Friday Celebration Worship and Hello Yellow Day
This morning, we enjoyed an extra special celebration worship to mark ‘Hello Yellow’ Day for World Mental Health Day. We began by exploring the range of emotions we all experience and discussed ways to lift our spirits when we're feeling down, with thoughtful suggestions like listening to favourite music, taking deep breaths, watching a funny film, reading a book, singing wholeheartedly, having a cuddle, or counting to ten. To boost our mood even further, we had a joyful singalong to Golden by K-pop and lit candles to pray for those facing mental health challenges. We then celebrated our Value Award winners across the school—well done to Coban, Reggie, Olly and Percy in EYFS and KS1, and to Harry, Olivia, Carter and Jenson in KS2—for their outstanding attitudes to learning and for consistently demonstrating our Barney’s 4Bs. Congratulations also to India Mill for being our overall Value Award winners with an impressive 979 points, as well as to EYFS and Year 2 for 100% attendance in the infants and Year 3 for an excellent 99.3% in the juniors. Mrs Ham shared the fantastic news that we had 100% attendance across the whole school on Tuesday. We also celebrated the achievements of our pupils beyond the classroom—well done to Mason for swimming 5m, Chester for earning ‘Player of the Week’ as a goalkeeper at Darwen FC, Phoebe for her wonderful dancing, Callie for her gymnastics skills, Callie and Alice for completing the Summer Reading Challenge, Grace for excelling in a recent dance competition with acro, song and dance, classical and her own choreography, Harry for achieving his yellow belt in kickboxing, Thea for being named Star of the Week in gymnastics, Scarlett for being a superstar netballer and earning Player of the Match, Willow for achieving her Puffin award in swimming and Star of the Week in gymnastics, and Eleanor for earning her Stage 4 in swimming, her recycling badge at Rainbows and completing the Summer Reading Challenge. A huge congratulations also went to our brilliant Year 4/5 Girls Football Squad for their outstanding performance in the Girls DPSSA Football League, and to the group of eight Year 2 children who represented our school so brilliantly in the Key Stage 1 Multi Skills Festival. To finish our worship, Mrs Ham reminded us of the upcoming Harvest Family Service at St Barnabas Church this Sunday at 11am, and how we hope to see as many of our children there as possible for a joyful Harvest singalong. We are also proud to be supporting Year 5 and the Rotakids in their campaign to collect as many shoeboxes as possible filled with essentials for local refugees and The Bishop's Harvest Appeal 2025—please see Class Dojo for further information.
Reception Maths - Subitising Bingo
This week in Maths, Reception have been really focusing on their subitising skills and have applied this quick thinking to a game of Bingo! We took turns to roll a die of 1-3 and subitised the images on our boards to match the numeral to the amount. Once we had covered all the images on our board we shouted ‘Bingo!’ We really enjoyed playing this game together.
Reception: Muddy Monday
Wow! On Monday the children in Reception blew Mrs Wilkinson's and Mrs Thompson's socks off! They walked over 2km around Jacks Key. The children listened to sounds they could hear, looked at what they could see under a bridge and used their imaginations chanting trip trap and the bear hunt story. The children had lots of fun!
Harvest Appeal
This morning we launched our Harvest Appeal for this year by hearing from Bishop Philip about his Pedalathon on 17th October where he will be cycling to visit and pray at a school or church in all 14 deaneries across the Diocese. We will be supporting Bishop Philip's Harvest Appeal for Christians in South Africa by joining in with his pedalathon over the next few weeks, including half term. We are encouraging our school family to cycle on bikes or scooters just like we did for the Big Lent Walk and we would love for you to send your photos in and the distance. Donations can be made on parent pay shortly. Our RotaKids are also supporting Darwen Asylum and Refugee Enterprise (DARE) and Darwen Rotary this Harvest by creating Winter Warmer boxes filled with toiletries, packets or tins of food and warm clothing for DARE families, the elderly, isolated, poor and vulnerable people in our community . They are also collecting winter coats for the homeless and poor through Darwen Rotary club. Please send in any donations and thank you in advance for your generosity. We then sang some of our Harvest songs for our Church Harvest Festival this Sunday 12th October at 11.00am- all welcome and our school Harvest Festival on Thursday 23rd October led by our WOW group and Reception, Years 1 and 2. All welcome.
Reception- Understanding the world- Our senses
During our understanding the world lessons we’ve been learning all about our senses. Today we have learnt about the job of our ears and that they are used for hearing so we are able to listen. The children closed their eyes and had to match the hidden sounds to the correct objects. We listened to bells, pasta, feathers and coins in different bowls to see if we could identify their sounds just by listening alone.
Reception - Our sense of smell
This week, for our understanding of the world, we have been focusing on our noses and our sense of smell. We have talked about the important job our nose has in helping us to identify different things from the food we eat to the fresh scent of flowers. It also helps to keep us safe if we come across a bad smell, we know not to eat it. We discussed what smells nice and what smells horrible, and how sometimes we might feel differently about those smells. We then used our noses to smell a range of different tubs which contained familiar and unfamiliar smells.
Reception - All about 3
This week in Maths we have been looking at numberblock 3 and the parts it is made up of. We know that we can make 3 by adding 1, and another 1, and another 1. We used this knowledge when thinking about the story Goldilocks and the three bears - there were 3 bowls of porridge - just enough for each bear! We then created our own ‘toy’s picnic’ where we checked that each toy had one each of everything. The children were great at spotting when we had not enough, just enough or too many things for the picnic.
Reception - PSHE - Hand hygiene
This week in PSHE we have been learning all about how important it is to keep your hands clean and how germs pass onto different people and objects. We used different coloured glitter on our hands and practiced hand shakes and ‘high fives’ then touching objects and pieces of fruit to see how the germs mixed and spread. We then put glitter in a bowl of water and added a drop of soap to disperse the glitter and demonstrate how the soap kills the germ and why it is important to wash our hands with soap and water.
Reception: Class Worship
Today during our class worship, we listened to Mark tell the story of Brother Andrew. Bishop Joe told us about the story. Andrew knew there were other countries in Europe who didn't like Christians. He shared the Bible with them because he was so enthusiastic that other people should read God's word. It shows us how much God loves us. We thought about how we could be just like brother Andrew by telling people how much God loves us all and by being kind and loving to everybody. We ended our worship by learning a new song and singing 'Our God is a great big God'.
Reception: Muddy Monday
Our Reception class took part in a Muddy Monday session in our school grounds this morning. They climbed trees, made mud soup and collected resources to build bonfires and dens. The children used their gross motor skills and imagination brilliantly today. Well done!
Reception :Creative - Building rockets
This week we made rockets in our creative area using recycled materials and foil. This is tied to our weekly story Aliens love underpants. The children really enjoyed building these and telling us where they wanted to fly to.
Whole School Worship - Agent Ananias
We learned about a very special mission given by God this week in worship. God directed Ananias, a disciple in Damascus, to heal Saul of his blindness and baptise him. Despite Ananias's fear due to Saul's reputation as a persecutor of Christians, he obeyed the Lord's assurance that Saul was a "chosen instrument". Ananias laid hands on Saul, restoring his sight, and then baptised him, marking his dramatic conversion from persecutor to the apostle Paul, a key figure in spreading Christianity. We reflected on what we learned from the story and the children shared their thoughts, including that we should trust God’s choices, and that everyone has the ability to change.