This term our Right of The Term is Article 1- Everyone should know their rights, parents and carers and governments (duty bearers) are responsible for making sure children know about their rights and all children should be able to access their rights.
Yesterday afternoon, the Rights Ambassadors were outside Yr 6 giving out leaflets and letting parents know about their Rights Respecting learning.
They are also looking for anyone who would be interested in helping in any way next year. Would you be able to come into school and do some work with the children? Do you work for/run a business that could promote our Rights Respecting work through sponsorship/fundraising? Could you support our charity work throughout the year? If so please get in touch with Mrs Buff through the school office.
Thank you to everyone who supported us yesterday and we look forward to sharing more with you next term.
Last week we led worship for KS1 and KS2 all about Christian Aid. We played a game about wants and needs. We held up picture cards to show the kinds of foods they grow and eat in Burundi. Evie told the story of Aline who lives in Burundi. She made her own business selling avacados and peanuts with the help of Christian Aid who supported her education in business. People are living in poverty all around the world and need our help. Poverty means people don’t have enough food, water, clean clothes and all the things we enjoy. It means you don’t have your basic needs met. These are our rights as children.
We are going to be holding an open session for all parents/carers to come and find out more about children’s rights and what we are doing to support them. There will be stalls and games where you can drop along after school (date TBC). We look forward to seeing you there.
This term our right of the term is Article 1- the right to know and access our rights including making sure all adults can teach us about them. We are refreshing our knowledge of rights and making sure everyone knows about them!
In Year 3 we talked about who our duty bearers are- adults who are responsible for making sure we access our rights on a daily basis. We made cards to thank them for everything they do to help us and look out for us. We will be delivering them around school over the coming week 😀
Today we planned what we are going to do for the next few weeks and it is based around respecting people in need. We are going to be doing Christian Aid week, teaching our own lessons to other classes and fundraising for our own charity choices. Look out for our work on here and Facebook!
All children have the right to be protected from war. This also encompasses their right to shelter, good food and water, an education and to be cared for by their parents where possible.
In January, we explored the importance of Holocaust memorial day. We learned about what happened during the Holocaust and all the people affected by Nazi rule. We also learned about more recent Holocaust events in different countries and how many people around the world are still suffering the effects of inequality and injustice.
Our Rights Ambassadors learned a Rwandan peace dance which demonstrates their desire for peace and unity. They learned about the inequalities suffered by many Rwandan people and how this has affected the lives of children just like them. They performed the dance to KS2 and since January some of our classes have been learning the dance too.
The dance is being shared in Praise assembly on Friday so look out for it on our big screen 🙂
In Reception the children helped to create their own ‘Class Charters’. We worked together to look at the different rights and thought about which ones were important to us and our class. We then thought about ways we could respect these rights, such as making sure we raise our hand when we speak so everyone can be heard or helping our friends to feel happy and loved if they are upset or sad. We also decided that the right to play was very important and that in order to respect this right we would try our best to share and take turns with our friends as well as looking after our toys by helping to tidy them away when we had finished playing. To show that we all agreed with the class charter we put a finger print on it and they are now displyed in our classrooms.
Article 2: No discrimination In our weekly assembly Holly and Oak class were thinking about how we are all different and how important it is to accept and celebrate our differences. We spoke about how we can look different, believe in different things, have different families, come from different countries and even have different pets! We then listened to the story ‘All Are Welcome’, a book about a school in which everyone is welcome to join in and be part of the community, just like our school. We also thought about some of the ways we are different from our friends and how lovely it is to find out about each other’s differences.
One of our COP27 targets as a school was to recycle more and our tin foil collection is still growing! If you have any tin foil at home that could be added to our collection we can make sure it goes to a good cause 😀
Today we are celebrating article 24- the right to a clean and healthy environment and article 12- the right to a say in issues that affect you. Year 4 wrote letters to Kingsteignton Council asking for support in encouraging more swifts to our area as part of our COP27 campaign. Here is the response from the council…
Throughout the week beginning 4th April 2022 St Michael’s Primary School have been conducting activities to make our school a more eco-friendly place to learn. The activities are leading on from ‘COP27’ which was held at St Michael’s on 9th March. The Rights Ambassadors and Eco-Council children took over the staff meeting and led the teachers in understanding why climate change is so important and what we can do to help as a school (Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to a say in issues that affect them). Because of this meeting, all teachers across the school made climate change promises with their classes which are being upheld throughout the rest of the year.
This week, the children across the school have been working on climate change based activities to help spread the message of COP27 and continue to improve the eco message of our school with the aim of working with the local community on this matter. Year 4 have written letters to Kingsteignton Council asking for support for the swifts living in our area, KS1 have been planting lots of seeds to encourage more insects in our school, all classes have been collecting tin foil for recycling (we have currently collected £260 worth and are now running competitions across classes to see who can collect the most), Year 3 have been making bug hotels and Year 1 have designed ecofriendly reusable bags. There is also a campaign across school using the hash tag #TOTL (turn off the lights) to encourage classes to stop using as much electricity when it is not needed.
All of these ideas have been initiated by the children of our school starting with the Rights Ambassadors and Eco council and working down to individual children who have been inspired by the campaign. We will continue to work on this project over the coming months and years; Oli in Year 6 said ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’. Thank you to Otter Nurseries, Jack’s Patch, for supplying the seeds.
Head of School, Kate Arnold says ‘the children have inspired us to turn off our lights in the office, use less electricity and cut back on our bills in the process. We are very proud of their enthusiasm and maturity in leading our school with this project.’
Rights Respecting School 