Open Days for our September 2027 intake
💙Is your child starting Reception this September? 💙 We warmly welcome parents, carers, and children to come and see our school in action. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet our school family and enjoy a guided tour with our Headteacher, Mrs Ham. 📅 Open Day Dates & Times: Tuesday 22nd September: 9.00 - 10.30am Wednesday 7th October: 2.00 - 3.30pm Thursday 15th October: 2.00 - 3.30pm Monday 9th November: 9.00 - 10.30am Thursday 19th November: 9.00 - 10.30am Friday 27th November: 2.00 - 3.30pm 📝 How to Book Your Tour: To secure your place on one of our open days, please complete our booking form: 👉 https://forms.gle/DxqPdvyXDx1Xmd918 To get a feel for our school and what we can offer your child, please see our news page on our website: https://stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/news and our photo galleries: https://stbarnabasdarwen.co.uk/photo-gallery-category/our-gallery Please also keep your eye on our website for the dates of our stay and play sessions that will soon be coming up for our current Reception parents and carers and pre-school children, parents and carers. We look forward to meeting you and your child! 💙😀
Year 4 Soap Sculptures
In this week’s art lesson, Year 4 used a variety of tools to carve pieces of soap into a sculpture. They first drew their designs into paper and then transferred these onto individual pieces of soap. They created some fantastic pieces using both their tools and their hands to carve, model and refine.
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Friday Celebration Worship
This morning, we began our Celebration Worship by reflecting on another amazing week at school. This week, we have thoroughly enjoyed our whole-school performance of Pinocchio, and across the school, our children have been working extremely hard to demonstrate Barney’s 4Bs and our Christian Values as they strive to earn ClassDojo points. We have been incredibly impressed by the children’s positive attitudes to learning and the high standards of behaviour we have seen throughout the school. Well done, everyone! We then celebrated our Barney’s Brilliant Beacons. A huge well done to Hunter, Lily, Albie and Hadi in KS1, and Elsie, Phoebe, Annabel, Alice, Harry, Emily, Alfie and Eliza in KS2. Well done to these amazing children, who have made such a fantastic start to the academic year! You have all been wonderful role models and truly shining examples of Barney’s Beacons. We are incredibly proud of you! Mrs Ham then shared a few important reminders with us. The Big Summer Weekend at our church this weekend, School Photograph Day will take place on Wednesday 16th September, followed by our Macmillan Coffee Morning on Friday 25th September. Our lunchtime and after-school clubs have also now gone live on Arbor and are available to book. To bring our worship to a close, we were treated to some beautiful prayers from Annabel and Seb. Thank you to everyone who joined us for Celebration Worship this morning, and an extended thank you to all of our families for your continued support, both this week and every week. We wish you all a wonderful and restful weekend! 🌟
Year 4 - National Day of Prayer for Schools
In our Class Worship, we focused on The National Day of Prayer for Schools when Christians across the UK set aside time to pray for their local schools. As a class, we decided to write our own special lunchtime prayers thinking about everyone that is involved in making our lunches from the farmers who grew the crops to the kitchen staff who serve it or our mums and dads that may have made our packed lunches.
Welcome Wellbeing Warriors in Year 4
Today our new Wellbeing Warriors were given their Ambassador badges along with their SCARF lanyards so that children can recognise them and they can support them with new ideas and initiatives along with running our Living Streets Walk to School Campaign. The children are super keen and enthusiastic about their roles and we can’t wait to see what they do. A big welcome to Seb, Elijah, Ella and Heidi.
Year 4 Art - Exploring 3D Chalk Art
As part of our first art lesson, we have been looking at developing our ideas for 3D work through drawing and visualisation in 2D. We studied the work of Magdalene Odundo who uses clay and ceramics to create pots and vessels. Following this we sketched large pots and vases onto black sugar paper using chalk in the hall so we could make the most of the space using our whole arms to do so.
Year 4 RE - Rosh Hashana
In our RE lesson this week we looked at how Jesus was Jewish and so would have celebrated Jewish festivals to honour God. We paid particular focus to Rosh Hashana which is the Jewish New Year. The children looked at how they eat apples dipped in honey for a sweet year and then created prayers focusing on their wishes for this new school year and what they’d like to leave behind. We finished by eating apples dipped in honey to celebrate all things sweet.
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Friday Celebration Worship
This morning, we began our celebration worship by reflecting on what has been a fantastic start to the year. Well done to all of our children across school for returning with such a wonderful attitude to learning, demonstrating the Barney’s 4Bs and showing great courage. Today was our first Celebration Worship of the half-term, which will always be reserved exclusively for our children to share and celebrate the awards and achievements they have gained outside of school. We started with our infant children. A huge congratulations to Indie who achieved Star of the Week at gymnastics and has also been demonstrating great skill at Tae Kwon Do, Bo for gaining Star of the Week at football and achieving 6th place in a biking race, Olivia, Eleanor, Phoebe, Callie, James, Isabella and Harry for completing the BwD Summer Reading Challenge, Isabella for achieving her Stage 6 in swimming, Callie for achieving her Stage 7, completing 100 metres and achieving 25 metres in breaststroke and front crawl at swimming, Phoebe and Max for completing the Explorer Challenge at Whitehall Park, Fiia for achieving her cartwheel in gymnastics and swimming 5 metres, Tommy-Joe, for being awarded his Stage 3 swimming certificate, Vienna and Ohana for both gaining their Water Safety Award with Ohana also achieving her 100 metres swimming certificate. We then moved on to celebrate our Juniors. Well done to Renee for achieving an award in bravery for flying and gaining her orange and white striped belt at kickboxing, Ella, for being awarded her Stage 4 swimming certificate, Elijah, Seb and Harry for competing in the All Stars Cricket Club Camp, Fletcher for getting through to the Blackburn Youth Darts Academy Final, being recognised as an All Stars Cricket Club superstar and achieving his Bronze Award at Beavers, Lyla for achieving an array of dancing medals in recognition of her great skill in improv, lyrical, jazz, ballet and commercial dance, Annabel for being welcomed into the Blackburn Centurions Swimming Club after successfully attending a trial and James for beating his rival team in a recent football match and being awarded Man of the Match. We then ended our worship with some lovely prayers from James and Olivia, before Mrs Ham announced that our clubs will soon be going live. Keep an eye on Arbor for further information and opportunities to get involved. Finally, a huge thank you to all of our parents and families for your continued support and encouragement. Thank you to those who were able to join us for our Celebration Worship this morning.
Year 4 - Our Representation of the 4 Barney’s Be’s
Today we looked at our four Barney’s Be’s and what they mean to us and how we perceive them to be. The children thought of some wonderful ways to show respect, be ready, be safe and show kindness. They then added these to their very own posters. This showed us how important these four rules are and how much the children value them.
Year 4 - Team Building & Problem Solving
As part of our settling back into Year 4, we completed problem solving and team building activities. The children worked brilliantly together showing encouragement and perseverance in order to complete a variety of challenges.
Behaviour Update
Dear Parents and Carers, welcome back everyone! It has been wonderful to see the children looking so smart in their uniforms and being ready to learn. They have all come into school beautifully and behaved so well in worship this morning. A special welcome to our new Reception children who settled so well this morning and we are looking forward to our second group of children this afternoon. It was fantastic to see so many of our previous Year 6 children as they came to say hello and have a hug before starting at high school tomorrow. We wish all of our previous Year 6 children all the luck in the world as they start their high school journey this week. Remember, keep achieving great things and living life in all its fullness! Please find attached to class dojo a behaviour update document, which details some exciting updates to our school behaviour policy. We officially launched this new system during worship this morning! Because of this, you may have already noticed instant notifications popping up on your Class Dojo app today when your child was awarded a point. As outlined in the letter, we are moving away from our traditional "values points" and will now be using Class Dojo points to track and reward positive behaviour across the school. This means you will no longer have to wait for physical values awards to come home; instead, you will be able to see daily updates of your child's wonderful behaviour at the click of a button. Please take a few minutes to read the letter in full to learn more about: *How children earn points (such as following the "Four Be's" and demonstrating our Christian Values). *The exciting new individual, class, and house rewards. * Important adjustments to our Friday Celebration Worship and how we celebrate out-of-school achievements. Thank you for your continued support and we welcome your feedback!
Happy first day of school! 🌟
We’ve had a brilliant day together and the children have been absolute stars. We hope you have a great time tonight hearing all about what they got up to, and especially why they earned their Dojo points today! 🏆 Thank you for such a great start to the term. See you all tomorrow! 💙
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