The Bonneville Buzz
September 2023
Happy New Year!
Welcome back to the start of the Spring Term in 2024. Whilst the mornings are still dark, and there is still a chill in the air, we can start to look forward to days were the sun is shining. That gloves, scalf and sun glasses type of weather.
This is a short 5 week term, so please remember to check the schools website to ensure you have all the key dates in your diary!
On my learning walk this morning, I was incredibly impressed by our children's resilience in maths lessons. In all classes, children were focussed and trying their best. Every classroom exuded the development of confidence in grappling with learning a written method, appropriate for their stage of learning. A big well done to Ms Napiers year 6 maths group for nailing algebra, an area of maths they once were nervous to attempt.
Our value this month is 'commitment' and being 'commited', at a time of year when it is commonplace to make personal promises for self improvement and happiness. Whether that is a particular fitness goal or a habit change. During assembly we will think about different ways we show commitment and can be comitted, the different types of behaviour for commitment to take place, relating this to achieving our goals.
With this in mind, I would like to take the time to give three key reminders relating to uniform, punctuality and voluntaring.
Please ensure your child/ren come to school in the correct school uniform. This should be a Bonneville blue or white T-shirt, sweat shirt or fleece. Children are permitted to wear blue, grey or black skirt, trousers or leggins. Dark coloured shoes or trainers only. Children should not be wearing football boots to school. I am also seeing lots of unecessary accessories. All neck scaves must only be warn for outdoor purposes, and headresses for religious reasons only.
The school gates open at 8:45am for a 9:00am start. Arrival anytime after 9:00am means your child/ren are missing out, as the daily timetable of education begins promptly at 9:00am. It takes the children approximately 5 minutes to settle into their seat with the resources they need. A child who is 5 minutes late everyday, loses 25 minute of learning, in the same subject every week!
Please remember our community commitment to ensuring no child leaves Bonneville unable to read. We need your help to maximise reading opportunities for our children. If you have a spare hour, please volunteer your time hearing children read at our school. Anytime, is valuable time!
Every month I will invite a subject leader editorial on one of our curriculum areas. Last month Ms Neate, our English Subject Leader, shared how reading is taught in our school. This month, we will hear from Ms Neate again telling us all about writing. Keep an eye out for the article further down.
Our annual Parent Survey was released on Monday 15th January, please do not forget to share your views.
The Lambeth Football League starts this week. We wish our team well in their first two games at the Ferndale Community Sports Centre. The first game is against Walnut Tree Walk Primary School, and the second versus Allen Edwards Primary School.
Finaly, congratulations to Ms Wilden who gave birth to a baby boy Oliver. We can't wait to meet him!
Bonneville Primary School has had the pleasure this term of ‘Eating the Rainbow’.
Eat The Rainbow is a new programme that has been created exclusively for Lambeth. The council has supplied funds for 10 schools and have asked to focus on schools in the Brixton Hill area-, which includes us! Through an integrated primary school and families programme, it encourages children to eat a greater volume and variety of vegetables by adding one new vegetable at a time until they have a rainbow of different vegetables in their diet. We started with red peppers, where the children spent some time cutting up, smelling, feeling and tasting peppers, and were sent home with a bag of peppers for the family to enjoy. Every child also went home with the Eat the Rainbow “manual” which we hope has supported you in to getting your children to eat more veg. This has been created by the UK’s leading nutritionists, chefs and child psychologists and is supported by greater depth and video content online! We hope your children enjoyed this term’s vegetable of choice, any guesses what the next one will be?
The teaching and learning of English at Bonneville Primary School comprises the development of comprehensive reading, writing, speaking and listening skills and, importantly, the exploration and application of high level vocabulary. This is embodied by the mantra, as Alex Quigley emphasises, “if they can read it, and understand it, they can say it. If they can say it with confidence, it provides them a key to success for their future beyond school.” It remains a vital subject to embed our pupils' understanding of literature and the lived experience of others across the globe, past and present, and across a range of genres. It rests at the very core of our pupils’ ability to express themselves creatively and imaginatively, and enables them to think critically and enthusiastically about the world around them. The study of English also embeds our pupils’ understanding and appreciation of the intricacies of language: its breath, patterns, structure and origins. Empowered with this knowledge, pupils at Bonneville Primary School are able to make informed choices about how they communicate themselves in different contexts.
English at Bonneville follows the 3-2-1 structure. Each half term we spend 3 weeks on our fiction unit, 2 weeks on non-fiction unit and 1 week on poetry.
At Bonneville, pupils follow the ‘immersion, experimentation, innovation’ sequence of exploring a genre of text.
At the start of each unit, the immersion lessons will involve ‘immersing’ the children in the examples of the genre they are focusing on. This will include lessons that allow the children to read, listen to, and where applicable, act out a range of examples of that genre. They will be able to identify and explain the purpose of the key features in each genre they are learning.
Following this, children use the features of the genre to work on their sentence and word level skills. This will include a focus on the grammatical elements of the genre. These lessons and their work are linked to the overriding topic of that term and have a clear context and purpose in terms of their end of unit piece.
Children will then have the opportunity to plan, draft, edit and publish their final pieces, building on the skills developed over the course of the unit and embodying the practices of professional writers.
January 2024
Monday 8th - INSET Day (School closed to children)
Tuesday 9th - Children return
Wednesday 10th - Open Morning 9.30am
Monday 15th - Clubs begin
Monday 15th to Friday 19th - Parent Survey
Wednesday 24th - SEND Coffee Morning @ 9.15am
Friday 26th - FAB Feast
Tuesday 30th - Year 5 & 6 Virtual Parent Grammar Workshop
Food Bank Vouchers
In these difficult times any of us can find ourselves in challenging situations. Should you need support, please contact Mr Connelly who can support with food vouchers discretely.
Better Start Outreach Support
We are delighted to welcome Alex from the Better Start Team who will be working with families at Bonneville going forward. Alex will be in school every Wednesday morning and will be happy to meet parents and carers to give help, advice and support relating to the following issues:
Citizens Advice
Benefits advice
Food bank vouchers
Disability Living Allowance applications
Cost of Living information
Training and employment advice
Activities for children during half-term breaks
Advice on support available within Lambeth
Alex has a great deal of knowledge and expertise and will be a fantastic asset to have working with us at Bonneville. If you would like to arrange an appointment with Alex to have a chat and a cup of coffee on a Wednesday morning, please contact Mr Connelly and he can book in an appointment for you.
Central to raising standards in all schools and ensuring all pupils can fulfil their potential, is the need for children to attend school regularly to benefit from their education.
There is a strong link between good learning, high achievement, rapid progress and developing good social skills with excellent attendance.
We want to take this opportunity to outline our expectations for school attendance this academic year.
If your child arrives at school from 9.01am they will be marked as LATE, if they arrive after 9.30am they will be classed as “late after the register is closed” and their attendance is classed as absent for the morning session. As the registers would have already been returned to the Department for Education.
Regular poor punctuality can also have a negative effect on your child’s attendance as well as their academic learning. Being 6 minutes late each day equals 30 minutes of missed learning every week.
If your child’s attendance drops below 90%, we will need to share our concerns with the Local Authority Education Welfare Officer at Lambeth Council.
Raising a Concern
It is important to us that any concerns or questions you may have are dealt with as efficiently as possible. The structure we have in place is designed to do just that.
The structure
1) Your first port of call is -Your child’s class teacher
(email via the admin team to request a meeting)
2) You may contact the leader of your child’s phase (see below)
This includes issues regarding communication and organisation
(email via the admin team to request a meeting)
Should you be dissatisfied with the handling or outcome...
3) You may raise your concerns with Ms Parker
(email via the admin team to request a meeting outlining the nature for the purpose of the meeting)
Leaders are required to share items (as appropriate) with Ms Parker on a weekly basis, even if the matter is being handled by them.
We request that you do not field your concerns to FAB but instead work directly with the school staff as outlined above.
