English Events

Take a look at what we've been up to...

WORLD BOOK DAY 2023

Thank you so much to all of our St Mary's families who came into school to participate in our Big Booky Breakfast. It was so lovely to see so many of you! We even got a surprise visit from Clifford the Big Red Dog!

The children had a phenomenal day of completing lots of fun activities such as an outdoor story hunt, redesigning book covers and so much more! Head over to our Facebook page to see what else we got up to!

A couple of messages from our families:

" Lovely atmosphere, good selection of books - a great idea!"

"The children really enjoyed the Big Booky Breakfast."

"I've been coming here for World Book Day for years and this place has never been so full! Fun, fun, fun!"

Happy National Storytelling Week!

We enjoyed a whole school assembly to kickstart the week in which we celebrate storytelling! The theme of the week is: 'When I grow up.'

The children listened to a story told by members of staff and thought about what makes good storytelling. We discussed how Jesus was a storyteller and thought about how parables were told to teach us lessons.

The assembly finished off with a challenge for the children to complete: Tell a story to someone at home or at school about what you want to be/do when you grow up.

We thought about which virtues and values are important to help us to fulfil our vocation.

Wow! What a fabulous morning we have all had. Thank you to M&M Theatrical Productions for bringing Snow White to St Mary's! We look forward to completing our follow up writing unit based on this amazing hook!

Here is what the children said:

Noah (Y1) - "This is the best pantomime I have ever seen!"

Bella (Y3) - “I love this school because we have the opportunity to do so many different things.”

Hannah (Y3) - “I loved the pantomime because they brought the fairytale to life!”

Alfie (Y4) - “It was amazing! The jester was really funny.”

Bobby (Y5) - “I thought it was amazing! The great acting made me laugh a lot!”

Hannah (Y6) - “It was really fun and the music choices were a good option for the theme. I would recommend the show to others. All kids were really enjoying it!”

This year, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of World Book Day! We thoroughly enjoyed dressing up as our favourite book character and sharing our favourite book with the class. Throughout the day, we participated in lots of activities, such as: creating our own rap about books, participating in BBC live lessons, creating our own book characters, listening to audio books, designing our own National Book Token in the official World Book Day competition and much more. We then had the pleasure of being read to by another teacher in the afternoon, during the teacher swap session. To continue our celebrations, we have since been working on completing our very own Spring Reading Challenge.

Reading on BBC Radio Stoke!

Some of our Year 6 children have represented St Mary's Catholic Primary School on BBC Radio Stoke’s book club! The children selected one of their favourite books to read an extract from with some clues to help the audience. I wonder if you can guess which book they chose…? The children also spoke about our wonderful new library! Below is the link for you to listen to - skip to one hour and 39 minutes into the programme and the second part at 1 hour 48 minutes . 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0bgbyz9

Some of our Year 1 children had a lovely afternoon meeting Karen and Dotty the reading dog. They were so happy reading to Dotty and talking about their books.

To celebrate Roald Dahl day this year, each class conducted a scientific investigation based on a Roald Dahl book. The children had lots of fun making lava lamps, fizzy colours and using their footprints to measure their height! Who says learning isn't fun?

PYJAMARAMA

Friday 14th May 2021

St Mary's took part in Pyjamarama - a day in pyjamas to celebrate reading and stories! We raised a huge £294 to support the provision of books for children who are less fortunate, as we know how important reading is!

We were able to recommend our favourite books to our peers and we participated in lots of reading activities throughout the day, such as: acting out our favourite nursery rhymes/stories, which we shared with residents of Rowan Court; miming the most dramatic part of our favourite traditional tales; reading a range of non-fiction books and sharing the most fascinating facts we could find; performing our favourite poem and explaining why we liked it; deciding which books we would take with us on a desert island and being able to justify these choices; and reading a range of mystery and horror books from which we voted for the ultimate scary story! To finish off our reading festival, we shared juice and biscuits whilst listening to a story.

Children' s author, Eamonn Reilly, visited St. Mary's to inspire our children to write. He shared some of his intriguing stories with us and gave us some super writing tips and challenges to complete.

We were given the opportunity to purchase his books which were personally signed by Eamonn himself!