On Friday 11th December, Bloxwich Academy held our annual Christmas jumper day. Dozens of Rudolphs, copious amounts of elves and several Santas walked through the school gates that morning. Mr Kirkham even donned a fantastic Star Wars jumper!

We managed to raise an incredible £300.40! On top of this, we even had an extra special guest feature. The original singer and composer of ‘I wish it could be Christmas Everyday’ – Roy Wood (formerly of The Move, ELO and Wizzard) – sent a special message to the year 6 students. You can see this in the Christmas video below.

Usually, we would invite parents into the school for our Christmas concert but with current the situation, this was not possible. However, all the children made a fantastic effort to sing the carols in their bubbles. It’s safe to say that the Christmas spirit was well and truly in the school on that day. All the children were fantastic with their singing and made Bloxwich Academy proud!

A huge thank you to all our parents who donated food for ‘Walsall North Food Bank’. We had an amazing response, and the food bank was extremely grateful for all your donations for their families who may need a little help this Christmas. 

The food bank has been in contact to say thank you for the generous donation. They said:

“Dear Bloxwich Academy, 

We would like to thank you very much for your extremely generous Christmas donations to Walsall North Foodbank, weighing-in at a whopping 127.35kg. This year, our volunteer helpers have been busier than ever, and have had to adapt procedures to respond to the developing changes brought on by the pandemic.  

On behalf of our steering group and the rest of our team of volunteers, we would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has helped in any way to support the Foodbank. We would like to say, once again, a big thank you for the part that you have played in helping us to make this foodbank project sustainable. “

This term, we introduced a new reward system into the school: good to be green. Each week, the children earn an afternoon GTBG slot on a Friday. So far this term, we’ve had decoration making, chalk planet drawings, treasure hunts and many more fantastic activities. The children love taking part in the Good to be green activities on a Friday.

In December, we had our first good to be green end of term activity. Each class had the option to choose from one of many activities: archery, fencing, footgolf and disc golf. The children were all excited to take part in these events and had a great time doing so. 

We are very grateful to families for all the support we have received this term regarding our staggered start and end times.

Please note the end times for Friday 18^th December, the last day of autumn term:

This academic year has seen many changes; as a result, PE and extra-curricular activities look a little different. As a school, we are currently participating in the Virtual School Games; October saw the start of the Black Country Virtual Skipping Competition. This was a virtual skipping competition against local primary schools over a two-week period, which then lead to competing against primary schools across the Black Country. The skipping competition created a lot of excitement and the children really enjoyed participating with their friends. There were some great performances across KS2.  

Ruby (Year 3) achieved 40 skips in 30 seconds 

Daniel and Emily (Year 4) achieved 55 skips. 

Blake (Year 5) achieved 69 skips. 

Harley and Riley (Year 6) both achieved 56 skips.  

It was great to hear children were practising at home and working hard to improve the number of skips they could complete in 30 seconds. It is also lovely to see skipping has become a popular activity which children are enjoying at break and lunchtime. Keep on skipping Bloxwich!

We love reading at Bloxwich Academy so we were over-the-moon when we found out we would have the chance to have a virtual author visit! It was surreal to hear the actual author, of a book we love, read it out to us live!

Year 1 & 2 listened to Humza Arshad, the author of ‘Little Badman’, read his story out loud. He even brought along his illustrator to teach us how to draw some of the illustrations from the book. The children did a fantastic job of recreating the artwork.

We all enjoyed the author visits, and we can’t wait to read the books in class.