We have been very busy today raising money for Children In Need. Activities have included a penalty shoot out, a dance off and ‘throw a wet sponge at a teacher’! Congratulations in particular to year 6 who clocked up a grand total of five hours in their sponsored silence held yesterday!

An enormous thank you to our ARP children and staff for leading the organisation of today, and especially to Mr Owen for being such a good sport! Thank you children for your fabulous fund raising ideas and for your enthusiasm throughout the day. We will confirm the amount we have raised after all of the money has been counted. Well done everyone!!

We are delighted to have received a message from our specialist Mathematics teacher, Miss Atkins who is currently in Shanghai taking part in an exchange programme organised by the NCETM, (National Centre of Excellence for Teaching Mathematics). Miss Atkins has arrived safely and has begun her work observing Maths being taught by the teachers she is with in the photograph above. We can’t wait to hear more about this very exciting venture! For further details about the exchange programme please see below.

• Miss Atkins is working with Charlie Stripp (National Director) and Debbie Morgan (Primary Director) from the National Centre of Excellence for Teaching Mathematics who have set up MathsHubs across the UK, along with 70 other teachers who have been successful in their application for the China-England Exchange. https://www.ncetm.org.uk/news/51584 This link is to NCETM and gives more information about the wider exchange programme.

It was a very spooky Thusday yesterday at Rushall with Halloween themed days across school followed by our disco for Key Stage Two! The costumes were spectacular and all children behaved beautifully. An enormous thank you to the staff and Rushall Family PTA members who made this possible.

We would like to congratulate all of our children for their stunning performances during our Harvest celebrations last week. We had superb singing, signing and poetry recitals that were performed with fantastic confidence and enthusiasm! We are particularly proud of the confidence shown by our youngest children who have only just started in Nursery or Reception – Well done!!

Thank you parents for the amazing amount of food that was donated – this has been gratefully received by the food bank at Pelsall Methodist Church.

An enormous thank you to the newly formed ‘Rushall Family’ and Miss Faulkner for organising our Macmillan coffee morning which was held last Friday!! It was lovely to see this event so well attended and the cakes and samosas were delicious! We raised an incredible £307.18!! Thank you so much to all who attended/ supported this event and to all of our star bakers!

Our value this term is ‘Patience’. We have been thinking very carefully about what patience means and times when it is important to be patient. The children made some very good suggestions such as doing ‘Good Waiting’ and remaining calm in many situations at home and school. These included waiting for your lunch; waiting to take turns, waiting in a traffic jam or a bus queue and waiting for a special day such as your birthday. We also discussed the importance of being patient with others who may need to take more time or need more help to do things than we do.

Here are some examples of art work that the children have produced on the theme of ‘patience’.

A special message from the Rushall Dragon Newspaper Team: Lauren, Eleanor, Matthew, Louie, Arthur and David.

This year, we have decided to embrace creativity and technology by developing the first Rushall Dragon blog. After developing our school newspaper over the past few years we have realised that an increasing amount of people stay up-to date with current affairs online as opposed to a printed version. We too want to adapt in an ever-changing world and will now produce a weekly blog. Please can you inform us of any ideas or suggestions for our new blog.

We hope that you too enjoy our adapted way of reporting the news. Look out for the Rushall Dragon blog coming very soon!

We start the new term by sending huge congratulations to La’Myah who achieved word ‘millionaire’ status at the end of the summer term. We are so proud of you La’Myah, and of all of our enthusiastic and dedicated readers. It is wonderful to see some children taking their books outside at lunchtime too – let’s see how many new millionaires we can create this year!

We had an assembly from Google Be Internet Legends on Monday. The whole of KS2 became internet legends. The assembly told us how to make the most of the internet, how to make smart decisions.

To become internet legends we had to make the legends pledge after we found out all about Interland and how to stay safe online.

The legends pledge:

Children and parents can access Interland here – https://beinternetlegends.withgoogle.com/en_uk/interland

We will continue to use the pledge and Interland as part of our Online Safety Curriculum in KS2.

Following our excitement at winning third prize at the WASUP exhibition, on Saturday we went on to win first prize for our stunning icy ‘eco-themed’ carnival float! We also won first prize for our walking group thanks to our fabulous team of carnival dancers! This is a fantastic achievement! Thank you so much to all of the children, staff and parents who have helped. We are so proud, well done Team Rushall!!!