HSA NEWSLETTER 6: The Story of the Little Boy and the Magic Books
The following story is all true and the magic books that you will read about really do exist. They were bought with your generous donations to the projects and events we have been running. We are desperate for your support at a time when it is difficult to organise any events that involve people meeting up in large numbers.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE SMALL INITIATIVES WE ORGANISE. THEY MAKE A DIFFERENCE! YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE: EVERY PENNY WE RAISE GOES TO SUPPORTING OUR CHILDREN.
Please read on…
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who hated reading. Every evening his mum pleaded with him to read at bedtime. Every week his teacher complained that he hadn’t read at home:
“Billy! Have you done your homework?” “No Miss, I couldn’t find any books!” “Billy! Are you reading up there?” “Not yet Mum, I’m just looking for a book!”
“Billy! Did you do any reading this week?” “No Miss, I tried but there were no stories I liked!”
Every night there was an excuse and every week at school there was one too.
It made Billy sad. Sometimes the letters in his books jumped around on the page. Sometimes the letters played tricks on him and made themselves into new words that didn’t make sense. Billy felt he was just not like the other children. He watched them in the playground bringing their reading books at break time. He saw their faces come alive as they read about stories of dinosaurs, fairies or secret sevens.
Billy didn’t know why his letters danced around; he just knew that this reading business wasn’t for him.
That was until the day he found the magic books…
Reluctantly, he picked up the magic book that his Mum had found for him and before he could make an excuse, he saw the brightly coloured pictures. They looked fun…Who knew whether these letters were wicked too and would run around changing the words as he read? He wanted to find out what was going on in the pictures though so he read the first sentence. The words were just right for him and he realised that the letters stayed still just long enough for him to understand the story. It was an adventure story. It was so exciting he read on…and on…and on. “Mum! I’ve finished the book!!!”
“Already?!” cried Mum.
“Yes! Can I have the next one? I need to find out what happens.”
Mum ran to school the next day and grabbed the next book. His teacher was delighted.
“Well done, Billy!” she cried. “I can give you some worksheets to do to help you stop those letters jumping around. They will help you to keep those letters still and will help you to follow the adventure. Do you want to try them?”
Billy reluctantly agreed and soon his reading had improved so much that he started to dream of all the other books he wanted to read. He excitedly made a list. When his music teacher taught him songs from a musical called Oliver Twist he ran home and asked his mum if he could read that book too…
Billy’s story is not over. But his world has suddenly opened up and he can read about ancient lands, footballing heroes and naughty schoolchildren…
Billy is not alone.
We could tell you about the story of Daisy who was too fidgety to read a book and couldn’t find anything she wanted to sit and read…until she too found the magic books … and enjoyed them so much that when she went shopping with her mum, she asked if she could buy her a book by Roald Dahl. Mum sighed and wondered where she was going to find time to do more reading. She bought the book anyway and, to her surprise, her little girl read the book herself! She danced into class to tell her teacher who gave her a Golden certificate for her amazing efforts!
There’s also Matthew, whose Mum had always struggled to make her son read. Once he discovered the books, she started to struggle to get him to put his books down!
HSA Newsletter 5
Lockdown News
It seems that nobody got the news they were hoping for regarding the reopening of the U.K. on 21st June! The HSA were just as disappointed as everyone else as we had hoped to be able to run a few last-minute end-of- term activities and fund raisers. 2020/2021 has been a challenging year to raise money!
We are grateful however for the support we have received and are immensely proud of the money that we have given to the school this year.
Our target has been £6000 per school year and we have scraped together all the pennies we have to fulfil our commitment!
End of our academic year 2020/2021
We handed over a cheque to the school for £6000 this term. We have made a conscious effort to keep you up to date via our regular Newsletters of how that money is being spent. If you remember we have completed the funding for the new school stage which we
hope you will be able to view as soon as it is ordered, in place and restrictions allow you back in school again. The SEND team has had some extra money to fund vital resources, we have provided extra books, phonics books, science goggles, maths equipment, treats for Skipping Day, Year 6 leavers celebrations…the list is endless. It is so often these little extras that make our children’s lives that little bit easier and a little bit more fun. Has your child benefited from any of these things? Please continue to support us in any way you can!
Uniform
We were overwhelmed (as we are sure you saw!) by the amount of people requesting new P.E. T-shirts. We have tried our best to keep the school shop open during the year and have been receiving orders via social media and email. We were recently given permission to open a small outdoor table sale in order to supply your P.E. T-shirts in time for Sports Day and we have never dealt with so many people!!!
We have now received our order from Mapac and this morning delivered all the T-shirts that were ordered. Mapac have done a fabulous job rushing through our order!
Mr Peters and Mr Daniels are particularly excited to see EVERYONE in their team colours for Sports Day this year!
We hope that “normal service” will resume in the new academic year and we will be able to open the shop to visitors.
If you wish to order your items direct from our suppliers you can visit www.mapac.com . You will be asked to search for our school and then will be shown the range of products available along with the prices. Delivery to school is free of charge.
Lottery
We are hoping to open up Gateway payments for our HSA lottery. Please, please support us this way if you can. It is a great way for our school to make money and also for you to have a chance at winning some cash!
Numbers are pulled by our team each month. Currently winnings are £30 for 1st prize and
£15 for 2nd prize but if our participants increase, so will our prize pot! This year we were able to give over £600 to the school through our lottery! If you have helped us this year please join in again next year. If you haven’t given it a try yet, give it a thought! You can buy as many numbers as you like. You have to be in it to win it!
Local Business News
Year 4 were delighted to have been supported by Huffers on their school trip this year. Studying the geography of rivers, they went down to observe the River Brett, see the old mill wheel and view the valley that Hadleigh lies in from Constitutional Hill. Huffers did a lovely job of delivering the children’s ice cream treat to the park.
Social Media
Do you already follow us on social media to keep up with our news?
HSA Newsletter 4
A heartfelt thank you!
With the first steps out of lockdown now being taken we realise how much we have to be thankful for this year:
Thank you for all your support so far. We have been able to continue our activities through a very difficult time thanks to you and our local businesses!
Thank you if you support our lottery
Thank you if you supported our Christmas hampers.
Thank you if you supported our Christmas Card Project. Thank you if you supported our Easter Cake Competition. Thank you if you donated books
Thank you if your business has sponsored us this year.
Please continue to support our projects. Every penny we raise goes back to our children to help their education and their enjoyment of school.
How we have supported our school.
Did you know that the HSA has committed to raising £6000 a year for Hadleigh Community Primary School? Last year we fell a little short as fundraising was so restricted but we handed over £4000 in September to be distributed as needed by the school. This year, determined not to be beaten we have just presented a cheque for the full £6000!
We have raised funds to support our SEND team, purchased extra equipment in years 3-6, we have donated over 400 books to the school libraries as well as a series of over 40 phonics books to year 2. We have also made a large donation towards purchasing a new stage for all children to enjoy when life gets back to normal.
In addition to the financial support we also provided our children’s Christmas “Sweet Treats” during the last week of term as well as their class decorations. We were also able to provide and serve their refreshments after their wonderful Skip into Spring event. It was so lovely for us to be allowed back onto the premises to help out!
Lottery News
Congratulations to Nicki and Lynette, our February winners and Sharon and Karen who took our March prizes! We hope you enjoyed spending your money! Make sure you join our lottery next time round to ensure a chance of
winning. You have to be in it to win it!
Easter Cake Competition
We had some fabulous entries for our new Easter Cake Competition and were overwhelmed by the support we received from Terri at EriVica Cakes in the High Street. She found the entries very difficult to judge as so many children had put in so much effort. We had entries from Nursery right up to Year 6. A very excited Rose won in Year 2 and had her design made up into a stunning cake in time for Easter. She was very popular in her family as they were all able to share in her prize!
Terri very generously donated her time and talents to the HSA and did everything for free! She was so impressed by the entries that she wanted to donate a 2nd and 3rd prize of a set of Easter cupcakes which went to Shivahni and Catherine. She then went above and beyond donating individual cupcakes to 12 runners up. Certificates were also awarded and Terri displayed the entries in her shop window. Did you have time to take a look over the Easter Holidays?
School Shop
We got a new delivery of fleeces during lockdown and these have proved as popular as ever. We also have a good supply now of sweatshirts, cardigans, PE T- shirts and book bags. Although the school shop remains closed to visitors for the moment, we can still take orders via social media messages or via email HSA@hadcps.uk
#ShopLocal: Local Business Sponsors:
| HJ Structural Engineers Ltd. | MW Partridges & Co. Ltd. | The Marquis |
| SP Plumbing & Bathrooms | EriVica Cakes | Hadleigh Maid |
| Masonic Lodge | Double Take Hair Salon | Adnams |
| MBA Flue Services | Bellwood Construction Ltd. | Andrews Butchers |
| Foresters Friendly Society | Hemisphere Freight | Sunny Day Cycleworks |
| The Ram | Fork Kitchen & Deli | Jimmy’s Farm |
HSA Newsletter 3
We hope that you managed to enjoy your Half Term break. This year hasn’t exactly started the way any of would have wanted but we are sure that a break in Home Schooling was appreciated by many! We would like to extend our thanks to the wonderful staff at Hadleigh Community Primary School who have supported our children at very short notice.
There were not many dry eyes in Hadleigh when we tuned in to the first assembly to be serenaded by Mrs Broadbent singing our school song!
We have obviously been limited once again with the fund-raising activities that
we are able to continue with but rest assured that the HSA has still been active on your behalf even during lockdown.
Book Lending Scheme
We are really proud of our Book Lending Scheme this half term. We hope that we have helped with your Home Learning by striving to offer as many books
as possible to your children. Finding reading materials has been a challenge for everyone at times when everything suddenly closed down. We are still collecting if you feel that you can add to our collection.
At the time of writing, we have over 250 books all labelled up to correspond with the Accelerated Reader system that we use at HCPS. Please make sure that these books are returned in order for other children to be able to enjoy them. Once the lockdown is finished we will be allocating these to our two libraries for years 3/4 and years 5/6.
The books that are used by the younger children will be offered to the school or sold in a book sale once it is safe to do so. Thank you to everyone who donated!
Christmas Hamper Thank you to everyone who donated to our hampers or bought tickets. Despite these difficult times we raised a very impressive £1076!
Lottery winners Congratulations to Isabel and Lynette who were our January winners!
Local Business Donations
We would like to thank a few more businesses/groups who have very kindly donated to our HSA this year. I think everyone in Hadleigh views Partridges very much as a community business and we are delighted to say that they have very kindly donated to our cause.
We were also contacted by a Masonic Lodge as they wanted to help us out. We are very grateful for their donation. We look forward to putting this money to good use!
2021 Spending
One of our aims now in the HSA is to show you the direct effect of your donations. We hope that when you see where the money has gone that you will be encouraged to donate and to participate more in our events. Every ticket you buy, competition you enter, disco
you come to (when times permit) have a direct effect on your child’s education and enjoyment at school.
We had hoped to have an HSA meeting at the beginning of January to take a look at the donations we had received last term and make some decisions on how to spend the money. We were a little demoralised to discover that we were no longer able to do this as it has been difficult to make these decisions at a distance especially as we are in the same boat as you are and struggling with Home Schooling. However, we are conscious that the money is there and is waiting to be spent.
A few decisions were taken to spend the money donated by HJ Structural Engineers as this had a specific aim to help Year 3 Maths. This has been spent on a complete set of Place Value Charts and counters. This is vital for the teaching of Maths at HCPS as we teach a full understanding
of mathematical principles rather than just asking our children to perform calculations “robot-style”. These charts help with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and teach children the value of the digits they are working with. Thank you again to Mark Shutt and Elke Hunter of HJ Structural Engineers.
Following the success of the reading series we purchased during last term our fabulous SEND team decided to use some of their donated money on further series. We really wish that you could all
see the effect of these books on children who struggle to read. The stories are fun and exciting and really stimulate the most reluctant readers. The workbooks that go with them have provided priceless resources to assist comprehension, phonics and word building.
Children who were unable to read compound words have completed the work and are now much better at segmenting words and blending their sounds in order to read and understand. We know that these books will be used by many children for many years to come. Thank you in this case goes to Hemisphere Freight Services Ltd. They particularly asked for their donation to go to this department and we hope that you approve their use of it. Once it is safe to do so we welcome you to come and see these books in action!
Easter Cake Competition
Looking forward to the future half term we will be giving you details of our Easter Cake Competition. We will be working with a local cake maker to offer
one of our lucky winners the chance to have their cake made up in time for Easter. Entries cost £2 and will be judged by the HSA and our cake provider. You can enter as many times as you like! Keep an eye out for details!
HSA Newsletter 2
Wow! We are already in December; the last month of a challenging year!
While we have seen many new rules and restrictions come into place this year, the lesson that has been learned is that we certainly live in a beautiful place (who didn’t get into nature more this year?), and that we have a wonderful sense of community. When the going got tough this year the tough got going: community volunteers helped the vulnerable, children decorated the fences outside our wonderful care homes, Hadleigh’s Wishing Tree near Beaumont Park and the Covid-snake on the Railway Walk were created and visited by so many people.
The HSA also made a plea for help as the majority of our fundraising events had to be cancelled one by one. We asked…and Hadleigh answered!. So far, we have been overwhelmed by the generosity of:
MBA Flue Services, Bellwood Construction Ltd., Foresters Friendly Society, Hemisphere Freight, HJ Structural Engineers Ltd. and MW Partridges & Co Ltd. We are very grateful to all involved!
Donations for Christmas Hampers
We also asked for donations for our Christmas Hampers, and with fewer people coming in to the school grounds and the added challenge of trying to deal with donations outside the school grounds, we wondered if we would be struggling to fill our hampers this year. We asked and YOU ANSWERED! Thank you so much for your generous donations. We even had
people driving out of their way to drop gifts at our homes as they couldn’t make it in to school. We were also overwhelmed by the generosity of some of our local businesses:
The Marquis, The Ram, Sunny Day Cycleworks, Andrew’s Butchers, Fork Kitchen & Deli, Adnams,
Jimmy’s Farm, Hadleigh Maid, Double Take Hair Salon and QD.
Let’s show our support and shop local where possible!
Hampers
We have twelve beautiful hampers for our winners. Tickets will be on sale until 11th December and the winners will be drawn on 16th December. Our volunteers will deliver hampers in the couple of days before the end of term. Tickets are available via School Gateway. Please show your support. Have you donated the money you would have usually spent on the school discos and the Christmas Present events that we usually run?
Lottery
We have had 2 lucky winners in October and November. Congratulations to Natalie O and Nicki G, our 1st prize winners. We also had two lucky 2nd prize winners.
If you still wish to get involved please email us on hsa@hadcps.uk
Sweet treats sponsored by HSA
Our children have had a lot of changes to deal with this year and it was hardly surprising that their school Christmas is going to be different too. There are to be no Christmas concerts,
no Christmas lunch (as we know it) and no nativities. This year, HCPS had to re- invent their Christmas.
We were asked if we could help make Christmas 2020 a little bit special and of course, we said “Yes”! We have supplied all our children with their sweet treats as part of their Christmas “Grab & Go” lunch this year and we have to say that the children are already excited by these plans!
Class decorations sponsored by HSA
We would normally do a big school display for Christmas but as this is not possible this year, the HSA has purchased the items to decorate the children’s classrooms. This will be shared via a “virtual” school assembly and is already
looking competitive! Our children will be busy building snowmen, icicles, angels, Christmas trees and much more. We hope to be able to share some of the photos with you!
Noticeboard
Our HSA noticeboard is currently a little hidden with the new school procedures for pick up and drop off. While we would not encourage you to linger, please take a glance to familiarise yourselves with its location by the blue gates. Once things get back to normal we will keep you up to date on our news with photos and notices.
Projects for New Year
We will continue to plan “socially distanced” events until the rules change, in order to raise money for our fabulous school. We hope to get back to normal as soon as possible but will not give up in
the meantime! Please keep up with our news by “liking” our Facebook page and following us on Instagram.
Welcome new members
Did you know that everyone who has a child at the school is automatically a member of the HSA? If you would like to become more involved, please get in touch on hsa@hadcps.uk or via social media on Facebook or Instagram.
We would like to introduce our new active members Natalie Harrison and Amber Gray and thank them for their help!
School shop
We still have a good stock of our HCPS sweatshirts and cardigans. As the weather gets colder, if you decide you would like one please email us on hsa@hadcps.uk or message us on social media. It has been very difficult to get hold of more fleeces. We will have some new ones in January.
Apologies for this delay but unfortunately it is out of our control.
HSA Newsletter 1
Introducing your new HSA newsletter
One of our aims in the HSA is to show our supporters just how much they have helped our school and our children through donations of money and time. With this in mind we will be posting regular newsletters to keep you up to date with all our work.
Welcome to our first newsletter! What a time to be trying to raise funds!
We have never really known times like this. Covid-19 has had a huge effect on emotional and physical health as well as many people’s financial situation. With this in mind, the HSA met at the very beginning of term this year, but rather than a long list of events and fundraising ideas the proposal was to suspend our activities until some form of normality returned.
Ever conscious of the increasing needs of our children however, we decided we would reinvent ourselves, become more creative and find new ways to raise money. We have even decided to keep an enormous challenge of maintaining our annual goal of delivering the £6000 the we usually commit to.
Christmas Card Project
Thanks to Tracey, our fabulous Christmas Card Project was our first fundraiser this year. Children spent their time getting creative with paints, colours and glue and produced some wonderful Christmas designs. Thank you to all the adults who placed orders for cards, mugs or wrapping paper! We hope you all love them when they arrive. So far we have raised over £200!
Lottery
Sharon has been busy relaunching the HSA lottery and this year, thanks to everyone out there, we have doubled our members. We wish you all the luck with our monthly extractions!!!
(If you wish to know which numbers you were assigned you can email the HSA on HSA@hadcps.uk. If you paid via Gateway we do not have your contact details.) The first winners have now been notified via the school office!
School shop
We have been looking at new ways to be able to reopen our School Shop. We currently have a good system of parents or carers being able to contact us via social media, an order is then put to one side with the school office and children can bring their money in in a marked envelope. We will continue to do this but will encourage you now to email the HSA at HSA@hadcps.uk. Thank you to all the parents/carers who have supported us so far, we hope you love your items!
We would encourage all parents/carers to register with Mapac (our uniform provider), even if you do not currently want to order any uniform. This will enable you to see any promotions or sales they are offering (and we know there are some coming up!). Visit www.mapac.com , register and search for your school.
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We will be placing a new order shortly so let us know if you are interested in any particular items and we will add them to our list!
Christmas term
We are currently exploring a few ideas for projects for the next half term. Watch this space for announcements!
Calling all businesses!
This year we hope to reach out to some of the local businesses in our community to see if they would like to sponsor a project within our school. We appreciate that not everyone will be in a position to do this as many people have been seriously affected by the closures and by social distancing measures. We are looking for people who feel that their business has not been adversely affected and who would like to show their support withing our community. Projects can be big or small, we can share a project between businesses or you could help us get started by making an initial purchase for us. We are looking at different ways to recognise your company and giving you a shout out to show how you have helped. We would love to hear from anyone who thinks they could help us. We currently have a wish list from our teachers for things that they feel would help our children to “be the best they can be”.
A huge thank you to MBA FLUE SERVICES LTD for our first donation. We very much appreciate your help.
Social media
We are trying to keep you all up to date with our work and our progress through social media. Do you already follow us on Facebook and Instagram? Please look us up and follow us! Ask friends and family to do the same!
Support your HSA
Would you like to support us more and get involved? Send us an email at HSA@hadcps.uk