Monday 1st February 2021.

Welcome to a new month and a very busy week ahead with an important focus for everyone whether you are at home or in school. This week is Children’s Mental Health Week 2021 with the focus being ‘expressing yourself to stay healthy.’ Our daily worship times will look at the ways we can stay mentally healthy and look after the wellbeing of ourselves and those around us. We will be promoting the five ways to wellbeing that are key to everyone and we hope that you will find them useful.

It is also National Storytelling Week. We will be marking this by sharing ideas and suggestions for everyone to support a love of reading and stories at home. We have also been working with the Harrogate Housing Association to share stories with elderly residents who are feeling the negative effects of the current lockdown. We hope that our shared stories can bring them a bit of sunshine as we enter February.

We will be continuing to connect with our children via live teams meetings and we hope that the children in key stage one will be able to join their class at meetings towards the end of the week.

The 8^th of March has been announced as the date targeted for schools to re-open to the children currently accessing remote learning. We will share further information with all of our families when the guidance for re-opening is published. Until then we will continue to do everything that we can to support everyone both at home or in school.

If you have not joined in with our ‘Road to Tokyo’ Challenge the start of a new month is the perfect time to get started. We are trying to be the first school in Harrogate to complete the journey to Tokyo by logging the miles covered on foot or by bike by the children and staff at RTS. We were in second place by the end of last week so with everyone’s help we can still get to Tokyo first.

Look out for more information on the school’s seesaw page.

I will leave you with the words of St Francis of Assisi at the start of a week of focus on Mental Health it is a very good place to start.

Andrew Symonds