This year's Big Pedal, the UK's largest inter-school Cycling, walking, wheeling and scooting challenge, will be taking place between 19th to 30th April and we are all invited to take part!
This year, the challenge is fronted by Dame Sarah Storey, British Paralympian and 38-time world champion in cycling and swimming.
The Big Pedal will see young people across the UK compete with one another to make the most journeys by cycling, walking, scooting or using a wheelchair. Let's get healthy and help reduce pollution with less car journeys!

To find out more, head to the Sustrans Big Pedal website: 
www.sustrans.org.uk/our-blog/projects/uk-wide/schools/sustrans-big-pedal/

Congratulations to the Eco Council and everyone at IVJS for achieving Green Flag status again!  IVJS has now been a Green Flag Eco School since 2014: successfully renewing their application three times! 
 
This magnificent achievement has been down to the commitment of everyone at IVJS to make our school a cleaner, greener environment.  Thank you to the teachers for including environmental issues in the curriculum; every pupil who has volunteered to become a classroom monitor, recycled responsibly, picked up litter, switched off a tap or light, and our special thanks to the Eco Council for their determination to promote eco initiatives such as Switch Off Fortnight, Waste Week, Recycle Month, Walk to School Week, Clean Air Day and Road Safety at every opportunity!  We are immensely proud of everyone who has helped our school to look after our environment and our planet.  Keep up the good work and we will make a difference!

​Huge thank you to the wonderful Mrs Orr for her dedication to the cause every year!

Another busy day and a very happy Friday! We started the day out in the sunshine watering the plants we planted earlier in the week! Then we made dream catchers to hang in our windows with ‘Stay safe stay home’ messages inside. We also made cornflake cakes to take home and share (yum yum). We’ve also ‘styled our scooters’ we think they look pretty cool! Why not try to style your scooter at home? Finally we made our very own fork friends inspired by ‘forkie’ from toy story 4! Miss Couves, Mrs Orr and Mr Openshaw would like to say a big thank you to all the children in this week for helping us to have such a great time! We look forward to seeing everyone soon!
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Congratulations to our Junior Road Safety Officers who collected two awards this month!
Our school was invited to the Buckinghamshire County Council (BCC) Offices in Aylesbury to collect the Modeshift Stars Gold Award.  This is a national School Travel Award, supported by the Department of Transport.  Our school has been working towards moving up from Bronze to Silver however, due to all our amazing initiatives including: using Travel Tracker daily, our Walk to School fun day and Clean Air Activities, our school was awarded Gold Level!
While the JRSO’s were at the County Offices, they gave a presentation to BCC Officials and other schools to encourage them and pass on ideas as to how to complete their journey to Modeshift Stars Gold Level.
Buckinghamshire County Council were so impressed with our Gold submission that they entered our school into the Buckinghamshire Star Awards and IVJS won Primary School of the Year!

​On Thursday this week, IVJS celebrated the third national Clean Air Day!
Our wonderful Eco Council presented an assembly to educate and inform us all of the importance of having clean air to breath and how we can all help by walking/cycling/scooting to school or even just by switching off our engines on the school drop off and pick up.
Later that day, 22 eco-friendly pupils took part in a project organised by our friends at Heathrow to create a dramatic and thought provoking artwork of a pair of lungs to make sure we always keep in mind why we are working so hard to clean up our atmosphere.
As part of their Science topic, Year 6 have been recording their lung capacity for a scientific investigation into the possible correlation between height and lung capacity. They also wrote pledges as to how they could play their part!

On Wednesday all children took part in the Interhouse Mile! This was a sponsored event in which pupils had to complete a mile whether that was walking , jogging or running. The whole day was a hugely successful event and one that both the children and adults enjoyed!
The fact it was an Interhouse event meant that children competed in their houses.
By the end of the day all houses were within four points of each other with Ealing winning the event on a last minute run off after being tied with Shepperton at the end!
Well done Ealing and thank you all for your generous donations.

​This week, as part of Switch Off Month, the Eco-Council presented an assembly to encourage us to save energy and money!
Apart from reminding us to save energy by switching off lights, the focus was on Goodbye Standby, making sure we all remember that leaving TVs and games consoles on standby uses energy and is a waste of money, it all adds up!
Join us, save, switch off and say goodbye to standby!

What a success! Wednesday held our first Big Soup Share night and even we were surprised by just how eager you all were to try all the varieties of soup the different year groups made. With a choice of Leek and Potato, Chicken or Vegetable Noodle and Tomato Soup, all mopped up with freshly made crusty bread, hand made by our year 6s, our school hall was packed with families, excited to try the incredible smelling soups!
The children did fantastically well, not only learning about food, where it comes from and how to eat healthy, but also making a real effort to try foods they normally wouldn’t eat! That sounds like success to me!
Thank you to everyone who came along and supported our school and the children including all the staff and a load of the mums of the members of staff who came in to help!