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!