Worship with Rev. Matt
Today, Rev. Matt led worship and shared the second half of the Easter story, focusing on the events following Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. The children listened intently as he spoke about the resurrection, emphasising the joy and hope it brings to Christians around the world. Through engaging storytelling, Rev. Matt encouraged the children to reflect on the meaning of Easter and how it represents new beginnings, faith and God’s everlasting love. He posed thought-provoking questions, prompting the children to consider how the message of forgiveness, kindness and renewal can be applied in their own lives. The session ended with a moment of quiet reflection and a prayer, allowing the children to appreciate the significance of Easter and its impact on their faith and actions.
Year 4 DT - Building circuits for our torches
In the first part of our DT session we constructed our circuits to put inside our torches. These consisted of a bulb, three wires, a battery pack and a switch. We made the switches ourselves by attaching two split pins to a piece of card and then the switch itself was a metal paper clip. The children found this stage of the process very challenging but they persevered and worked collaboratively to make a full working circuit that they then carefully placed inside their torches which have been made from water bottles.
Completed Torches in our Electrical Systems Torch Design Unit
In the second part of our DT lesson, we added the circuits to the casing ( water bottles) and fixed these together securely, ensuring that the switch was still in working order. Throughout this unit the children have worked extremely hard to develop their subject knowledge about electrical systems including identifying electrical products and explaining why they are useful, making a working switch, identifying the features of a torch and creating and designing a functioning torch. Following the testing of each design, we will now move on to evaluating the success of a final product.
FOSB Mother’s Day Coffee Morning
A huge thank you for your generous cake donations yesterday and to all of the wonderful ladies in our school family that came to our FOSB Mother’s Day Coffee Morning. We were overwhelmed with the turn out and thank you for your patience. We hope you all enjoyed having a few minutes to relax and have a brew and a cake with your loved ones. Thank you so much for your generous donations and for purchasing raffle tickets. We have raised an amazing £375 to go towards upgrading our trim trail surfaces and purchasing new chrome books. Thank you for bringing to our attention the issue with some of the wrong tickets being sold by our Year 6 helpers in the raffle. We worked out the missing ticket numbers and made tickets with those numbers and added them to our tombola drum to make it fair. The winning tickets drawn out were( also see photos) : *Peach number 30- £40 ocean palace voucher * Pink ticket 982- Dolly’s Tea Room afternoon tea for 2 voucher *Blue ticket 954- £20 Mangiamo Voucher * Blue ticket 669- £20 Freya’s Grill Voucher *Peach ticket 271- Bottle of Asti & Lemon Drizzle Cake * Pink ticket 979- Bottle of Pinot Grigio & Red Velvet Cake * Peach ticket 302 - Red wine & Red velvet * Peach ticket 6- Rose wine, photo frame & blueberry cake If you have won a prize, please bring your ticket to the office to claim your prize by the end of the week. A huge thank you to our FOSB members and staff involved in planning and supporting the event as we couldn’t have done it without you. A special mention to our Year 6 helpers too who did a brilliant job. Thank you so much to Katie and Steph from FOSB who also stayed after the event to clear out the FOSB cupboards. You have done a fantastic job! There are still plenty of cakes left so children can buy one after school today to give to the special lady in their life. They will be priced at 50p a cake or 3 for £1.00. All of the photos can be found here: https://www.stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/photo-galleries/fosb-mother-s-day-coffee-morning Thank you to everyone who made this morning a success and on behalf of our whole school family I wish all of our Mums, Grandmas and Aunties a wonderful and relaxing Mother’s Day and thank you for everything you do. You are all amazing!
Collective Worship - The Garden of Gethsemane
Our collective worship began with the Year 6 class presenting their learning about Shakespeare. Thank you for sharing, Year 6! Mrs Ham then led our worship about the Garden of Gethsemane and how Jesus spent time praying for strength from God to help Him through the events that were to follow. We spent time reflecting on all of our Lenten events so far: Lent walks, Lenten promises and our 40 acts of kindness. Finally, we took part in this week’s special Year of Prayer by all sharing what was on our minds with Jesus, considering what we are thankful for, by writing these on a leaf. Mrs Ham created a prayer tree in our entrance area with over 200 lovely prayers on leaves from all of our children and staff.
Year 4 - English: Easter Poetry
This week, we began our poetry unit in English. Our topic is the Easter story, with our aim being to produce a piece of poetry, some of which will be displayed in the rose garden at Whitehall Park. We are only in the first stages at the moment; exploring poetry and working on our performance skills, but we had great fun creating and performing Kennings about Judas.
Year 4 - Linking Schools: Social Action
Today, Year 4 began the scene phase of our Linking Schools project, looking at different types of social action and discussing issues that they are passionate about changing. Each group recorded ideas for problems to tackle on a leaf, ready to add to our class kindness tree. In the next session, we will talk about how we can bring about change and vote on one idea to implement. Watch this space…
Mad Science Club- Lab Works
Today in Mad Science Club, we became real scientists. The children got to use real lab equipment to stir, swish, and swirl different mixtures. It was a hands-on introduction to laboratory techniques, and everyone participated in the experiments and had great fun.
Friday Celebration Worship
Today, we started our celebration worship by signing the trinity and reflecting on another extremely busy yet fantastic week in school. First of all, we thanked everyone for rocking their socks for World Down Syndrome Day and continuing to support ‘THE BIG LENT WALK.’ The kilometres walked across school are ever increasing as is the money that we have raised and we are extremely grateful- thank you! Please continue to let either Mrs Wilkinson or Mrs Ham know if you have walked anywhere and please send photos if you can. This week, we have had a wonderful week learning about Lent in collective worship, Reception, Year 1 and 2 had a special visit from Local Author Janek Puzon, Reception had an exciting firefighter visit, we’ve enjoyed a variety of after-school and lunch-time clubs and Year 6 spent two days exploring London. We then moved onto congratulating this week’s individual value award winners. Well done to Freddie, Cici and Charlie G in EYFS and KS1 and Bobby-Ray, Tristen and Neve in Years 3, 4 and 5. Well done to these children for consistently showing our Barny’s 4Bs and working hard across the curriculum. We also awarded all of Year 6 as the value award winners this week for representing school amazingly well in London and making the most of the experience. Furthermore, we congratulated our Year 1 and Year 4 class for being our attendance winners this week with 96.7% and 99.6% attendance, India Mill as our value award winners this week with 442 points and our Year 4 football team for three fantastic performances in the BRFC league on Tuesday evening- well done! We then moved on to congratulating our out of school sports award winners. Well done to Hollie for being the Star of the Week at gymnastics, Charlie for achieving his blue belt in martial arts and being the Beaver of the Week, Isabella for also being awarded her blue belt at martial arts, Callie for her amazing performance at Stage Coach, Elijah for being Player of the Week at football, Haydn for achieving his white belt at kickboxing, Lyla for achieving gold in a recent Jazz competition and silver for a lyrical dance, Sofia for coming 3rd place in a recent singing competition and Olivia for being Star of the Week at gymnastics. To end our worship, Mrs Ham reminded us that next Tuesday 25th March is ‘Friends of St Barnabas Non-Uniform Day’ in exchange for a cake or sweet treat to sell at the Mother’s Day Coffee Morning on Wednesday 26th March which you are all welcome to. Then, we all had a singalong to ‘Lord of the Dance.’ We wish you all a lovely and restful weekend.
Year 4 DT - Designing Torches
In our DT session this week we looked at designing our product to fit a set of specific user needs. To begin the session, we created our circuits that we will need for our torches and then we drew the circuit formats out using the correct symbols. It was quite challenging to make the circuits light the bulbs as some of the crocodile clips in the wires were tough and some of the batteries no longer worked. We worked in small groups and it was great to see the children working as a team to problem solve. Once we had done this we then designed our torches and labelled all of the components. We can’t wait to start making the torches in our next session now we have collect all of the resources which include; a water bottle, I battery pack, a bulb, a switch and three wires.
Year 4 History- Making Inferences about who was buried at Sutton Hoo
This week in history we have been trying to make inferences about who was buried at Sutton Hoo and what evidence it gives us about Anglo Saxon life. We researched artefacts such as a helmet, having bowl, shoulder clasps, belt buckles and sceptres. We each selected an artefact to look at in more detail and answered questions directly related to it. We described it, added what we thought it was made from, what it may have been used for, who its owner may have been and what it tells us about Anglo-Saxon England.
Year 4 - Science: Electrical Circuits and Testing Hypotheses
This week in Year 4, we were hands on with our learning. We began by recapping scientific symbols and then practised drawing scientific diagrams. We then built the circuits we had drawn to test whether they would work. We then made predictions about whether or not different circuits would work and tested them out by building them. There were some super explanations for why certain circuits wouldn’t work, showing a firm understanding of the key components and conditions needed to make a working series circuit.