What a lovely weekend we had at Cropthorne School during Walkabout. Amazing how the sun shone and how nice to see so many smiling faces. I just want to say thank you to so many parents and friends for supporting our PTA and helping to raise much needed funds for the school. I don’t know the final amount yet but it is a lot! In addition it was great to hear outsiders wondering around and commenting on our “beautiful school!”

Talking about the PTA…Naomi Standing, Leanne Seal and Sara Agg have worked tirelessly for the past three years co-ordinating some excellent fund raising events allowing us to purchase our pirate ship and Chimps play area and equip our new Nurture Room. All three of them are now standing down but I am delighted to say we have already found volunteers keen to take over. We are a very lucky school!
Meanwhile, it’s business as usual in the classrooms. Children in years 4 & 5 got particularly excited during election week when they visited the local polling station to observe democracy in action. As the children explain:

“We started the day by looking at Parliament and the role of M.Ps. We walked to Cropthorne village hall which was being used as a Polling Station. We were allowed in to meet the “Presiding Officer” who explained the voting process to us.
We returned to school and created our own Polling Station and made our own polling cards. Mrs Brown, our Presiding Officer, checked the ballot papers against our register (Electoral Roll), especially to see if everyone could write their own addresses correctly!
Mrs Hunt read through the brochures for all of the political parties, giving equal time to each party, whilst some of the children acted as roving reporters and film crew.
The children cast their votes in our Ballot Box and we added up all of the votes to see which party had ‘won’ our election…”