Eco Team

Welcome to the Eco team webpage here you will find updates and links to our campaigns in school.  The Eco team has grown since we first started and we now have Eco representatives from each class in Key Stage 2. We have recently recruited three new Eco members from Year 3 who are eager to improve our Eco school.

We are proud to announce we have been awarded the Eco Schools Green Flag for the fourth time running.  The Eco team have done an amazing job over the past two years and we will continue to strive for a more Eco friendly school and community. We are currently working through our Environmental Review and will be sharing with you our outcomes and next steps very soon.

Each year group is focusing on an area of the Eco agenda.  They are as follows:

Year 3

School grounds and Global Citizenship

Year 4

Waste and biodiversity

Year 5

Healthy schools and litter

Year 6

Energy and Water

We organise two Bag 2 School Collections  each year.  The response from the school community is always very generous and helps raise funds for our school as well as encourage everyone to recycle effectively.

Walk to School

For the second year, we have launched our living streets walk to school initiative.  We promote that at least one ‘eco friendly’ journey takes place each week.  If you live some distance from school we offer the park and stride facility so you can park your car on the church car park and walk to school.  This assists with the congestion outside school at the start and end of the day.

Thank you to all the boys and girls who, so far, have tried hard to walk to school and to ride bikes and scooters.

Fair-trade Fortnight

During Fair-trade Fortnight, we worked hard to raise awareness about the importance of Fair-trade and its significance in making the world a fairer place.  The Eco Team held an assembly about Fair-trade, we hosted the Big Brew and invited parents along and encouraged all classes to buy Fair-trade products wherever possible.  The PFA supported us by organising the Fair-trade refreshments, for which we were very grateful.  Almost £200 was raised for the cause.

Eco Week

As part of our Eco Week work, all classes completed work to address one of the seven areas of study as part of the school’s eco work.  From transport to biodiversity, each class completed some curriculum work of their choosing.

Encouraging Biodiversity

In the woodland, we have been doing our best to create a range of habitats to encourage different wildlife to nest.  We have created a deadwood pile for beetles, hedgehogs and hibernating toads and reclaimed an abandoned insect hotel and given it new life! We have just started working on our pond area and we are extending our pond area with a herb garden.  Watch this space!

School Coucil

School Council 2024-25

Meet the team:

Year 5: Al-Ameen, Jaxon, Alex, Lauren,Quinn

Year 4:  Alyssa, Mariana,Usair, Kai, Daniel

Roles within the team:

Chairman – Alyssa  Vice-Chairman – Al-Ameen, Secretary – Mariana, Vice-Secretary – Lauren, Treasurer – Jaxon, Vice-Treasurer – Alex

Spokespersons – Quinn, Vice Spokesperson-Usair, ICT Coordinator- Kai, Collator/Reporter-Daniel

We meet every Tuesday lunchtime in Year 3 classroom.

Spring Term 1 and 2 – 2025

The School Council and GIFT teams will be supporting our local homeless charity – PETRUS as well as Rochdale Foodbank.

Autumn Term 1 and 2 -2024

The team began this year supporting the ‘Friends of Holy Family’ CAKE SALE and we raised £340.00 for children at Holy Family.

We worked in partenership with our GIFT team to plan, organise and coordinate the NSPCC ‘KIndness Challenge’ and raised with your support £28.90.

On our Christmas Goodies stall we raised a fabulous £148.00.

Th team wrote to various local companies kindly asking for donations for our Christmas raffles and these raised £140.00.

Thank you for your continued support.

Previous Achievements

School Council 2023-24

For our final project of this year, the School Council have decided to raise awareness and vital funds for the North West Air Ambulance (NWAA).

The NWAA is celebrating 25 years of saving lives this year. The team decided to walk around our playground and count their steps. THe average count was 125 steps completes one round, so to compliment 25 years of this vital charity the team would like the whole school to walk around the playground twice bringing the total walked per child to 250 steps (approximately) to celebrate and link with the anniversary of the NWAA.

Spring Term 1 and 2  – 2024

On Friday 16th Februay 2024 we launched our NSPCC Number Day to raisae awareness and funds for the NSPCC charity.

The School Council prepare an assembly to promote the great work the NSPCC do working with children and young adults,

including their ‘SPEAK OUT AND STAY SAFE’ campaign. We raised £91.95 for this hard working national charity.

Approaching Easter, we began working alongside Mrs Nightingale and co-ordinated an Easter Egg Raffle to run across the whole school.

This project supported Caritas’ St Josephs Penny charity to help collect loose change to support children in less fortunate families. We raised £258.00.

Meet the winners!

Autumn term 1 and 2 – 2023

Successfully worked in partnership with ‘Rochdale Foodbank.‘

Our ‘Macmillan Event’ was very successful and with our friends and families kind and generous donations we raised £337.63.

We worked in partnership with out Gift Team to raise awareness for the Caritas Christmas Appeal #BeeThere and produced 19 ‘Christmas Gift Boxes.’

We worked with Friends of Holy Family and our GIFT Team to plan, order, prepare and organise our ‘Christmas Goody Bag Stall at the Christmas Fair on Friday 1st December. We raised £68.00 for our local homeless charity ‘Petrus.’

Autumn Term 2022-we are winners of the ‘Caritas Catholic Social Teaching Award.’ This award is given to those who recognise and help others in need. WELL DONE TO ALL OUR MEMBERS!

Thank you for your continued support.

PREVIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS

We have worked with Mrs Collins and wrote a letter to local companies to ask politely for any donations for our Christmas Fair, we were inundated with lots of beautiful gifts. The PFA raffle raised £248.00 with these donations. Thank you to all our generous local companies for their kind donations.

Spring term 1 – 2023

A huge ‘THANK YOU’ for all your kind and generous donations for our local foodbank in Rochdale, the project was a great success.

Each member introduced themselves and explained their roles to Mr Hardiker, Rochdale Foodbank Warehouse Manager. Thank you Mr Hardiker, Mrs Entwistle, staff and volunteers for working with our team and long may your valued work continue.

Your donations will help over 125 families every day.

Spring Term 2

We have been working with our Chaplaincy Team to raise awareness and funds for the people of Turkey and Syria after the devastating earthquakes that happened 6th February 2023. We have teamed up with the Disaster Emergency Committee and created a JustGiving page. We have raised, with your kind donations, £154.00 in total. A big THANK YOU to all our families and friends and for your continuous support.

Summer Term 1 and 2 – 2023

We have been working in partnership with Rochdale Foodbank to create A4 posters to be displayed at the Rochdale unit situated in our town centre. We decided to co-ordinate a whole school competiiton, we had lots of fabulous entries. Mrs Nightingale had a tough job choosing the 10 winners. Each winner received a set of art pencils and sketch book. Congratulations to all our winners. (We are the first school in the Borough to be asked to produce posters to be displaced by the Foodbank).

Our final project this year has been to co-ordinate the ‘Children’s Champion and Deputy Champion Ballot box.’ We planned a short presentation to reveal the candidates. We were thrilled to announce one of our children in Year five – Lena, successfully got through to the final 12. Unfortunately, not this time for Lena.

We wish good luck for next year!

This year we have successfully completed 9 projects, raised awareness and funds for a local, national and international charities totalling £598.00.

Congratulations and very well done to this year’s team on your very successful year.

Thank you for your continued support and kind generosity.

Previous achievements:

Summer Term 2022

We have purchased ‘child friendly parking cones’ to ensure the safety of our children, parents/carers and families entering and leaving school premises on Great Gates Road. Thank you for your continued support in keeping this area clear of parking.  Thank you to Mrs Arnold and our Governors for the funds to purchase these.

School Council Achievements 2021-22

During the Autumn term we worked in partnership with Year Three (harvest) and coordinated all the donations with our Local Food Bank.

We hosted our annual Macmillan Cake Day and raised £294.02, working in partnership with our PFA.

We prepared, planned, organised and presented to the whole school in assembly information on our annual ‘NSPCC – Number Day’ and raised £102.22 with support and kind donations from all of our children, parents/carers and staff.

Previous  successful working partnerships:

We have supported the Digital Leaders with teaching Key Stage 1 & 2 about E-safety and how to keep safe on line.

We have raised money for McMillan Cancer and Fairtrade projects working alongside our PFA.

We have supported our local charity for the homeless-Petrus.  We collected kind donations of hats, scarves, gloves and socks.  We also raised funds by selling Christmas lollies.  Total raised £185.00

Seven members of our School Council successfully attended  Peer Mediation Training

Sports Ambassadors

Our role throughout school is to promote sports participation and to encourage active and healthy lifestyles. We do this by promoting the clubs we are part of in and outside of school and by talking to the children about how to be healthy and active in and outside of school. We also help to organise and lead sporting events. Each lunchtime we have a timetable of different sports on offer for our Ks2 children to take part in. We also support our KS1 children who are still developing their sporting skills at lunchtimes. We are all passionate, enthusiastic and keen to help promote sports participation at Holy Family RC Primary School.

This year, Sports Ambassadors have:

Coordinated games at lunchtime and break time and refereed matches between pupils.

We have organised Fruit Fridays and delivered an assembly all about the work we do.

We have shared with everyone our sporting values including; determination, self-belief, respect, passion, honesty, team work.  We award children who show these qualities while at play and in competitions.

We lead after school clubs and activities on the playground and hold weekly meetings to talk about the different things we want to do to improve sport and activity in our school.  We set challenges for the children to improve their skill and stamina; how many kick ups can they do?  How can they improve their skipping?

We organise sports equipment for the children to use at break times and make sure it is looked after and in good condition.

We plan, organise and oversee sports day with Mr McKenna and take photographs of everybody’s achievements.

We also find out pupils views of sports in school and after school clubs  through pupil voice interviews.

Reading Ambassadors

These children were chosen to be our Reading Ambassadors this year because of their shared love of reading and their enthusiasm to help other children experience that same joy.

At Holy Family, we know how important it is that children are able to access books and choose to read for themselves. As well as being beneficial to learning, we know that reading is also lots of fun when you find the right types of books. We hope our Reading Ambassadors will help every child to do so, alongside our capable staff!

Part of the job of a Reading Ambassador is to encourage others in school to read more and to find their own love of reading. Every class in school has been allocated at least one Reading Ambassador who will try their best to help everyone find great books to enjoy.

Another part of the Reading Ambassadors role, is making sure others get to know about new books, and all things related to reading. They do this through:

  • Meeting each week to discuss book recommendations and ideas for promoting a love of reading across our school.
  • Reading to other children through paired reading, small group and whole class story sessions.
  • Choosing and recommending books to children, which cover a range of genres, styles and topics.
  • Helping to set up and maintain our school’s new Reading Bus!

Why not ask one of our Reading Ambassadors what book you could read next?

Last year, the previous Reading Ambassadors worked hard to set up our Reading Bus. We were delighted to welcome the fantastically great author and illustrator, Kate Pankhurst to our school to officially open our Reading Bus!

We are so happy to have such a wonderful space that all children can access to read for pleasure and our current reading ambassadors are working hard to ensure all children can access the reading bus regularly!

Reading Ambassadors

GIFT Team

Jesus live

Jesus live in me

So that everything I do is done by you.

Together we aim to continue on our journey in supporting the Catholic life of our school.

The role of a member of the G.I.F.T. Team at Holy Family is detailed below.

  • To give joyful witness of Christ in our school.
  • To encourage pupils to live out their faith in daily life.
  • To develop good relationships within and beyond the school community.
  • To support Liturgy, prayer and the spiritual life of our school.
  • To involve pupils in fundraising for charities.
  • To continue to develop strong links with the Parish.
  • To support the school in living out its Values and Mission Statement.

Scripture is at the centre of everything the Church does.  Through this, it is hoped we can focus on celebrating, living and sharing God’s word. Perhaps as a family you could read and share your favourite bible stories with one another.

October is the month of the Holy Rosary and the team would like to remind you how as a family you may like to come together in your own home and recite the Rosary.

We would love to post pictures showing families coming together in the above ways so don’t be shy, please email them to the school office in the first instance.

The G.I.F.T. Team regularly plan and lead Prayer Stations for children in Key Stage 1 & 2.  Here are some examples of the lovely prayerful ideas they have had this year…

The G.I.F.T Team led some prayer stations all about Anti-Bullying to raise awareness about what bullying is and how we can work together to make sure we treat one another with love and gentleness.