Leicester Cathedral service

Yesterday Mrs Impey and I took a group of children to the Christmas service at the cathedral where we enjoyed reflecting on the idea of how important our homes are at this special time of the year. The Bishop spoken of his own favourite aspects, including a train set in the loft and pizza and films on a Friday night with his family. Others shared the importance of familiarity, friendship, love, belonging, family and a place to be ourselves. Our bible readings helped us to remember that Jesus was not born at home and like many others this Christmas, experienced the difficulties and challenges of becoming a refugee. Our prayers were for those not as lucky as us, but also reflected our thankfulness for all the things that we ourselves were grateful for.

We were also fortunate enough to also have to me to find out more about Richard 3rd and to take time to learn about the Leicestershire regiment as well as enjoy our packed lunches in the Grand Hall. 

It was certainly a worthwhile trip.

Blinded by your grace

As we have continued on our Advent journey as a school we have drawn to reflect on a word that is probably underused in the time of Advent, GRACE.

I started playing the Stormzy song , Blinded by your grace, at the start and end of assembly’s recently. It’s a song full of reminders of God’s love and our identity in being a significant part of his creation. The song caught on and we have now been using it to sing along to. This has even led to a small group of future rappers in year 6 performing the song live in singing assembly yesterday and boy, where they good!

Grace is an incredible word, it speaks of love, forgiveness, hope, new beginnings,  and all that Advent is about. All of this is also being captured in our various Christmas productions that are being prepared across the school ready for next week and beyond. I have been bumping into angles, shepherds, camels and a whole range of other nativity characters over the past few days and the sound of singing has also been filling the hall and corridors. Sometimes with songs for our performances, but also occasionally a 70’s or 80;s Christmas classic fills the airways as well!

I am sure that as ever you will enjoy our Christmas productions, they will certainly be worth the wait for, something Advent is all about. 

The architect's group continues

We've had one trip out and two successful meetings of our new Architect Group.
After our trip to see an architect's office, our first meeting was focused on the process of design. The children thought about how designers had come up with innovative ways to solve problems within a project and how to take advantage of space and light within a site.

This week, we put what we'd learnt to good use: visiting the gardens of the Church; spotting problems with the site; and thinking about how we could solve them.

The children were eager have their first go at a 'proper architect job' and filled their plans of the site with ways to improve it. These ideas ranged from the simple but effective (more benches around the gardens) to the more ambitious (an extra bus stop outside the Church resulting in a change of a good number of bus routes).

We discussed the innovative ways we could solve the problems we noticed on the site and saw that there could often be many different solutions to a problem when it comes to designing.

During the weeks after the Christmas holidays, the group will get the chance to represent their ideas in drawings, using computer software and even in Lego! This will all result in their ideas contributing the redesigning of the gardens and benefiting the Church, school and wider community.