the Seven Stars car park each morning and the children then walk across the green. We also take part in the ‘WOW' scheme. WOW stands for Walk on Wednesday and the children are able to gain certificates and badges for walking or cycling to school. We are very impressed with the numbers for our Walking Bus and we are very grateful to the number of parent volunteers who run it. At the time of writing, we are averaging around 18 children a day (nearly a third). On Friday 13th March, over half of the children either walked or cycled to school. With better weather on the way (we hope!), perhaps the numbers will get even higher, we think so. It is just one way we are trying to alleviate the problems outside the school. We are always open to new ideas! Please say hello to the children if you see us in and around the village. Nick Pitson - Headteacher
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