It brightened our day to receive this picture from Marion, a lay reader at St Mary’s Church. Children from our school planted Spring bulbs in the Church grounds in 2018, and on Easter Sunday they produced a wonderful display of flowers. Well done to all of the children who are helping to improve our local community. Our Stay and Sing sessions continue with gusto every Thursday morning in the Community Hub! This term we have had Mya with her guitar and beautiful singing voice to lead the sessions.
The children love singing the nursery rhymes and playing instruments. There are scarves and teddies and even, on the odd occasions, a parachute! Anyone with a baby or a child under 5 is welcome, as are parents, grandparents, carers and friends! The children also love tucking into the fresh fruit that is available after all the hard work of singing and dancing is done. In order to develop our new Spiritual Garden, we organised 2 community gardening mornings. Many thanks to the staff, children and local volunteers who joined us to fill the Spiritual Garden with plants, including three lovely olive trees. The volunteer team also cleared out and refilled several planting containers around the school. As stated in our school vision, we want to be a learning community that promotes the wellbeing of every person. The Spiritual Garden, along with the rest of the planting around the school, will provide an oasis of peace and calm for everyone in our school community.
Parents attending this workshop with Emma Beadle our Speech & Language Therapist learned how to better communicate with their children at home. This included advice on how to talk to children in a way that allows them to practice speech and language without placing too much pressure on them. So instead of asking too many questions and quizzing children, try and use more comments that give opportunities for general conversation.
This will help them develop their language skills and enrich their vocabulary. Thank you to all the parents who attended. What was your first memory of money? Can you really tell the difference between Lidl’s biscuits and those branded biscuits which cost twice as much?
Mustafa from the Social Quaker Action Group came to test our theories around spending and saving money with plenty of money-saving tips along the way which we could all share with each other. A really practical, fun and useful workshop for parents. Here are some photographs from poetry citizenship day. The organisers said that the children were an absolute delight and it was great to have them there. A particular well done to Daniel for reading his poem so confidently and his mum for her public speaking. They were definitely the highlight of the day for all involved!
The whole school have enjoyed a wonderful week immersing themselves in Chinese culture. Each class took part in a Chinese Dragon Dance workshop, finishing off with a spectacular performance from our KS2 children performing traditional dances. The children have enjoyed traditional storytelling, made different crafts based on the animals from the Chinese zodiac as well as feast on a Chinese lunch prepared by our school chefs. There was also a parents breakfast with food provided by our parents. Thank you to the parents who provided all the delicious dishes and also to those who came in to teach our children some Chinese calligraphy.
As part of Year Four’s Community Project, they have introduced recycling bins to every classroom. They had noticed that our bins were full of paper and card at the end of the day and realised that this could be recycled! Today, our eco warriors went around each class to collect the bins and although every class did brilliantly, Year Two’s box was overflowing and have been awarded our first ever Recycling Champion Penguin to display proudly on their door. We wonder who will win the next one in our first week back after the Easter Holidays!
St Mary’s continue to campaign for a safer road crossing outside our School. We have been in contact with the Mayor of London’s Office, Travel for London and our local Member of Parliament and we are continuing to collect signatures on our petition.
Staff, parents, Police community support officers and local community volunteers have been working together to make our voices heard, actively campaigning on Lewisham High Street, before the Police carried out speed checks. The children in Year 1 and Nursery have been reflecting on how they can help those in need. Following the words of our school vision ‘Our work is founded on the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, building on his message of equality, peace and justice’, the children decided to collect items to be donated to the homeless. The children encouraged many generous donations from our families and staff from St Mary’s travelled to Central London in order to distribute the items. All of the donations were gratefully received and will make a real difference to the homeless, thank you to everyone who contributed. This will be an ongoing project, so we will be continuing to collect. Please pass your donations to the Nursery or Year 1 classes, the most useful items are:
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Community ProjectsFind out about the community projects we are working on Archives
May 2024
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