Byfleet Primary Newsletter

• Spring has finally sprung! With the spring term now done and dusted, there's lots to celebrate..... We've had record attendance (the highest since 2018!), Year 1 and 2 exciting WOW enrichment days, Spelling Bee Competition finals, Reception's ducklings hatching, World Book Day, trips to the theatre, Voice in a Million choir singing at Wembley, visits to our local Kings Lodge Nursing home to sing to the elderly, athletics and our Year 6 residential to Suffolk arrangements are underway!

• Thank you to the Year 1 parents for donating cakes for the Year 1 cake sale!

• Our annual Spelling Bee Competition final took place last week. We are hugely impressed overall with how well many of the children did in learning so many tricky spellings. Well done to our finalists who not only showed excellent spelling recall, but demonstrated excellent bravery competing against each other in the live finals in front of parents and the whole school. Thanks to Miss Partridge for organising this. 

• New road safety lines have been installed by Surrey County County outside our school gates. We urge parents to please consider how they abide by our road safety expectations: please DO NOT stop your vehicle and drop off your child(ren) near the gate. Thanks for helping us keep our roads safer for our children. 

• Year 4 hosted their assembly last week - see information below. 

• Year 1 and 3 enjoyed singing to our elderly neighbours at Kings Lodge and Reception had a dentist visit, to discuss the importance of oral hygiene and a healthy diet - see information below. 

• Over the Easter holiday, Year R Rainbow class will be having a new aluminium canopy installed - photos to follow.

• Well done to our Red Nose Day hamper winners. We raised a total of £315 for Children in Need Charity.

• Thank you to the parents who attended their child's parents' evening last week. We know you are as proud as we are of their hard work and the feedback teachers provided will help you work with your child to address any development areas. 

• Thank you for your feedback regarding end of year school reports and looking at ways to reduce our staff workload. 59.6% voted in favour of keeping end of year reports and we are pleased with the array of constructive suggestions on how to improve this provision which will help save time and money. We had 52 responses. Your feedback is always valued and informs how we are able to make BPS even better!

• We are looking for temporary reading helpers to read 1-1 with Year 1 children in the summer term. If you have a spare 30 minutes or more each week, please let the admin team know. We are working hard behind the scenes to prepare our children for their Year 1 phonics screening check in June, so any help is welcome!

• Swimming lessons will commence in Summer 2 and details will be sent out after Easter. 

• Well done to Eagles House for being our Spring term HOUSE POINT overall winners with 1353 house points. We hope you enjoyed your MUFTI day today! 

• We hope you've spotted our beautiful new BPS banner on our fence. A big thank you to Mrs Patel (Hari in Year 4's mum) for being the creative designer! We're sure everyone can now recognise our values of being Ready, Respectful and Safe at BPS!

• Year 6 parents - just a reminder to attend the SATs Parent Information session at 5:00pm on Monday 15th April with Miss Partridge.

• If you are interested in hiring our school hall, a classroom, our outdoor hive or swimming pool for an event you may have in mind, don't hesitate to speak to Mrs Scott in the office who will be able to share our pricing details. 

• Have a wonderful Easter break and we look forward to the summer term starting on Monday 15th April.

To promote individual motivation and to reward personal effort, we award house points to our children.

We also use our house point system to encourage our children to work well as a team, where collective effort is also rewarded with house points. 

Each week , our House Captains visit each class to count up the house points earned, which is then celebrated in our Friday Celebration Assembly.  We reward our overall winner with a mufti day on the last day of each term.

Reception Class have had some very special visitors in their classroom this term. On Monday 18th March, Farmer Allen delivered some exciting items into the Rainbows class including 5 duck eggs, an incubator, a special cage/straw, feeding trough, duckling pellets, a water dispenser and a special heat plate. After the eggs spent a few days in the incubator we began to see cracks in some of the eggs, which finally lead to 4 of the ducklings hatching. We were very excited to have our 4 arrivals which we could look after and watch grow throughout the week. Once the ducklings got a bit stronger, we were able to hold them and even teach them to swim! We couldn't believe how speedy some of them were. They are being collected on our INSET day and returning to the incredible eggs farm in Canterbury. What amazing behaviour Reception had when looking after our ducklings, we really did love having our ducklings in our class and hope they enjoy their new home.

Well done to Year 4 for their fantastic class assembly.  As well as sharing their knowledge of this term's topic 'Beneath the Surface' they also demonstrated their Spanish learning, with various songs and phrases being shared.  Well done to the children who shared their fantastic writing.  Everyone enjoyed their poetry recital and retrieval of last years 'oceans song' that has helped with this terms learning.  Finally, we saw an array of sea creatures drawn by the children.

Year 1 and Year 3 had a special visit to Kings Lodge Care Centre to celebrate Easter and spring finally starting!

They sang the songs 'Tiny little seed', 'Spring chicken' and 'It's a happy day' along with performing their class poems to the residents. We really hope they loved our singing celebration.
Well done Year 1 and Year 3. What a special show you put on for our lovely neighbouring residents. 

A massive well done to every single child in Year 1 - 6 who have taken part in the Spelling Bee: it began at the beginning of Spring with all children learning their spellings before going to a 'Spellathon' for the spellers with the highest scores and eventually the top two spellers were our Spelling Bee Finalists.  

All our finalists demonstrated resilience and compassion, along with focus and hard work, the whole way through the Spelling Bee Final and we are so proud of them. 

A massive well done to our Spelling Bee Champions 2024:

Year 1: Emily 

Year 2: Eva

Year 3: Ezra

Year 4: Dominik 

Year 5: Kurt

Year 6: Olivia

We also would like to thank all parents/carers for their support at home. 

Last week, some of our year 3, 5 & 6 children went to Wembley Arena to join nearly 6,000 others and perform a set list of songs as part of the VIAM Choir. This gives an opportunity for school children from all backgrounds, throughout the UK to come together and perform in front of their own family and friends in a spectacular multi-school concert in a famous venue. VIAM aims to raise awareness of the struggles of children in care and the importance of adoption and fostering. 

Everyone involved had an amazing time - they sang and danced the night away to songs such as: On Top Of The World, Chosen Families, Simply The Best and many more.  It is safe to say that all the grown ups in the audience looked like they were enjoying themselves too.  Well done to all the children that attended after months of rehearsals. 

As part of Red Nose Day, each class put together some wonderful red hampers.  Thank you to for all the class donations.  These were raffled off today, which raised £ 315 Red Nose Day 2024.  The lucky winners of the class hampers are:

Reception - Clara Barros Quelhas 

Year 1 - Louis Thomas

Year 2 - Zach Stephens-Saunders 

Year 3 - Aston Patey 

Year 4 - Isabelle Sorrell

Year 5 - Luke Chinery 

Year 6 - Matthew McCormick

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

• Well done Year 4 for having the highest attendance in March. Enjoy sitting on the benches during assembly time!

• A huge well done to Reception and Year 1 who we have targeted to improve their overall attendance. It's great to see both classes at 97%!

There are 11 children whose attendance is below 90%:

Reception: 6 children                         Year 1: 2 children                          Year 5: 3 children

We will continue to work with families where attendance falls into the persistent absent (below 90%) category prior to referring to the Surrey Inclusion team for additional support.

Surrey County Council’s Safer Travel Team (SCCSTT) are undertaking research with

parents on pupils' modes of travel to and from school. 

The objective of the research is to assist them as they continue to develop a better understanding of the different types of travel used to and from school, and to ascertain if this is changing over time.  The Safer Travel Team’s goal is to assist schools to continue to encourage safer and more active ways of travelling to school.

This year they are offering a charity incentive for participation – SCCSTT will donate £25 for every 100 surveys completed to a charity that the parent will choose from either

Shooting Star children’s hospices or Change of Scene in Farnham. 

If you would like to participate in this survey, please click on the following link:

https://www.surreysays.co.uk/safer-travel/primary-school-travel-2024/

Surrey County Counicl are looking to recruit for more Feet First Walking Instructors.  For further details please click on the following link : https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/jobs/search/details?id=563