Caring Curious Courageous

Enabling all children to learn and grow

Dear all families,

How did we get to the 1st of December so quickly? Time is flying by – a sign that children and staff are busy, hard at work and having fun as we progress through the term.

It was quite a shock standing at the gate on Tuesday as a raft of Victorians arrived at school! Year 1 went back in history and learnt about what it was like to go to school when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Their desks were in rows, they did their work on chalk boards, and learnt about, but did not experience, the realities of discipline at that time. This experiential learning really does support knowledge moving from our short to our long-term memory. If they are able to attach new knowledge to a memorable experience, they are much more likely to hold this in their long term memory for longer. Thank you to all who have either paid their £100 donation or paid their first instalment. Sadly, school budgets don't stretch as far as we would like to fully support this sort of learning, so your financial contributions are essential. Thank you and I hope you can see that the money directly benefits the children.

That's not all for enriched learning this week, as Year 3  went to Buster farm to learn more about what life was like in the Stone Age. They went on a Stone Age exploration and took part in a Bronze Age jewellery-making session. It was a great day! A year 5 class visited the Buddhist Temple in Wimbledon and the rest of the year group will go next week. This trip supported the year 5 RE curriculum.

I am very proud to share that Miss Foster said the year 6 boys who she took to a borough football team were courageous - playing as a team, learning from mistakes and standing up for one another. They showed respect for both the referees and tournament organisers, listening carefully to them and speaking with confidence. It is wonderful to hear how our children are real ambassadors for The Vineyard when they take part in events in the borough.

Next week, our youngest children will be performing in their nativity plays at 9.30am:

• Tuesday - Topaz class
• Wednesday - Opal class
• Thursday - Jade class

They have been practising hard, and I am very excited to watch them in action.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Frances Bracegirdle

Headteacher - headteacher@vineyard.richmond.sch.uk

Safeguarding

Teaching and Learning at The Vineyard

For the last two years, one of the key foci from our school development plan has been around developing a bespoke Vineyard curriculum, following a review of The Vineyard Values. All of our subject leaders have worked hard, alongside the senior leaders, on creating a curriculum that not only meets the expectations of the National Curriculum, but is also designed with our Vineyard community in mind. So far, we have created curricula for the following subjects:

Our next steps will be to create curriculum documents for R.E., design and technology and French. We are also planning a review of our whole school writing curriculum to ensure there is a balance of different writing genres taught throughout the school and that the texts we are using are varied and diverse. As you can imagine, designing these tailored curricula has been a significant task for the school team to complete and we are very proud of the work achieved so far. Once The Vineyard curriculum is completed, we will move on to the next phase of our school development plan.

Ms Reilly and Mrs Dempster 

Assistant Headteachers for Teaching & Learning

Behaviour policy

We hosted a behaviour workshop to families today. This was for families to have an insight into the ethos of our policy, how we deal with behaviour incidents and also families got the opportunity to discuss how they think we should deal with scenarios! Thank you to those that came along. I hope you found it useful. The slides can be found here.

Attendance

Well done to all the year groups getting above 96%!! 

The classes that have got a slice of pizza on their chart (no lates) are Diamond, Emerald and Ruby!  Emerald have now earnt their pizza party - well done to all for arriving at school on time!

Miss McArdle- Assistant Headteacher 

School Council

Last Friday, an architect company called ‘We Made That’ visited our school to talk to the children about Richmond Town Centre. The company are working with Richmond Borough to redesign parts of the area that will benefit the local community, including children and their favourite things to do. The Year 4, 5 and 6 School Council members had to work in groups of 6 to sort through pictures of Richmond Town Centre currently and describe how they felt about these features of our area using emojis and provide verbal feedback. The team thought those children that took part were incredibly articulate, creative and helpful with this process, and they walked away with many ideas to share with the board working on this. Some of those ideas were zip lines across the River Thames, an ice skating rink that can be used all year round, toilets on Richmond Green and outdoor art displays on rotation that celebrate local artists’ work. A job well done and everyone looked like they really enjoyed it!

PTA News