Mrs Ham's Weekly Message
Dear parents and carers, wow, what another busy week of 'achieving great things' and 'living life in all its fullness'! The highlights have been: *Choir Let's Go Sing concert at King George's Hall *Reception class firefighter visit and Mother's Day Worship *Years 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 Big Lent Walks *Year 5 and 6 football festival *An author visit- RK Alker *FOSB Mother's Day Breakfast- Thank you FOSB! *Year 3 visited by a baker and made apple crumble * World book day- the word costumes were amazing! *International Women's Day girls football tournament *Whitehall Park house team winners non-uniform day and disco *WOW walk to school launch Next week we have a slightly quieter week but are looking forward to: Monday: Launch of the Big Plastic Count Wednesday: Rhyme and story time for Reception class and younger children Thursday: Cross Country competition for our cross country team Friday: Dress in red for Red Nose Day, Comic Relief Darwen Swimming gala for our swimming squad. Thank you so much for your donations and support towards our Big Lent Walk. We have now walked 1088km. Please keep sending in your walks and sponsorship money can be donated here: https://schools.walk.cafod.org.uk/fundraising/st-barnabas-big-lent-walk For all the latest photos in our gallery, please click here: https://stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/photo-gallery-category/our-gallery For all of the latest news from each class, please click here: https://stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/news or see our facebook page. I've attached a photo of the upcoming church Easter services and your child should come home with an invitation today. We are looking forward to our choir singing on Palm Sunday 24th March and everyone is welcome to come and support. Happy International Women's day to all of our wonderful Mums, Grandmas, female staff and young ladies in our school family. We hope that all of our Mums and Grandmas have a wonderful relaxing day on Mothering Sunday. Rev Ben is leading a special church service at 11.00am on Sunday and everyone is welcome. Wishing you all a fabulous weekend and thank you for your ongoing support, Mrs Ham
Friday Celebration Worship
Today, we started our celebration worship by wishing all of the wonderful women in our school family a Happy International Women’s Day. We then thought about how we’ve lived life in all its fullness this week with a lovely Mother’s Day breakfast hosted by FOSB, a special Mother’s Day celebration in Reception class, a fantastic author visit from R.K. Alker, an amazing day celebrating World Book Day, a visit to King George’s Hall Let’s Go Sing concert for our amazing choir and lots of amazing extra curricular clubs. We then presented Vienna, Charlie, Archie, Carter, Declan, Grace, Bobby and Sienna as our value award winners this week. Well done to those children for consistently showing our Christian Values and working incredibly hard across the curriculum. We then had a phenomenal performance from our incredible choir of ‘Dancing on Air’ which was one of their songs at Let’s Go Sing concert. We also congratulated Year 1 and Year 5 on being our amazing attendance winners this week, Whitehall Park who are our overall value award winners this week, our Year 5/6 football team who attended the Football Festival on Tuesday evening, our amazing librarians for all of their effort and enthusiasm on World a book Day and Grace, Annabelle and James in Year 4 for designing badges for the launch of the WOW initiative. We then congratulated our out of school achievers. Well done to Jenson for achieving his 400m at swimming, Daisy for getting Emily the doll at Rainbows for being incredibly kind and thoughtful, Eliza for being awarded player of the match in her football match at the weekend, Skye and Rosie for demonstrating incredible skills in their horse riding lessons, Isaac for achieving a 100m medal in a swimming competition, Cassidy for being awarded gymnast of the session and Scarlett for achieving her ‘World Thinking Day’ badge. To end our worship, we had a lovely prayer from Rev Ben, sang happy birthday to those children who are celebrating birthdays today and this weekend and we had a sing along to ‘We Have a King Who Rides a Donkey.’ Mrs Ham also reminded us that it is dress in red for Comic Relief next Friday 15th March. We thank all those who attended celebration worship and we wish the the rest of our school family a lovely restful weekend and thank you for your ongoing support too.
Values Points House Team Winners - Spring 1 2024
A huge well done to our Values Awards Winners for Spring Term 1 2024 - Team Whitehall Park. Today they celebrated their win with a special non- uniform day, sweet treats and a disco. It was lovely to see each and every one of them dancing and having lots of fun! Well done Team Whitehall Park on another successful half term win!
The Big Plastic Count
THE BIG PLASTIC COUNT We're excited that our school is joining the Big Plastic Count initiative from March 11th to 17th. The issue of plastic waste affects us all, and our young ones must have a say in finding solutions. Click on the link below for more information. https://youtu.be/x0nQHO7Mw-k?si=76vpk8Hf9wXOKqn1 During this initiative, your children will play a vital role in gathering evidence about what happens to our plastic waste. This information will be used to advocate for change at national and global levels, urging UK ministers, supermarkets, and major brands to take action towards phasing out plastic production. In the coming days, your child will receive a ‘Let’s count tally sheet’. Count as you throw from Monday 11th March morning until Sunday 17th March! Simply mark every piece of plastic package as you throw it away on the tally sheet. We encourage you to support them in this activity, and they can then input their findings at home using the unique class link provided on their class page between 18-31 March. Once all the results are in, we'll create our class footprint and share it with the children. We appreciate your continuous support in involving our pupils in these significant initiatives. Thank you, Smart School Council and Miss Kachwalla
KS2 World Book Day Assembly
Thank you to our wonderful KS2 children for their fantastic engagement with this morning’s World Book Day assembly. Mrs Ham introduced the assembly by telling the children all about the word that she had come dressed as which was ‘onomatopoeia.’ The children then watched a video published by the literacy trust which gave them some top tips for choosing an appropriate book such as deciding if the genre is of interest to them, reading the blurb and ensuring that there are no more than 5 words that they can’t understand on the first page. They then joined in with a three part quiz. During the first round, the children had to identify the title of a book by looking at the front cover. This included book titles such as The Naughtiest Unicorn, Grimwood, Mac B Kid Spy, The Storey Treehouse collection, The Accidental Prime Minister, The Babysitters Club, Loki and Breakfast Club Adventures. The second round consisted of guessing the authors of certain books such as J.K. Rowling, Andy Stanton and Francesca Simon and the third round consisted of playing emoji Pictionary with books such as Goldfish Boy, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, Ninja Kid and Daisy and the Trouble With. All of the books that were on the quiz are books that we have in our library so we are hoping that our children now feel inspired to sample a book that they haven’t yet read. The librarians also awarded Annabelle and Miley with their book token as they were the KS2 winners of our ‘Design a Bookmark with Your Favourite Book Title’ competition. Annabelle‘s bookmark showed her love of the ‘The 13 Storey Treehouse’ collection of books and Miley’s showed her love of the ‘Daisy and the Trouble With’ collection of books.
World Book Day- Dress as a word
Happy world book day! The children have loved seeing all of our staff team dressed as different words and have had great fun guessing their lords. We have had some brilliant challenging vocabulary from onomatopoeia to metamorphosis! Can you guess the words?
World Book Day- Reading for Pleasure
As part of our World Book Day celebrations, all of our teachers and teaching assistants swapped classes and read to a group of children in a different year group. The children loved being read to by a different adult to usual and our teaching staff thoroughly enjoyed promoting reading for pleasure.
Let’s Go Sing concert 2024
Wow, we are so proud of our school choir for their amazing singing and enthusiastic actions this evening at the Let’s go sing concert at King George’s Hall. I’ve loaded some videos onto class dojo and the photos can be found here: https://www.stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/photo-galleries/let-s-go-sing-concert-2024 A huge thank you to Mrs Govan for her wonderful leadership of our choir and to Mrs Wilkinson for her support this afternoon. Thank you to all of our choir parents for their support in helping the children learn their words and for supporting them this evening. We are hoping to have more choir members next year and will be opening choir open to more KS2 children in the next few weeks. If your child is interested in joining, they are welcome to come along on Thursday lunchtimes to give it a try. It was an absolute pleasure to watch our children sing their hearts out. They will be performing their favourite song in worship on Friday. You are very welcome to join us.
World Book Day Competition
A few weeks ago, our school librarians set a whole school competition. This was to design a bookmark with their favourite book and explain why. Today, the school librarians and our English link governor have been judging our World Book Day competition ready to announce in our World Book Day assembly tomorrow.
FOSB Mother’s Day Breakfast
A huge thank you to our members of FOSB and staff who supported at our special Mother’s Day breakfast this morning. Thank you to everyone who came and we hope you enjoyed it. Wishing all of our school family Mums and Grandmas a wonderful relaxing Mother’s Day on Sunday. All of the photos can be found here: https://www.stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/photo-galleries/fosb-mother-s-day-breakfast
.jpeg)
Year 5&6 Big Lent Walk
Today, Year 5&6 completed their big lent walk. The children walked through Jacks Key and around the local area and completed 4.5km each so that's 265.5km towards the school's 2000km target.
KS2 Author Visit
Yesterday, the children in KS2 were lucky enough to have a visit from Richard Alker. Richard is the author of the book ‘My Grandad vs the Fangazoo’. The children were truly immersed in his session and had many questions to ask Richard about his life and how he became an author. During the session, he discussed various things: what inspired him to write, character development, simple strategies he uses when writing and finally the children had the chance to listen to a book reading. Thank you Richard!