Reception: Muddy Monday
Reception had a very busy forest school session today. They enjoyed exploring in the shaded area of Jacks Keys. They found a fox hole and enjoyed exploring and creating their own storylines. They made houses for different animals and roleplayed a story about a fox coming out during the night. Some of our children climbed trees and managed to climb higher than usual. We are so proud of the children and love seeing how far they have come. Super perseverance, challenge and determination was seen from them all!
Year 3- Design Technology-Constructing nets to make 3D shapes
In D.T. this afternoon, the children constructed various 3D geometric shapes for building castles. They cut along bold lines, folded along dotted lines, ensured tabs were the correct size, made crisp folds, and used glue to assemble the nets into 3D shapes.
Reception: Mindfulness
Each morning before we start our day, Reception class begin a mindfulness activity. This helps us to feel calm and ready to start our day. All children participate in the activity and are very sensible throughout. Well done!
Year 2 - Football Session
This afternoon, Year 2 were very lucky to have Stephen and Lily come in and take us for a football session. The children got stuck in and really enjoyed playing. It was lovely to see some children playing football for the first time!
Mrs Ham's Highlights
Dear parents and carers, wow, another super busy week of living life in all its fullness at St Barnabas! The highlights of the week have been: *Our Barney’s Got Talent show this morning. We are so proud of our super talented and courageous children who took part in it. Thank you so much for all of the parents and grandparents who came along to support. Thanks so much for your kind donations to East Lancs Hospice. You can still make a donation on parent pay if you would like to. Photos can be found here: https://www.stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/photo-galleries/barney-s-got-talent-june-2024 *Learning about refugees in class worship as part of refugee week and Years 3 and 5 have special visits from two refugees from DARE (Darwen Asylum and Refugee Enterprise. * Our high fives netball team winning the league and will now go on to represent BWD in the Lancs school games. *Our boys cricket team crowned champions of the DPSSA cricket competition. * Our tennis team did brilliantly at the tennis tournament. *Our new after school clubs started with Little craft club and Little Voices. *We had a carbon monoxide safety assembly for the whole school and workshops in Years 5 and 6. * Our WOW group have started to create our Spirituality garden with the help of Mr Fairbanks, Mr Ham and Mrs Ham’s son. We still welcome donations of pots and plants if you have any spare ones lying around at home. Next week we are looking forward to our Sports Day on Friday. Fingers crossed this lovely weather stays. The Infants ( Reception, Year 1 and Year 2) will go first at 9.15am- 10.30am and then the Juniors (Years 3,4,5 and 6) at 10.45am- 12.15pm. Parents are very welcome to attend and we are hopeful that we will be able to have our Mums, Dads and toddler races too. Work will begin next week on a new canopy on our Reception class yard. Therefore the Reception class yard will be closed and children will need to walk around the outside path to get to and from their class, rather than through the Reception yard. Further information will be sent out on Monday about where to drop off and collect Reception children from. Yesterday I sent out information about our children being invited to sing at a ‘Cidari 10 Year Celebration’ on Wednesday evening. I’m aware this clashes with out of school activities for some of our older children. Therefore, I have opened this up to children in any year group and they do not need to be choir members, just anyone who enjoys singing. We will be singing songs that we already know and sing in worship. We would really appreciate your support. If you would like your child to take part, please fill out the following google form and further information can be found on my previous post. https://forms.gle/sahNa3JH1UFz88Vu6 A polite reminder to please park considerately to our neighbours. This morning a white car parked on one of our resident’s drives to drop off, which meant the resident’s visiting family couldn’t park on their drive. Wishing you all a fantastic weekend and thank you for your continued support, Mrs Ham
Year 1- Euros Football Session
This afternoon, Year 1 enjoyed their first football session of 4 with Steve and Lily. What a fabulous way to celebrate and join in with the Euros 2024! They practised lots of skills such as passing, dribbling and shooting. Thank you to coaches Steve and Lily- The children absolutely loved the session!
Barney's Got Talent
To celebrate World Music Day, Mrs Ham supported by our Heads and Deputies (Lucy, Skye, Isaac and Wilson) presented a very special Barney's Got Talent this morning. We are collecting donations that will be going to East Lancs Hospice to support the wonderful work they do. All of the talents that we witnessed from our school family were absolutely incredible and we commend all of the children for being so courageous and sharing these talents with such a large audience. A huge well done to Callie the Tangled Twin , Super Summer the Gummy Bear, Haydn and Percy as the Football Friends, Olivia and Lydia as the Barbie Girls, Ballerina Annabel dancing to the instrumental version of ‘Dance Monkey,’ Super Ted and Electric Elijah with their amazing street dancing, The Friendship Band of Iris and Naomi singing ‘This Girl is on Fire,’ Jack, Ella-Grace and Chay as The Conga Monkeys, Miles, Daisy and James as The Brilliant Believers singing Believer by the Imagine Dragons, Toffee Tristen singing Pure Imagination dressed as Willy Wonka, Sparkly Sofia singing ‘Beautiful Things’ by Benson Boone, Dramatic Darcy singing ‘A Thousand Years’ by Christina Perri, Mason and James as the MJ Boys singing ‘Shotgun’ by George Ezra, Amazing Annabelle as a magician , Graceful Grace dancing to ‘ABC’ by the Jackson 5, Beau, Jess, Laila, Brooke, Charlie-Rose and Betsy dancing to ‘Who Runs the World? (Girls)’ as the 6 Golden Stars, Eliza as The Joyful Joker, Outstanding Oscar playing and singing ‘Believer’ on the Piano, R’Kid Seb singing ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ by Oasis, Archie the Arrow thrashing Mr Bloomfield at darts and The WWE Wrestlemania team of Charlie, Carlton and Alfie. Wow! What a lot of talent. Thank you to the parents who could attend our Barney's Got Talent, we hope you enjoyed the performances. For those who couldn’t, Mr Bloomfield kindly recorded it and this will be shared with you all. We wish you a lovely restful weekend. Thank you for your continued support.
Year 4 PE Athletics in the sun
In our PE session yesterday we had our first athletics session. We worked in teams to develop our agility, speed and body awareness. We also practiced the events that we will do next week in our Sports Day such as sprint, egg and spoon, sack race and obstacle relay. We used batons for handovers and some of the children really pushed themselves out of their comfort zones.
Year 4 Art - Making our own stamps to create a pattern with paint.
As part of our artwork last week, we made stamps by cutting out various shapes from polystyrene tiles. We then glued a cork onto the back of the shapes to create a stamp. This week we have shared our stamps with a partner to create a repeating pattern with two different colours of paint. The end result is very effective and the children are really pleased with their final pieces.
Year 3- English- Zoom session from Tom Roberts-Author of the The Great Realisation poem and film. ·
Performance poet Tom Roberts also known as Tom Foolery shared his journey into poetry and explained his creative process during a Zoom session with Year 3 today. He emphasized the importance of focusing on subjects that matter to you at the moment, whether personal or universal, making the work more engaging. He shared valuable advice from a former teacher about structuring a poem. Instead of thinking of a poem as having a beginning, middle, and end, he approaches it as a progression from stability to instability, and finally to resolution. During the session, Tom delighted the children by reading two poems: "The Great Realisation" and "The World Awaits" – the latter from his second book. To make the experience even more special, he included the names of the children while performing. Year 3 loved it! Inspired by this session, the children will now use Tom's approach to structure their poems on the theme of refugees.
Year 5&6 Cricket
A huge well done to our year 5&6 cricket team. They played six teams across Darwen including: Avondale, Ashleigh, Lower Darwen, St James and St Peter’s; winning every game. The team showed amazing team spirit and talent winning the tournament.
English- Year 3- Refugees from Sudan and Libya
Today in Year 3, we welcomed two refugees. Zinab from Libya and Samah from Sudan. They both had to leave their families because it was not safe in their countries. Zinab and Samah told us about their struggles and worries about fitting in here in the UK. They were very grateful to the UK for providing them with housing and support. They also reminded us to be thankful that we don't have wars, and that we have safe places to stay and food to eat. The question and answer session helped the children understand the challenges refugees face, which they could then portray in their writing.