19 / 20
1 9
C OM M U N I T Y A N D C H A R I T Y
Saturday Morning Challenge
Haven House
Enterprise Team
Amber Fisher and Ariana Ahmed, U4N
Eleanor Channer, L6S
This winter term, Bancroft’s hosted a group of Year 5 pupils,
from a mixture of local primary schools, in the annual Saturday
Morning Challenge.This consists of ten weekly sessions ranging
from building dens in Epping Forest to making fresh pasta with
the school chef.
Alongside the hardworking staff, a group of Upper Fourth and
Lower Sixth volunteers were lucky to be a part of this valuable
experience. Despite some challenges with working with the young
children, we learnt a great deal, whether it was skills for working
with children or learning facts alongside them each week. It was
a very enjoyable experience for us, not to mention how much
the children must have learnt.This shows in the feedback the
children gave us at the end of the Challenge when many parents
commented on the skills their children had picked up. In fact, many
of the children have shown interest in joining Bancroft’s inYear 7.
The Challenge ended spectacularly with a well-rehearsed play and
a great video which showed the progress.
As the weeks went by, we saw the children’s confidence grow and
watched as they became more enthusiastic in the various tasks.
This was especially true of some of the shyer children and it was
extremely rewarding to see how we had contributed to this.
On 7 October, a group of four L4th (Sabina Talbot, Sehrish Alam,
Harry Blisset and Amber Chowdhury) and four L6th (Emilia
Parsons, Matthew Dean, Ben Hughes and myself) attended the
launch of an enterprise project in aid of Haven House. Each of
the six teams competing from local schools were given £50 seed
capital by construction company, Galliard Homes, with the aim
of reinvesting it to produce £1500 for Haven House.
So far, we have held bake sales, had people throw sponges at
Mr Brennand and Mr Dickinson at East House Family Evening
and helped organise the Christmas Fundraiser. Before Christmas,
we were treated to a day out by our Galliard Homes mentors,
who took us to two of their construction sites. One involved
an extensive tour around a large amount of scaffolding and the
other around some of their latest and very swanky, £4 million
apartments on the South Bank.Whilst some of our photos and
videos were, for some members of the team, vertigo-inducing, the
views were spectacular.The highlight, however, was of course the
free Nando’s, courtesy of Galliard Homes
This term, we are planning a
‘Haven House Hopstacle Course’
for the Prep School on 14
February, with all proceeds going
straight to Haven House.Thank
you to everyone who has already
supported us through donating or
helping us organise an event and
we hope to see as many of you
at our future events as possible to
help raise money and awareness
for a great cause!