Early Years wrapped up warm today and took advantage of the snow and had a fantastic time working together building an amazing snowman !

As a school we like to celebrate the successes of our pupils and one of these celebrations is when they show great friendship to those around them.

This term Jack W has been awarded the Friendship Award. His nomination letter paints a great picture of his achievement, it says “The adults in his class would like to say thank you and well done for considering others and putting their need above yours. Jack, what a wonderful example of a good friend you are. You should feel very proud of yourself and we are proud to have you in our school.”

What a fantastic award Jack – well done !

After the results of the rufferendum and weeks of waiting Molly has finally arrived at Mandeville.  Molly will be specially trained to work with children and is making her new home in Mrs Williams and Mrs Longhursts offices while she adjusts to life in school.

Molly is a Cockerpoo which is a breed that is known for being affectionate, easy to train, intelligent and enjoys spending time in the company of children.  As a breed they shed very little hair and are hypoallergenic.

In time Molly will be available to work with children to calm and  motivate them, encourage their participation and improve their behaviour and self esteem.

Molly will however always be supervised when working with children and only work with those children who have consent to do so.

We hope you all join with us in welcoming Molly to Mandeville.

At Mandeville we take pride in having a litter free, clean and safe environment for everyone to enjoy learning and developing in. Although we always try to keep the school grounds free from rubbish, some areas just outside of the school still has lots of litter and mess being dropped and not picked up by anyone in particular. This not only makes the school look bad but also the community and environment that most of you live in and around look untidy and just not very nice.

Over the past term we asked for volunteers from KS2 to go outside the school once  a fortnight during their break time to pick up litter. There was an overwhelming 111 volunteers willing to give up their break to be part of this project and make a difference in the community.

We will start the project again next term with the current year 5 volunteers but for now a massive thank you to all the year 6 pupils that were able to help this term.

Thank you to Maisha, Liam, Johanna, Alice, Natasha,  Jorja, Keira, Dina, Hamin, Ethan, Luke, Botond, Yamin, Jamil, DAna, Imad, Charlie, Alla, Megan, Salma, Ellie, masha, Kyron, Mohammed, Martha, Liam and Vlad.

See photos of our team litter picking here.

We celebrated some fantastic acheivements over the last term and the last year at our end of term assembly. Congratulations to all of the proud recipients of awards, certificates and celebrated acheivements.

Well done to all the winners below and especialy Seven who has acheived 100% attendance for four years!!!

100% attendance for four years - Seven

100% attendance for three years - Amber, Rosalie and Johanna

100% attendance for two years - Liam, Calvin and Ashley

Mandevilles Got Talent 1st place - Jheel & Torin, Roarke and Kellen

Mandevilles Got Talent 2nd place - Mansi & Elijah

Mandevilles Got Talent 3rd place - Atharva

Star receptionists - Chrissy, Alice, Tamina, Akosua, Emily, Faizah, Rahima and Aiysha

Star Football players - Keira, Fabian and Mr Tillsley

Huge congratulations to the 20 children who acheived 100% attendance for 2015/16. 

The whole school went 'wheely crazy' on the last day of the spring term when everyone joined together to raise funds for the British Heart Foundation by bringing in their wheels from home.  Whether you were on your bike, scooter, skateboard or on you brought in your favourite toy car everyone joined in.  Accessorizing with red in support of the BHF and donating £1 to join in, all classes were given time on the playground to have fun with their friends. We are so proud of they way in which wheels were shared so everyone could have the most amount of fun.

Miss Ellingham and Mr Tillsley showed their suport by joining in too.  See photos of Mr Tillsley on his in-line blades in the gallery below!!

Well done to Miss Ellingham for organising such a fun fundraising event which everyone enjoyed and with hardly any bumps and scrapes!! 

All our children came to school on Friday 11th March dressed as their favourite book characters to celebrate World Book Day 2016.  Some of the books chosen to dress as a character from included Wheres Wally, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, George's Marvellous Medicine, Percy Jackson and Wolf Wilder.   Harry Potter, Willy Wonka, Gangsta Granny, Cat in the Hat, Fedora Petrovna and even Medusa could all be seen around the school.

Whilst the children dressed as characters from an enormous range of books all of our teachers dressed as crayons from  "The day the crayons came home" by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers. Our World Book Day assembly was a huge success with Mrs Longhurst and her team of teaching staff acting out the book itself to great excitment from the children.

A huge thank you to all the children and parents for creating such fantastic costumes. 

Wow!! Children from years 5 & 6 experienced the night of their life when they joined the Voice In a Million massed choir at Wembley Arena on March 3rd. After spending the afternoon rehearsing, the performance itself was a high energy evening of fantastic singing and dancing.  VIAM (Voice in a Million) use their events to promote Adoption and Fostering and raise money by way of their t-shirt sales.

Guest artists on the night included the X factor’s Charli Beard, from BGT Calum Scott and all the way from Uganda the Destiny Africa Children’s Choir. Songs ranged from '500 miles' to more recent songs such as 'Hold back the river'.  Eventually the children arrived back at Mandeville exhausted and tired but very excited at 11.15pm.

Well done to all the children who took part rehearsing for the past few weeks in their lunch hour and embracing the energy and atmosphere of the show!! 

Congratulations to the 32 children from years 5 & 6 who completed the Bikeability course over the last week.

They successfully negotiated roads around Mandeville concentrating on making left and right turns correctly, making a stopping U turn and learning the relevant parts of the Highway code. Aflter learning how to maintain and look after your bike and demonstrating their ability to competantly ride their bike they were let out onto the roads - supervised of course!!

This week members of Year 5 and 6 have been learning to ride their bikes on roads safely in Bikeability. We have learnt right turns, signalling and lots of other things. It was very challenging as we were riding on the road with lots of traffic. After this amazing experience we now know a lot more about road safety and the Highway Code. We all would like to say a huge ‘THANK YOU’ to the wonderful instructors for helping us be confident about this complex subject’. ~ by Olivia

Mandeville Primary school was delighted to welcome the Mayor of St Albans, Councillor Salih Gaygusuz, to formally open the school’s new outdoor reading house.

The £18,000 bespoke reading house was commissioned by the school as a result of an idea suggested to Mrs Cathy Longhurst, the Head Teacher, by the School Council. Year 4 representative, Olivia Harding said, “In September last year, we had a reading tent set up on the playing field as part of our reading festival. We loved being able to take our books into the tent at playtime to read and at the end of the week we asked the teachers if it could stay. Unfortunately, the big tent had to be returned so many of us started talking about how cool it would be if we had somewhere permanent to read every playtime. We asked Mrs Longhurst to look for a shed or something for us.”

Thanks to very generous donations made by Mandeville’s PTA and the “MandAid” charity, the school was able to commission a structure which was so much more exciting than a shed. The reading house is constructed on stilts over a mound of earth with steps leading up to a platform big enough to take a class of children at a time.

Councillor Gaygusuz thoroughly enjoyed his first visit to the school; speaking to the whole school he said, “I am delighted to be here today for the official opening of the reading house. This will provide you all with a lovely outside environment to enjoy your books and I hope you will all read much more because of it!”

The Mayor completed his visit with a tour of the school, going into each class to meet the children and encourage them with their learning. Cathy Longhurst, the Head Teacher said, “The Mayor’s visit to us today made the opening of our reading house a very special and exciting occasion. He spoke to the children about his experience of arriving in this country from Turkey when he was only 16 and there has been lots of discussion about his achievements in St Albans which have brought both aspiration and inspiration to our culturally diverse community.

“Our stunning new reading house will encourage children to take their love of reading outside as well and the children feel such a sense of accomplishment as they lobbied me hard to persuade me to spend our money on it! Our thanks go to all parents and friends of the school who have raised money through fairs, discos, camp nights and other means, and in particularly to the dedicated parents and teachers who organise such fundraising events so well.”