Handle With Care
If your family is experiencing difficulty at home, we would like to provide additional support at school.
We understand that details are not always to be shared and that’s OK. If your child is coming to school after a difficult night, morning or weekend please message the class teacher on Dojo saying ‘Handle with Care’. Nothing else will be said or asked, but we will know that your child may need extra time, patience, help and a lot of love during the day.
As always we are a TEAM and we want to help your children thrive in school!
Well-Being Wednesday
Well-being Wednesday is an initiative used here at St Joseph’s to support our children’s well-being and mental health, during what has been a particularly difficult year.
We fully understand the impact that COVID-19 has had on everyone and we want to do our bit to further support our children. The activities are planned and tailored towards encouraging our children to look after themselves, keeping their body and minds healthy. Well-being Wednesday’s allow the children to relax, learn new thing, feel safe and have fun with their friends, something that they have really been missing.
What is a nurture group?
In December 2019, we achieved the National Nurture Award. A very robust process that celebrates and acknowledges the nurturing, welcoming and inclusivity of our school.
Nurture groups are founded on evidence-based practices and offer a short-term, inclusive, focused intervention that works in the long term. Nurture groups are classes of between six and 12 children or young people in early years, primary or secondary settings supported by the whole staff group and parents. Each group is run by two members of staff. Children attend nurture groups but remain an active part of their main class group, spend appropriate times within the nurture group according to their need and typically return full time to their own class within two to four terms.
Nurture groups assess learning and social and emotional needs and give the necessary help to remove the barriers to learning. There is great emphasis on language development and communication. Nothing is taken for granted and everything is explained, supported by role modelling, demonstration and the use of gesture as appropriate. The relationship between the two staff, always nurturing and supportive, provides a role model that children observe and begin to copy. Food is shared at ‘breakfast’ or ‘snack time’ with many opportunities for social learning, helping children to attend to the needs of others, with time to listen and be listened to.
As the children learn academically and socially they develop confidence, become responsive to others, learn self-respect and take pride in behaving well and in achieving. Nurture groups have been working successfully for more than 40 years in the UK and now in other countries including Canada, New Zealand and Romania, and have been praised, supported and recommended by organisations such as Ofsted, Estyn and HMIE.
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