Celebrations
At our school we are really lucky because our children, staff and our local community come from a range of backgrounds, races and religions. This means we always try to celebrate as many religious (and non-religious) festivals as we can.
We feel it is really important that children are able to share how they are celebrating at home and it means our children get the opportunity to learn about religious and non-religious celebrations from one another.
Harvest festival
For the last two years we chose to ask for donations for the Black Country Foodbank as we felt a huge number of people in our community had been impacted by the pandemic and cost of living. We were overwhelmed with donations and thanks to our children, parents and staff we were thrilled to announce we collected a huge 232kgs of food! This was enough for 460 meals and 22kg of toiletries which is enough for 22 toiletry parcels. An incredible amount to help our local community.
We also learnt about the importance of foodbanks and why some people need to use them, some of us learnt about the impact Marcus Rashford has had for this cause too.
Diwali
Pupils at New Invention Junior School enjoy celebrating the festival of Diwali. Diwali is the Hindu 'Festival of Lights' and is celebrated by Hindus and Sikhs in Britain and all over the world. This festival falls on different days each year, usually celebrated in the month of October or November. Mrs Blissett taught some traditional dancing to tell the story of Diwali and other classes completed art work or writing activities and learnt the story in other ways.
Christmas
We celebrate Christmas in school in lots of different ways. Usually, we go to our local church but the last few years we have had to do things a little differently. In the last few years we learnt about the Christmas Story and how Christmas is celebrated around the world. This year each year group learnt a specific Christmas song to tell a part of the Christmas story. We had a special school assembly this year where every year group retold their section of the Nativity and our Year 3 children acted out the parts. Each class did some work on the Christmas story in their RE lessons too.
Year 3 also get to visit our local church for a Christmas workshop, where they learn about the different parts of the nativity story and complete activities about what important gifts they would bring to Jesus.
Chinese New Year
Every year we celebrate Chinese New Year - this year was the Year of the Dragon, we had a Dragon art competition and again, we were amazed at how many entries we received! In fact, we received so many entries Mrs Harris had to get some more prizes, we had hundreds of entries! Here you can see some pictures of our winners this year and our display from the Year of the Rabbit. Next year we will celebrating the Year of the Snake. We already can't wait to see the competition entries next year!
Easter
Every year we celebrate Easter in school, we all learn about the story of Easter and the importance of the festival to many Christians all over the world. Last year our work focused on the feelings and emotions felt by the different people in the story as the events unfolded. We also completed some work looking at the similarities and differences between the role of Jesus in the Easter story and Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis and compared what happens to them.
This year we learnt about the story of Easter and we completed a range of activities across school - some us wrote poems and recounts (you can see an example of our work below)
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Our friends from Open the Book came into school and did a special Easter assembly for us all and we learnt some Easter songs - you can hear us singing one on our school Twitter page.
Eid
Lots of our children and their families celebrate Eid, this is an Islamic holiday that celebrates the end of Ramadan. Muslim people all over the world fast during Ramadan, fasting is a very important part of the Islamic religion for many people. We learnt about why Eid is so important and how different people might celebrate Eid. We completed some activities in school to celebrate, you can see an example of some work some of us completed below.
