We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all at The Caste School

We look forward to welcoming all our wonderful pupils back to school on Tuesday 3rd January 2017

Full of Christmas Cheer

We enjoyed our Christmas lunches at both main site and Post-16. We are very thankful to our catering team at main site and for Jan and the pupils for all their hard work at Post-16. The food was glorious. A special thanks to Rob Greenwood, who took the day off from being chef at Mary Hare School to help out.

Christmas Carol Cracker

On Tuesday this week our whole school decamped to the lovely St Mary's Church in Shaw. The church was packed and the service was really wonderful with pupils performing pieces from their Christmas shows and the choir singing a wonderful rendition of Little Drummer Boy. The classes also liked dressing up Jon, James and Atul as the '3 wise men'

 

Singing their hearts out

Our amazing pupils performed brilliantly again at this year's Newbury Carol Concert at St Nicholas' Church. They sung their hearts out to Little Drummer Boy, whilst everyone looked on in awe at what they have achieved. Thanks to all the staff who put in so much effort to make it work and especially to Ali Watkinson for having the belief, vision and passion.

The Wonderful World of Work

One of our Post-16 students has recently completed a successful work placement at West Berkshire Council. Below is an article posted on the West Berkshire website. We are all very proud of Danny and his achievements.

P4PC Conference

On Tuesday we held our second Pupils 4 Positive Change (P4PC) conference to find out what topics and subjects pupils would like to know more about.

The classes discussed it beforehand and came prepared with ideas to share. Classes wanted to learn more about animals, space and the world wars as well as more practical activities such as bike building and Design and Technology. The pupils were keen to have more Art, foreign languages and science experiments.

All of this feedback will be taken back to the teachers for discussion and moving forward.


Thank you to our governors, Georgie and Ali for joining and supporting us.

Forest School Fun

This year we have started a very exciting venture with Growing2gether and The RENEWAL Project in Newbury to run a Forest School for our young primary pupils. Each week pupils from Cardiff and Pembroke Classes walk down to the woodlands in Shaw to experience the different aspects of forest work including bushcraft along with experiencing nature first hand. Our pupils benefit massively from this, not only in terms of increasing their understanding of the natural environment, but also in terms of working together and developing their social skills.

Exciting Winter Growth

It may be winter, but our wonderful class teams have been planting and nurturing their beans over the past few weeks and we have now got the first shoots of growth! There was a competition for a box of chocolates to the first picture of new growth and that went to Donnington Class.

This may not look like much, but this is a result of the care and attention given by the class. This will grow and turn into a wonderful bean plant, as will other classes. The next competition is for the most number of shoots in a bed.

Castle Children in Need Day

The wonderful pupils and staff of The Castle School dressed up in spots and beards of all shapes, sizes and styles on Friday to raise money for Children in Need. Lots of fund was had by all and lots of money raised. We will let you know our total once it has all been counted. IN the meantime, enjoy these pictures form the day:

Frankenstein at Newbury College

Students from both Lancaster, Caernarfon and Stirling have been lucky enough to attend a private performance of the highly acclaimed 'Frankenstein' from the Watermill Theatre.  This was performed at Newbury College and formed the climax of our workshops that have been running for the past 6 weeks.

It was a truly amazing experience for all students who, having acted out their own version of the story last week, were able to see it done by professional actors.

Here are some pictures of our students in their workshops:

The Castle remembers

Pupils at the Castle School today, at 11am, remembered all those who have fallen in all wars. We had a 2 minute silence and heard poems from pupils. Very moving indeed

 

 

Fund Raising Quiz a success!

On Tuesday 8th of November, Lancaster Class held a quiz night to raise money for charity.  In particular they were raising money for Special Needs Children in Ghana, who are shunned by society and not given chances to thrive and be educated.

The students cooked a delicious curry to serve to a packed room of 'quizzers'.  Money was also raised through a raffle and donations for drinks on the night.

In total we raised a profit of £631.00 which the students are all very proud of.

Don't forget on the 8th of December in the afternoon, Caenarfon Class will be holding 'A Christmas Café' with stalls selling gifts.

Pastoral Team Christmas Craft Lunch

The Pastoral Team would like to invite you to a Christmas Craft lunch to be held at:

The Castle School on Wednesday 14^th December 2016

From: 12:30 to 2pm in the Jane Evans Room.

Please come along and create a Christmas decoration – we will provide everything you need together with a light buffet and tea/coffee.

Limited spaces are available so please let us know as soon as possible so we can allocate on a first come first serve basis.

Jackie – 07824 551 857   Pauline - 07824 551880

Or you can call the school office on 01635 42976

We look forward to seeing you.   Jackie and Pauline

Harvest Thanks

As you will be aware, we had our Harvest Festival before half term. Thanks to all our parents, pupils and staff we collected a large amount of food, which we distributed to the West Berkshire Foodbank. Here is the lovely reply to Libby (Windsor Class Teacher) from Sue Stevenson:

Hello Libby,

Please thank everyone for the fantastic amount of Harvest donations and for decorating the boxes so beautifully. The collections weighed 96.3kg which is the equivalent of 87 meals for those in need.

Daphne (who collected) took some photos so I hope to upload those to our website in due course.

Once again, many thanks for your support.

Kind regards

Sue Stevenson

West Berkshire Foodbank

Dressing up for Diwali

On Wednesday afternoon some of the KS2 Classes (Balmoral, Conway, Skipton and Corfe) joined together to celebrate the Hindu Festival of Diwali. We created Diwa lights using salt dough, tea lights and sequins. We tried a delicious vegetable dhal made by Conway class with poppadoms and naan bread. We dressed up and created saris out of patterned fabrics and danced to some bhangra music! A brilliant time was had by all

Jess Beasley