I hope that you have all been keeping up with our festive this week on our Facebook page and through the website. It was lovely to welcome our Heathlands School neighbours to join us for the Jingle Jog yesterday!

News and events – Dawn House School

As usual the Dawn House school team have created a perfect lead up to Christmas. Children and staff have all contributed to a relatively calm but celebratory week of events. The Christmas Show never ceases to surprise me as we watch children who might have previously not had the opportunity, the confidence or the wish to be on stage, sing, create films and so in in front of a group of people (around 150 yesterday!) Such proud moments for us all, on our schools 50th Christmas show!

As we leave school this afternoon, I remind you all to keep safe and well and to take good care of each other. While our children are at home, they will no doubt miss their friends at school and may be in touch with each other, I’m sure. Please keep oversight of this communication as so very often for our children, things go wrong, and friendships and relationships become very complicated. There is nothing worse than the anxiety of coming back to school when things have gone wrong and this sometimes really takes over from our biggest purpose of coming to school, enjoying learning.

We all have a shared responsibility here, as parents, carers and school staff, to lead by example and to guide our children. Sometimes it may be wise to reduce the contact that they have. We thank you for your support here so that we can all look forward to returning to school on Monday 6th January.

Our Occupational Therapy team have a thank you to parents and carers who took part in the survey around our OT provision. As a result of this and other feedback gathered, in January we will have a designated Occupational Therapist and Occupational Therapy Assistant working across specific key stages. This will mean that therapists can be closer to their core teams and support day to day in lessons, with school trips and provide therapy advice as and when required. The OT staff will remain with the allocated areas throughout the academic year rather than rotating after one term as they did previously. If you have any questions about your child’s OT, it will be easier to know where to find it. I’m sure the OTs will introduce themselves in the New Year.

In January we have a new Speech and Language Therapist starting with us; Liz Jackson. Liz has many years’ experience as an SLT and most recently working with Speech and Language UK delivering training. Liz will be working with KS4 students plus working with the assessment team.

In our education team, we welcome Mat Gething who will be the new Primary 1 teacher- I’m sure you will join me in giving both Mat and Liz a very warm welcome.

The end of the day is calling so I will leave you with very Merry Christmas wishes and we look forward to seeing you in the New Year,

Jenny.