Dear Parents
Thank you for all your support this week – I know many of you have had to make tricky choices within your family context and some of you have had to get children tested multiple times (worth it when they later tested positive!) Thank you for working together as a community to protect Christmas for everyone as best we can!
It has been a surreal week in school with attendance running at about 70%, but we have been doing our best to carry on with the events we could:
On Monday, our “Community Christmas” gifts were distributed from the Giving Tree. A range of charities and individuals benefitted from your generosity, including HomeStart and local families supported through the Home School service. Our elderly parishioners and the residents of Whiteley Village received gifts too. We have already received a thank you card from the lunch club we supported - it thanks the school and parents for “the generosity shown to our members who were delighted to receive their gifts with specially written labels.” You can see the HomeStart thank you below.
On Tuesday evening, our Year 6 children sang their hearts out at our Carol Service at St Erconwald’s. It was wonderful to hear them tell the story of Christmas in song and to see them build up the crib scene. On behalf of Fr Ruslan and himself, Fr Richard blessed our children and families, wishing all of us a happy and holy Christmas
On Wednesday, we enjoyed Christmas lunch in school and Trina, Jan, Waffa and Sarah did an amazing job of feeding all of us, including 6 bubbles in classrooms, 4 year groups in the hall and even all of the staff teams in our own bubbles! The children had an amazing time, singing along to Jingle Bells and to “If you’re happy and you know it” (led by Y6!).
On Thursday, we held our Parent Association Santa’s Grotto and Raffle event. The children’s faces when they went in to see Santa were just so magical! Santa even came along to pull out some of the tickets and the hampers were really special! Thank you for all your donations and well done to the winners! Some of the generous supporters of our raffle are named later in the newsletter below - please do support them if you can and thank you to the PA for all your hard work in such difficult times!
Through the week, our children have enjoyed the Elf Trail and Candy Cane wishes activities - carefully prepared by our Y2 Reps - thank you for all your hard work with this!
Our Y2 children have been enjoying telling the Christmas story at home through the travelling cribs - the Padlet to show their Travelling Crib is below.
On Friday our children all had a Christmas collective worship in class where they watched a recording of our youngest child placing Jesus in the crib and we reflected on the Christmas story and sang our favourite carols. That youngest child was able to explain that Jesus was born because God wanted us to know how much he loves us. It put me in mind of the carol “Love Shone Down” which our children were hoping to sing at Tuesday’s Carol Service.
Looking ahead to January, we are looking forward to welcoming the children back on Tuesday 4th January and we already have busy plans for the first week back! We hope that Friday 7th January will give us an opportunity to celebrate the end of Christmastide together as a whole school with an Epiphany Mass at 9am in the school hall, to which all parents are invited. We will try to allow Year 4 and Year 5 and the school choir to perform their carols before, during and after that Mass so do come along if you would like to.
In the afternoon of Friday 7th January, we are hopeful that Y2 and Y3 will be able to perform an “Epiphany” version of The Shiniest Star, with an opportunity for all our wonderful soloists to sing their parts on stage in front of their parents. Fingers crossed that this can go ahead following our circuit breaker this Christmas! We will hope to hold the Chocolate Tombola and Bottle Tombola after school that Friday too, outdoors and socially distanced, all being well.
On behalf of all our staff, I would like to thank you for your generosity to everyone this Christmastime - your cards, food and gifts are all greatly appreciated and we have all been struck by your kind words supporting us throughout this challenging term. We are blessed to work with your wonderful children and to enjoy the support of the whole community. A heartfelt thank you to you all!
Wishing all of you a very happy and peaceful Christmas and every blessing in 2022.
God bless.
Catherine Burnham
StreetSafe
Autumn Multi Skills Results
Please notify the school office every day your child is absent from school before 9 am so we can adjust dinner figures etc. Please either ring the school office and leave a voicemail or email absence@cardinalnewmanschool.co.uk. Thank you
