Byfleet Primary Newsletter

• We hope you enjoyed visiting your child's classroom during our Tray Day last week. A big thank you to our FRIENDS PTA for organising a brilliant disco for our children - they had a super time, so did the teachers!

• A big well done to Year 6 for taking part in Bikeability, learning how to safely cycle on our busy roads and they trialled out learning to cycle to their new secondary schools.

• Thank you to the parents who attended Parents' Evening this week, finding out more about your child's progress and sharing their next steps. Miss Vallins' Rainbow class meetings have remained the same time but on Thursday 3rd November.

• Thank you for the Harvest food donations that you've sent in so far - what a wonderfully kind community we are. We can't wait to pass this on to Woking Food Bank.

• The roof works continue to be underway and we are on track to have this work completed by 18th November. We are looking forward to our school finally being water-tight as we go into winter!

• Don't forget it's an INSET day on Monday 31st October - the children return to school on Tuesday 1st November.

• After half term, we will be introducing a new format for weekly homework in KS 2, linked to some of the computer apps we use (Doodle, Reading Plus & Spelling Shed). These will be sent out on in the first week back and also added to Google Classroom.

• A big thank you to the families who donated bean bags and cushions for our ELSA support room! Senora Wyatt is very grateful and the ELSA room is looking awesome as a result!

• You may recall on Thursday 6th October Chartwell's supported us in running an American themed lunch for the government’s termly education Census day. Many of you may not realise that the funding we receive from the Government towards our UFSM (Universal Free School Meals) is based on the uptake numbers reported in the October and January Census. This themed day was a huge success! Our meal uptake increased by 17% securing us an additional £6,868.50 in funding! Thank you and we look forward to another fund-filled lunch in January.

• We have several old laptops going spare in the office - if you need a device for your child's Doodle, Spelling Shed or Reading Plus, please liaise with the office and we'll hand one over to you. They are very old but we're sure you will still be able to use them!

• Attendance is everybody's business and we are working hard to make sure that all staff are helping us ensure our children are in school as much as possible.

• Our class with the highest attendance each month gets to sit on the benches in assembly. Well done to Year 3 Yellow Class for being October winners!

Our Attendance Winners:

September: Year 5 (97.4%) October: Year 3 (96.81%)

Our whole school target is 96%. Please help us by ensuring your child comes to school everyday unless they are unwell!

Persistent Absence

Any attendance below 90% is classified as 'persistent absence'.

At the end of Summer 2 2022, there were 45 children on persistent absence watch.

At the end of Autumn 1 2022, there are 30 children on persistent absence watch.

We have communicated with these 30 families to see how we can further help and support them to ensure all children's attendance reaches our 96% target.

Following on from our communication sent on 6th September please be reminded that the annual flu vaccinations are due to be carried out in school on Thursday 3^rd November 2022 for any pupil from Reception to Year 6. If you haven’t already done so, Please complete the e-consent form by 4pm on Friday 28^th October 2022 by visiting:

· www.surreyimmunisations.co.uk and entering your school’s unique code SR124999

· If you do not want your child to receive a vaccine then please fill in the ‘No’ box.

If you have previously consented and wish to withdraw consent, could you please email csh.sur-schoolimmswest@nhs.net to advise.

Well done to the following children for being recognised for doing something brilliant this fortnight......

We've seen an increase in our Year 3 - 6 pupils accessing Reading Plus at home this week, since adding this to our last news letter! This is great news!

Log on details can be found inside your child's reading diary.

There is also a Writing section available to help develop your child's writing based on what they have read. Look out for this at the top right of their screen.

From Autumn 2, we have incorporated Reading Plus as part of Year 3 - 6s weekly homework.

We have been working hard throughout the start of the autumn term to develop bespoke curriculum for our children. We have used Staff Development Meetings to consider the key drivers of intent for the designing and shaping of our new curriculum. Locality, challenge and engagement were some key components for shaping our curriculum content along with ensuring the National Curriculum is being taught effectively. To allow the curriculum to provide depth and breadth of knowledge alongside confidence in skill acquisition and application we will be using an approach called The 3Ps. Each topic the children learn will have an important Person, Place and Point attached to it. These are The 3Ps and will be used to provide a memorable hook for the children, and ensure their learning is bespoke for them. Their challenge is for the children to learn The 3Ps for their topic each half term, and then continue to learn them as they move through the school, therefore building on their general knowledge from one half term to the next.

For more information on the construction, design and intent behind the curriculum development we will be running a Curriculum Workshop for parents on Friday 18th November at 9:00am.

In reception we have began our practice reading sessions! We have been busy learning all our new phonemes and graphemes to help us read, blend, and segment words, and now we can put our learning to the test in our exciting reading sessions.

The children have been loving their groups (named after book characters) and our self-choosing book corner in our class. Our love of reading in Rainbows is superb. We are all so proud of the children for being so enthusiastic and excited about phonics and reading... what a brilliant start to the year!

In year 1 we have been planning our stories based on "On The Way Home" by Jill Murphy. The class have been enthusiastically creating their own characters and reasons they ended up with a hurt knee. We have been focusing on using some great adjectives to describe our characters. There have been some particularly inventive ones involving spiders' webs, robots and tomatoes.

In Maths we have been learning about addition, subtraction and forming number fact families.

The class has been having fun in art making a variety of self portraits. They have been making and painting their own papier-mache heads.

We have exciting news to share with our Reception and Y1 parents! We have subscribed to the Collins ebook library which will allow you to access your child's reading book online. All login details and information about this great website will be given to you after half term.