Twitter @bishopstonprimary Email Bishopston.Primary.School@Swansea-edunet.gov.uk Phone 01792 232754 Website bishopstonprimaryschool.wales

Diary Dates Open this newsletter on the phone and use this link to have the

school calendar on your phone… Calendar Link

Issue 22

December

Newsletter

UNCRC Article 1: All children have the UNCRC rights

Our value for the month of December is Happiness

Have a lovely holiday! We hope that over the next couple of weeks you all manage to get some time with your families and have some fun together. It has been another crazy half term in school with lots going on. Christmas has lasted a month already from the fair through to the shows—see page four for a few pictures to remember. We want to thank you for your generous support. We hope you feel that we’re helping the children here to care for one another and be the best that they can be!

Enterprising, Creative Contributors A group of pupils from Mrs Thomas’ class did the school proud on Monday 10th December. The group joined pupils from Trallwn school and ‘Sands Democratic School’ at the Down to Earth project. They were part of a project led by Charlotte Church and the BBC which sought to gauge pupil perceptions around an education fit for children and young people today, and in the future.

The children were fantastic throughout. They had some incredible ideas and worked collaboratively, made new friends and made everyone laugh! They were a credit to their families and our school.

Turning on Christmas Tree Lights—Congratulations to Jaxon Curran for winning!

1st Day Back—Monday 7th January Please can we remind you all that the first day back for staff AND pupils is Monday 7th January. Have a lovely holiday in the meant time!

Show my work Thank you to so many of you who came to the ‘show my work’ morning. There was a lovely atmosphere and both halls were full. We had some technical issue with the questionnaire, but, we can show you some of the comments people wrote:

It has been so lovely to see my daughter so enthusiastic to share the lovely learning experiences she has been given this year.

This was a wonderful opportunity to share my child’s work with him - thank you!

As well as being taught in class, our daughter has obviously been encouraged to perform as well as she can and to understand completely what is required of her.

I loved seeing my son's work and how proud he was to show me

This experience is so valuable and really gives the child a purpose and ownership over their work. Thank you

Lovely to see pictures and read all teacher's comments and actually see what they do day to day as they don't tell parents a lot of what they do

Very reassuring to see a good standard of work being undertaken.

I really enjoyed sharing my granddaughters work with her. She was very proud of her books and she was very enthusiastic. It was a special experience for us both. Thank you.

Fantastic to have time to go through their work, he enjoyed showing me what he's doing . Very good.

There were also some comments made which we can work on…

Would like to have been able to access the videos on seesaw

- apologies for this, apparently one or two ipads didn’t allow it. If it happens at another event, let us know and we’ll try to fix it on the day

The science looks pretty dull and boring. It seemed to be more about finding something to write about than encouraging the fun of genuine scientific enquiry. I know other schools do some really cool fun stuff. I think Bish could do much much better than this

- Science does involve a lot of writing, it would normally be the children’s literacy lessons for that week (that’s the National Curriculum expectations). Children do some great experiments, but certainly we’ll keep looking to develop it.

Christmas Concerts Many thanks to so many of

you for coming to support the

school concerts. The children

(and teachers!) have worked

hard to get their performances

ready.

Nursery and Reception put on

Christmas Counts

Year 1-2 had us in stiches with a

Midwife Crisis. The midwives

had to search for the baby.

The Key Stage 2 performance

was A Christmas Crisis .

Santa needed convincing that

children still believed, Jack Frost

had frozen his heart!

We are working on improving the Welsh provision and standards within the school. Please

help to promote a positive attitude towards Welsh—after all we live in Wales. Nearly all

the children will go onto comprehensives where they will have to do a GCSE in Welsh, if

we can get them ahead of the game that can only be good.

Estyn are increasingly expecting Welsh to be an important part of Primary School life, if

we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet I’m sure we’ll do well!

Mrs Griffith’s has been doing well on a Welsh sabbatical this year. We hope to get another

teacher onto the sabbatical next year and we are also looking to keep

training the TAs in the school.

Day Care Questionnaire Lots of people filled out the questionnaire regarding Child Care. It’s clear there is a real need in the area. We have been asked to clarify the fact that this is not a private venture. Rather, the Governors of the school are looking into funding options for something to be built which could not only support the community need for Child Care but could also bring some money into the school which would be of benefit to all of the children.

Sickness Please take the full 48 hours if your child has been sick , other-wise the whole class gets wiped out! We were on target with our attendance un-til this final week—suddenly we’ve dropped.

Diary Dates: March 23rd Feb-3rd is Half term March 5-6th are our Parents’ Evenings March 12th—Pendine Info’ Evening March 13th—Llangrannog Info’ Evening April 13th-28th is the Easter Holiday

Teacher Changes in the Spring Term Mrs Fisher’s job is coming to an end; she will finish on Friday 18th January. Her initial contract was for a term to cover Mrs Barrow, so she rightly found another job to go to. Mrs Barrow is now expecting to come back in March. So, the plan is that Mrs Allchurch is going to come back and cover the class for the rest of the first half term, starting on 21st January.

Group Girls Boys Total

Year 5/6 Mr Williams 95.6 95.3 95.4

Year 5/6 Miss Leentfaar 97.9 94.7 96.3

Year 4/5 Mrs. Thomas 95.9 96.8 96.3

Year 4 Miss Fisher 95.1 95.5 95.3

Year 3 Mrs Thomas/Mrs Gorvett 97.2 96.8 97

Junior STF Mrs. Bennett 89.6 89.6

Year 2 Mrs. Melling 96.4 94.2 95.3

Year 1/2 Mrs. Brewer/Mrs. Beynon 98.6 97.6 98.1

Rec/Year 1 Mrs. Ellis 80 92.7 86.3

Infant STF Mrs. Gray/Mrs. Jones 100 100

Totals 95.7 95.3 95.5

Attendance Competition Brilliant work if you’re in the green boxes, good work on yellow. The rest have a bit of work

to do on getting to school! The girls won last year, the boys were ahead in November, but

they’ve dropped! Any class getting over 97% should be really proud, well done. Let’s all

make the effort to keep our high attendance up.

Football games On a Winter’s night, the boys and girls took on Pennard Primary. Some amazing saves by Tobias kept the boys in it for the first half, it stayed at 1 all. The second half the lads went 3:1 down. Then Aaron got injured, Fin had to come on—Jake shot and Fin stole the goal! The girls were amazing! They thrashed Pennard 5:0—Grace and Esther got 2 each and Hannah scored a corker from the half way line!

Pupil Committees— School Improvement

The

Children in Need Many

Polite Request about sQuid Please