The highlight of our week was a visit from Anne Frank Trust!

We unpicked the following terms throughout a variety of activities:

Prejudice: pre-judging people without knowledge

Discrimination: acting upon your prejudice and treating people unfairly

Genocide: organised execution of people planned on a large scale

Stereotype: Labelling a group of people rather than considering each person’s individuality

Identity: who you are e.g. what you look like, your personal information, talents and interests, culture and religion.

Dictator: a ruler with total power over a country (Hitler, Kim Jon Un)

We used the Holocaust and Anne Frank’s diary entries to discuss the prejudice and discrimination she and many other Jews faced and which unltimately led to her death.

We then linked our learning to our curriculum unit of ‘Heroes & Villains’ and discussed how we can become heroes and challenge all forms of prejudice and discrimination to make the future a better place.

Here are some questions for you to reflect upon:

– Why is it dangerous to stereotype?

– What groups are discriminated against?

– What things could make you a poor digital citizen?

– What things can you do to become a good digital citizen?

– What gift would you give to someone who was behaving in a discriminatory way?

Year 5 & 6 came together today in a joint celebration of mass.

The First Reading from a letter of St Paul to the Corinthians reminded us that we are individuals but we also form part of a much bigger family and each have our contributions to make.

“Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many”

( 1 Corinthians: 12:12-13)

Thank you to all of those who contributing further to our mass through offering readings, bidding prayers, the offertory and altar serving.

Thank you also to those parents, friends and family who were able to join us.

We joined the other Year 6 and 7 students and teachers from our unity cluster in the celebration of Mass today for the Feast Day of the Exhaltation of the Holy Cross.

It was a lovely way to end our week!

Thank you to all of our past and present Year 6’s who came to join us for pizza and chips tonight. It was great to see you all and hear how you are getting on in your secondary schools. Please, keep in touch!

On Friday 14th September, Year 6 will be joining other Year 7 pupils from our Unity Cluster school and Bishop Ullathorne’s Year 7 pupils for a shared celebration of mass at St Thomas More Church. Mass will finish by 2.45pm and children will return to their schools.

We are inviting our previous Year 6 pupils back to our school to enjoy pizza & chips and a good catch up with the current Year 6 pupils. We ask that all children are collected by 5.15pm.

Thank you to all of the children who volunteered to take a more active role in our first whole school mass of the year by offering readings, bidding prayers, presenting the offertory and altar serving.

It was a lovely way of celebrating the beginning of our new academic year together as one.

Thank you to all of our familes who were able to attend this morning. We hope you enjoyed the beautiful singing as much as we did.

Today was Year 6’s launch day of our Autumn term curriculum’s theme: Heroes and Villains!

Of course, I was the hero and Mrs Elkins was the villain…

The children had an action-packed day understanding what it means to be a hero and a villain, describing a hero in their own lives and creating their very own superhero/villain characters!

From now on, we are all going to try our very hardest to ‘Choose to be a hero, not a villain!’

It was lovely to see so many happy and smiling faces enter their new classroom on Tuesday! We are glad you all had such lovely holidays and have returned safe and well for the new academic year ahead.

We started the week by hearing about each other’s best bits from the holidays before leading the way into the first whole school assembly of the year where Year 6 were proudly promoted to sitting on the benches and setting the best example to the younger years. Staff were awarded to our House Groups by picking names out of a hat before choosing their House Captain from Year 6. Congratulations to James, Muno, Lucy and Luke on their new roles as House Captains!

After collaboaratively creating our class rules for the year ahead, we put them into practice as children completed their first piece of work, writing biographical poems, which were so lovely to read! We then got a bit crafty creating Blitz-inspired artwork, birthday cards for each other and our Confirmation display. See if you can work out who is who from their silhouettes:

We spent Wednesday afternoon in the prayer garden with our first class prayer service based on the theme ‘New Beginnings’. Thank you to all children who volunteered to read and did so reverently.

Thank you to those who have volunteered to be part of the School Council:

The class votes have been counted and the elected members will be announced in next week’s Superstars assembly!

Well done to our Summer holiday competition winners: Harry for his ‘Reading in a GORGEous location’:

and Reuben for his lovely postcard:

Congratulations also to this week’s Superstars, Lily and James!

Thank you all for a positive start to what I hope will be your best year yet! 🙂