This week is National Children’s Mental Health week and this year’s theme is Express yourself! We would love to see how you all express yourselves whether it be through art, story writing, dressing up or singing. Upload pictures/videos or stories to your teachers on teams and let them know it’s for Children’s Mental Health Week.

The latest statistics show that 1 in 10 children have a diagnosable mental illness. However, in these trying times, it’s understandable that most children are feeling the pressures. Things like mood swings, being low and problems with behaviour is to be expected. 

Thursday 4th February is Time to Talk Day. On this day, we would like for you to spend some time talking to each other about anything and everything. 

The best way to encourage your children to express their feelings is through general conversation. So here’s a family challenge for you. 

Play a game where each of you chooses one of your favourite things in the world and don’t tell anyone else. Take it in turns to ask yes/no questions to find out what that thing is. For example, is it an animal? Is it a toy? Is it blue? Etc.

See how quickly you can work out what it is.

If you would like any more information about Children’s Mental Health week or resources to use at home, please visit https://www.childrensmentalhealthweek.org.uk/

If you have any concerns about your child’s mental health, please contact the school for further advice. 

This week in Year 5, we have continued with the exciting new topics we started last week. The children have worked really hard on consolidating their learning of how to read both digital and analogue clocks and how to work out the duration of an event. Children struggled at first but showed excellent resilience and their hard work has definitely paid off!

We have also continued to look at the features we need to include in our writing of a set of instructions. Our writing is linked to our exciting design and technology topic at the moment whereby we are looking at different types of food, healthy and seasonal foods and different cooking techniques. During the afternoon sessions, children have been given the opportunity to cook and evaluate different recipes and cooking techniques at home, and they have created some delicious looking food and smoothies! Children also got the chance to show off their amazing snowman building skills too on Monday.

Year 5 have also been extremely lucky to take part in Learning by Questions online with Miss Jones, Miss Hughes and Mr Watters, and it has been a great way of engaging learning and allowing children the chance to show off all they have learnt since the start of Year 5. Each child joins in a quiz using a unique quiz code and answers a series of questions. Their teachers are then able to see how well they are doing while the quiz is happening and are also able to offer some guidance on some tricky questions. We hope to continue to use this during our remote learning sessions to check that we have understood the topics that we have been learning.

We encourage children to be completing extra-curricular activities at home and share them on their Class Notebook in the ‘Other’ section – please tell us when this has been completed so we can share this amazing work with everyone!

In school and at home, the children have been talking and learning about birds. We have learnt all about how important birds are and the different types of British birds. In school, we have made bird feeders which we will be placing around the school grounds. We are looking forward to all the wonderful types of birds that will visit us. Next week we are even going on a bird watching walk.

We have been working very hard on our weekly project. The children have been making houses out of re-cycled materials. As part of the project, the children planned their design and added features such as doors and windows.

We are really happy with all of your hard work this week and we can’t wait until we see next week’s learning. Well done Year 1!

Pupils are uploading their work to the folders and class teachers are giving instant feedback/marking during their online catch up and feedback sessions.

Live lessons are being delivered for all the core subjects, PE and some foundation subjects. During these sessions the pupils are interactively involved answering questions by using the hands up icon to tell the teacher that they have an answer, as seen here in a Year 4 reading session.

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!