On Tuesday 27th April Year 1 enjoyed World Book Day Part 2! The children in Year 1 enjoyed dressing up as their favourite book character, making book marks, reading stories and learning all about Quentin Blake. Please see the website “Gallery” for more photographs.
Firstly, we’d like to thank all parents for their generosity and support over the past 6 months. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve raised around £17,300 since September 2021, which we think is a record breaking amount! The Christmas class fundraiser alone raised £11,884. We also had some incredible ‘ad-hoc’ donations totalling £4,235.
As always, the purpose of the PTA is to provide extra experiences or equipment to enhance the learning environment for all of our children. So far this year we have spent a total of £7,389. Money has been spent on:
• school online subscriptions, such as reading eggs, for every child
• a Christmas video production for each year group, ensuring no one missed their child’s performance.
• spending on an initiative to upgrade the school’s book provision and to support the promotion of reading, such as outdoor reading circle toad stools
• indoor play materials for children to use during staggered lunches or when its ‘wet play’
School is in the process of purchasing updated playground furniture and the school is also ordering more items too.
In terms of future spending, Miss Morris would like to replace the sheds at the back of the ball court with something more aesthetically pleasing, and fit for purpose (the current sheds are falling apart). Part of that plan is to hopefully create a second hand uniform shed / store which would operate as ‘shop’, making it far easier for parents to access second uniform throughout the year.
Lastly, the school is making a bid for ‘community infrastructure funding’ to finish updating the perimeter fencing, and to install an electric gate to the school car park. The PTA would contribute £1,000 to the whole project, which aims to further improve security and safety. The total project comes to closer to £32,000 and we hope that we’ll be successful in the bid. Due to Coronavirus we had to postpone the bid from February 2020. Ultimately we want to renovate Garage so that we can have an additional Learning Space (next to our forest School Area) / Meeting Room. Ideally it would be something that we could let out – for the community, or for extra After School Clubs. The Garage would be within the updated perimeter fencing, which of course would make it a secure. We hope that by sharing this parents will have a good understanding about our aims for the future and to know who we plan to spend the money that you raise.
A week of lots of fun learning in Reception: The children have had lots of fun exploring and playing this week, some of the highlights were: building 3D towers, making a loose parts rainbow, playing team games and going on a story trail for ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’! Please see the website “Gallery” for more pictures.
We have been having lots of Christmas fun in Reception this week! Each class enjoyed decorating their own Christmas tree and making snowflakes. Outside we created a grotto and the children have been posting letters to Father Christmas.
Fundraising Update
Wow! What an amazing first week of fundraising we’ve had. A huge thank you for all the effort and enthusiasm, it’s already led to over £2200 being raised for our wonderful school which is just incredible.
So at the end of week one, the top three classes are… 
– Duckling class with a whopping £765
– Hedgehog class with an amazing £572
– Gosling class with a brilliant £302
Just under three weeks to go, and everything still to play for! We can’t thank you all enough for getting involved, FoML
Gosling class have kicked off with a ‘guess the number of chocolates in a jar’ event and will be launching a second event on Friday.
Leopard Class are having a virtual pizza party, and are also running a sponsored kindness challenge.
Squirrel Class are seeing how far they can cycle / scoot / walk as a class… they’re aiming for the North Pole!
Fox Class have a guess the name of the fox competition
(to win a cute jelly cat fox), a guess the number of pom poms
competition and a Christmas drawing competition to win
a personalised book.
Hedgehog class have also been scooting, cycling and walking to raise money. They will also be launching a ‘guess the number of hedgehogs in the jar’ competition this week.
Duckling class are getting ready for their ‘big waddle’ event this weekend. Each child will be scooting / cycling or running part of a circuit around Weybridge / Hersham / Byfleet, while carrying their giant Duckling!
Our first ever curry club was well received. We are hoping to do another one if you would like? The charity earned £70 commission from your orders so thank you very much for all who took part. Ruth from Cook Curry Surrey really enjoyed cooking for you all. She has always been a big supporter of our school – Thank you Ruth!
• In the absence of a Christmas Fair, we are looking into other fun activities for our children to take part in. We are looking at launching sponsored class events or challenges that the children can take part in safely within their bubbles. More information to follow…
• 2nd hand uniform – we have so much uniform that we need to make available to you all. We are looking into ideas of how we can make this readily available to you. We have discussed buying a uniform shed with neat plastic drawers that people can access easily. If anyone has the time to run with this, or has any ideas to how we can make this more manageable, especially during these times, we’d be hugely grateful.
• With online sales shopping being so high, please ensure that you select Friends of Manby Lodge as your chosen charity when buying from Amazon Smile and always use Easy Fundraising before selecting your chosen online retailer to ensure the Friends of Manby Lodge receive the commission.
We held an impromptu tuck shop in the playground on the last day of term where we told drink with a snack packs and craft kits. This generated profit of £218 which is brilliant. Thank you for your support and we hope you and your little ones had a lovely half term break!
A local company, Made by Milly has always supported our school, so it seems right that we support her in return during these strange times. She gave use a taste of her wares by making masks, head bands and hair scrunchies for us to sell and they all sold out straight away! She is now working hard making more for us so watch this space!
We had an overwhelming display of pumpkins on Thursday 22nd October for our annual pumpkin display. Amazingly this generated profit of £333 which is twice as much as another other year usually raises. Thank you for your overwhelming generosity!
