St Joseph's Catholic Primary School

Brrr... the cold has certainly arrived in Tadcaster this week! This hasn't stopped us being outside, and staying active throughout the day though - one of the many reasons we were awarded the Gold School Games Mark last year! Our Y5/6 Playleaders are doing a fantastic job of facilitating games and matches during breaktimes, alongside our adult-led clubs running each day too. Have a look below to see the variety of daily clubs offered (for free!) to our children.

Thank you, as always, for supporting us to

Live, love and learn with the Lord.

Mrs Ronicle

Feel free to follow our social media accounts. Our Twitter has the most photos/videos, but we also have a more limited Facebook account too, designed for those who don't use Twitter!

Our virtue this week is: Prayer

Have a look at our Prayer Guide for Families on our website, to help you understand the prayers we use in school so you can share these at home with your children too!

St Joseph's Catholic Primary School & Nursery - Faith & Values

This week, we have celebrated our Other Faiths Week across school. The children explored Sikhism. This included looking at the places of worship; ceremonies and celebrations; key figures, stories and events; and beliefs, culture and worship. Our children thoroughly enjoyed exploring Sikhism this week!

Thank you to the Bridge Project, who delivered another wonderfully interactive worship, bringing the Bible to life for our children! We are very grateful for your time!

As you will have seen in the letter sent to you at the beginning of the week, we are taking part in the BWCAT Times Table Rock Stars Tournament for the first time! See the poster below. PLEASE encourage your child to log in and practise at home - every game counts towards our score and we want to do St Joseph's proud!

Our School Council met this week and discussed some fabulous ways in which they would like to improve our school and support our local community. They have the following message for you:

We are collecting any 'nearly new' toys and presents from now until the end of November. These will be donated to charities who support families who may not be able to afford Christmas presents this year. Please sort through your toys before Christmas and please give what you can.

We have a collection box in the hall - please pop any donations in here or give to your school council representatives. Thank you.

Last Sunday, Mrs Ronicle and Laura Cooper completed the Tad10!

It was so heart-warming to see our families lining the street to cheer us on, and made the 10 miles feel much shorter!

We are thrilled to have raised such a staggering amount of money - £535 on our JustGiving page! The page will stay open for another week, so there's still time to donate if you feel able.

Funds are being split between our Friends of St Joseph's and St Leonard's Hospice. The hospice holds a special place for us, as two of our families lost their dads last year, and the hospice provided such love and care in a difficult time.

Crowdfunding to support our St Joseph's community on JustGiving

We are pleased to promote two upcoming safety events in our local community.

Monday 25th Nov - Road Safety Talk (Tad Fire Station)

Wednesday 4th Dec - Online Safety Workshop (St Mary's Primary, Knaresborough)

Please see posters below for further information.

Many thanks to our families who bought poppies and other remembrance items over the past couple of weeks. We are proud to have raised nearly £50 for our Tadcaster District Royal British Legion!

Just to keep you informed, there will be no newsletter next week - I'm out at a conference for two days and won't have access to the internet to write or send it! We appreciate your understanding.

Celebration Assembly will run as normal in my absence - thank you to Mrs Tucker!

Whole School Attendance this week: 91.57%

This week, our attendance is significantly below National Average.

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to show that when families take term-time holidays, the children suffer, both academically and socially. We are still seeing a large amount of requests for term-time holidays. Please note, we are NOT allowed to authorise these.

We have had so much fun outdoors this week; enjoying experiencing the ice and experimenting with different ways to make it melt! We have also embraced our learning about different faiths; looking at the Hindu festival of Diwali. We have made our own Diwali Diva lamps and had a go at making some Lemon Landoos (traditional Indian sweets) to participate in our own Diwali celebrations!

As part of our History learning, St Bernadette's have been thinking about their favourite toys. Last week, they brought their toys in to show each other, and this week they've been describing them and beginning to compare them to toys that children may have played with in the past.

St Patrick's have found other faiths' week fascinating! We have really enjoyed learning about Sikhism and the foundations of that religion. We learnt about the gurdwaras as their place of worship and considered similarities between some of their rules and teachings and ours for in a church!

This week St. Therese have been delving into the work of Henry Moore. We critiqued his sculptures then designed our own version. Our objective was to create a clay animal sculpted out of just one piece of clay- similar to the creative style of Moore.

We really enjoyed creating our models!

St Francis (Nursery/Reception): Rowan

St Bernadette (Y1/2): Hannah

St Patrick (Y3/4): Zack

St Therese (Y5/6): Tilly

Headteacher's Award Winner: Aoife

Reading Raffle Winners: Rowan, Roman, Hannah, Charlotte T, Dollie

Teampoint Winners: St Matthew

Forest School (St Patrick's and St Therese): Wednesday 27th November

School Christmas Fayre: Sunday 1st December

Christmas Panto Visit (Reception - Y6): Tuesday 3rd December

Advent Mass (whole school, in Church): Wednesday 4th December, 10am

KS2 Carols in Church: Thursday 12th December, 6pm

Christmas Jumper Day (for Martin House): Friday 13th December

Preschool and KS1 Nativity (in school): Tuesday 17th December, 4pm

Christmas Dinner Day: Wednesday 18th December

Carols Around the Christmas Tree: Friday 20th December, 1:30-2pm

School closes for Christmas: Friday 20th December, 2pm

All children should have now brought home their card designs. Ordering them is easy via the class fundraising online shop. FoStJ will get any commission on these so your orders help the school too! The deadline for orders are 12 noon on Monday 25th November and all orders will be delivered to school.

Thank you all for the chocolate and bottle donations for the Christmas Fayre. Our final plea will be for any cake donations on the day of the Fayre- baked (or bought) will be welcomed!

Raffle tickets for the christmas raffle will be sent home with children in the next week. There are some great prizes this year, including the top prize of a family day out at Stockeld Park. The raffle will be drawn in assembly on christmas jumper day- 13th December.

FoStJ will be treating all children going to the pantomime with an ice cream in the interval.

As ever, any help and support is appreciated so please do get in touch with us!

Our email address is: friendsofstjotad@gmail.com

Please find and follow us on Facebook:

Use the button below if you'd like to give our staff a shout out!

We love hearing from you!

If you have a query or concern, please feel free to speak to me (Mrs Ronicle) at the gates in the morning; your child's class teacher at the end of the day; or our school admin team at the front entrance or via phone/email.

If this is not possible, feel free to phone or email the office who can forward any messages to staff.

Website: https://www.st-josephs-tadcaster.n-yorks.sch.uk/
Location: Station Road, Tadcaster, UK
Phone: 01937 832344
Twitter: @StJosephsTad

We are a proud member school of the Bishop Wheeler Catholic Academy Trust:

https://www.bishopwheelercatholicacademytrust.org/

Email: admin@stjosephstadcaster.org