We have reached the end of a busy half term. The new year is in full flow! As I write this, the staff are meeting with you all virtually to celebrate and share your child’s learning journey so far. As always, it has been a learning journey for staff too - old and new, working together purposefully and compassionately to guide and support the children and coming together as a team.
This has been a particularly busy week! On Monday we gathered alongside our parish community to celebrate Harvest. Year 6 led the readings and the choir sang beautifully. Once we returned to school we collected together all your generous food donations given over the past few weeks, ready to go to the food bank. We had three wonderful mums who volunteered to ferry the bags and boxes- thank you so much ladies! Later in the day, I received a lovely email from Margaret Sellick (past Chair of Governors and member of the Food Bank team) it read:
Just wanted to say a massive thank you on behalf of St Annes Foodbank to everyone at school for the Harvest collection which weighed a fantastic 224.16kg! This donation is most appreciated and all the food will be used in parcels for local people. Thanks also to everyone who sorted the food into groups which made it easier to put away.
Kind Regards”
Our Head Boy and Head Girl - collecting the food together
Our wonderful volunteers
Following Harvest, on Tuesday, Year 3 performed their thought provoking assembly - teaching each of us that we are all perfect and precious in God’s eyes- thank you Year 3. On the same day and after a busy learning day in class, our Year 5 and 6 children played netball and football against Heyhouses- the children have written match reports!
ART COMPETITION
Art continues to be loved throughout school. As a further celebration of Harvest, Miss Neves set the children a pumpkin challenge/competition! Each class had to paint, make, draw or construct pumpkins inspired by famous artists! Children’s creativity was left to flourish as they explored a wide variety of media. Here are the children whose artwork won first second and third - find a celebration of the art on the ART/DT button on the LEARN page of the website!
NEW PARENT GOVERNORS
The votes have all been counted. There were well over 200 of them. Congratulations to Ruth Cronin and Joe Davies who have been appointed as our new parent governors and will serve a 4 year term of office. We will be in touch in the coming days with regards to getting you 'governor ready' for the remainder of our autumn term! We’d like to thank all of the prospective parent governors who put themselves forward for the role - it gave us such a boost to see that number of candidates coming forward and wishing to serve our school community.
A huge thank you too, to the many parents who voted - there was a wonderful response and it really is heartwarming to have so many of you involved in this important process.
Office News
Just a reminder that we return to school on Monday 31st October and we have a 7 week and 2 day half- term (37 sessions) leading up to Christmas. Dinner Money for the half-term will be £88.80 (dinners are £2.40 each) and as always, payable on ParentPay. This week’s dinners will be inputted by the end of the day and any necessary reminders sent re payment. Please do take a look at your child’s dinner account over the holiday and, if dinners are required, please ensure that you have paid in advance.
Please believe us, we don’t like to nag but if a dinner is required it should always be prepaid.
Our School Community will be going to Church for 9:30am Mass on Tuesday 1st November, All Saints’ Day, please come and join us.
Finally, UNIFORM! We would love you to collect any spare outgrown uniform, washed and in good condition, and bring it to the Office, the first week back after half-term. We’ll sort and then on Friday 11th November at 2:50pm, we’ll have a uniform stall set up in Year 6 spare classroom to visit before picking up the children - there will be no charge, we’d like people to come and take items which will be of use to them and it’s a way of being eco aware and recycling. It would be great though if you do have uniform in good condition to pass on and hopefully will be of use to parents who need to top up on uniform.
Winning attendance for the whole Half term combined
Compassionate and Loving.
Finally, a note about our virtues. Here at Our Lady’s, we strive to be more like Jesus everyday. To help us we focus each half term on two personal virtues - these we nurture and practise at every opportunity we can. During each Friday assembly this year we share the times we witnessed compassion and love. These reflections have helped us to always remember what is truly important - one another.
God Bless you all, have a lovely autumn break with your families - rest and recover ready to start again on Monday 31st October.