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
Year 2 - World Book Day
We had an action packed World Book Day. Here we are enjoying our book tasting towards the end of the day. This was a nice opportunity to relax and enjoy a good book. We had a selection of books for the children to choose from whilst enjoying juice and biscuits. Any books the children liked, were added to their book shelf of favourite books.
KS1 World Book Day Assembly
Thank you to our wonderful KS1 children for their fantastic enthusiasm and excitement in this morning’s World Book Day assembly. Mrs Ham introduced the worship by telling the children all about the word that she had come dressed as which was ‘onomatopoeia.’ The children then joined in with a picture book 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 The Smartest Giant in Town, Elmer, The Squirrels Who Squabbled, Who Pooed in my Loo, My Dad is a Grizzly Bear and The Highway Rat. The second round consisted of playing emoji Pictionary with books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Giraffes Can’t Dance, The Gruffalo and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. All of the books that were on the quiz were 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. Our librarians also awarded Emily and Molly with their book tokens as they were the KS1 winners of our ‘Design a Bookmark with Your Favourite Book Title’ competition.Molly’s bookmark showed her love of the ‘Who Pooed in my Loo?’ picture book and Emily’s showed her love of ‘Stickman.’
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?
Forest School Club
In forest school club we have been making stick people. The children found the sticks they wanted to use and thought about how they wanted their stick people to look. We learned how to do a square lashing to hold the sticks together. When we finished our stick people the children chose to have a game of stick in the mud.
KS1 Wellbeing Club
Today at wellbeing club, our Year 1 and 2 children made Mothering Sunday cards. Their cards doubled up as hanging decorations so that their mummy’s could remove these from the cards and continue to display them even when the Mothering Sunday cards are taken down.
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.
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.
KS1 Author Visit
This morning, Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 had a visit from children’s author, R.K.Alker. He told us that he hadn’t always been an author but he had also worked in many other professions. Whilst working as a paramedic, he had hurt his leg and could no longer do this anymore so he was suddenly struck by the idea of becoming a children’s author. He believes that God has called him to become a children's author. It was something that he’d dreamed of for 30 years and became incredibly excited by the idea. He told us that he writes a story by writing it and then going back to edit and improve it by making sure that he’s told the author who, what, where, when, why and how, using his his five senses and re-reading his writing to check it makes sense. He then read chapter 7 of his story, ‘My Grandad Vs the FangaZOO’ and we met a mischievous little boy called Zac who set off the emergency alarm on the aeroplane. Rich then did a question and answer session. Renee asked how many books Rich had published, Jack asked what Rich’s favourite part of his story was, Isaac asked how long it took Rich to write a book, Cassidy asked where Rich had got his inspiration for writing from, Lottie asked how long Rich had been writing books and Elijah had asked what Stretch the Dragon (who features in Rich’s story) likes to do at the weekend.