Holywell Challenge Updates

Week Six - Gold:

Preparing for Easter.  The weather has certainly helped us all to see the ‘new beginnings’  emerging at this time of the year! Two classes visited our lovely Church in Holywell to ‘Experience Easter’ led by staff and volunteers from Church. At the end of the week we held our traditional service at the Church and also presented new plants, one per class for the Peace Garden, these were accompanied by prayers and added to the garden by the children. The whole school took part and prayers were led by Rev Sheila Anthony outside. We enjoyed a silent minute to absorb all the glorious sights and sounds of this very beautiful spot.

The challenge has helped us to forge some new and very positive links in our community. The village Gardening Club joined us this week to dig over our growing plots and will return to do some planting with the children. Parents and Grandparents also attended and it was a happy ‘get together’ for all as well as a very helpful event for school! At least one new member of the Gardening Club was ‘signed up’ at the event!

Week 5 : Silver

This week we enjoyed finding out about all the worldwide links that we have through school – and appreciating that although the world is a huge place we ‘stretch’ out into many parts of it. Each class is working to record all their worldwide links and we hope to use this in our future work. 

Week Four - Gold

We followed our now familiar pattern of introducing the theme to the whole school via the  associated powerpoint in Monday’s worship.

During the week other worship and class based discussion pursued the same theme, encouraging the children to add their own thoughts and ideas.

This week we had a wonderful event where we followed a suggestion (made by one of our Mums) of a South African tradition to host a special party to honour Mums! Our curate, Susan Bowden-Pickstock led a wonderful and thought provoking talk (with pictures) about mothering – this was for all the children and their mums (lots attended!) This was followed by an opportunity to join the children at play and for refreshments – including homemade cakes and biscuits. A really successful and happy family time in school – we are eager  to repeat! 

We also had a happy and rather special time when our deputy Headteacher was joined by her own daughter (a pupil at school) along with her own Mother and Granny – four generations working and playing together!

Week 3 - Silver

Each week we are sharing the Diocesan powerpoint related to the theme and the children are enjoying these very much.

For our particular focus this week following a discussion of all the wonderful ‘natural’ aspects of our village school we decided to try to reduce the amount of paper that we use. Each class is to establish a tray for paper that can be reused on its second side. Further to this we have set up a pupil based litter picking service.

Simple things but they will make a positive difference.

Week Two - Silver

For Week 2 (Remember school neighbours) we decided to make our in-school community the focus and encouraged children to sit with others and to have ‘in depth’ conversations – some very charming outcomes! We re-introduced shared reading between classes of different age groups and also shared our work following clay workshops – Reception were very proud to take Y6 to see their clay Goldilocks pieces.

A big focus for the week was to set up a special event to celebrate the return to school of Thomas (Y5) who has just completed chemotherapy treatment. A fun day has been established when the children will bring in bikes and scooters (a school council request) and share their skills (a safety planning challenge  for the teachers!) Families have been invited to make a donation – the children plan to fund a ‘fun time’ for the family!

Week One - Silver

During the first week the children created a large Lent calendar outside the hall –shared by all on the way in!

We also returned the pots of daffodils from the Mini Pots of Care campaign from Marie Curie (begun in the Autumn). Children brought their daffodil pots into assembly and we discussed the importance of helping others and giving to support. The donations amounted to just over £258