We are extremely proud of our Year 5 children who had the wonderful opportunity to be invited to the Brass Band in Aspire event at The Glasshouse. Our children proudly took the stage and played in a special concert in Newcastle. The children were expectation in every way!
Our children took part in a range of activities to explore what bullying is and how they can deal with it and deal a range of situations. The children discussed what they could do to help each other and they were able to link this to our school vision. We were very impressed with their mature discussions around these sensitive issues.
Supporting our children’s emotional wellbeing and developing their positive mental health is very important to us at Grace Darling. Being happy and comfortable helps us to be in the right mindset to learn. World Mental Health Day was on October 12th and we decided to have a drop-down week where the children would be able to work on strategies to support their wellbeing.
We had a range of activities such as Yoga, mindfulness, walks, writing worry leaves (which the children loved ‘blowing away’) and creating our own positive affirmations. We also had some special guests from the If you care, share Foundation who worked across the school with all children in Y1-6. They discussed feelings and identifying different emotions in ourselves and others. The children recognised that we don’t all share the same feelings and spent a lot of time working on how we can make ourselves and others happy when we may feel down. The children wrote down their happy thoughts which are now stored in a treasure chest in each classroom and any time they need to reflect on these, they are given time to do so. The children were also delighted to receive a positive mental health goody bag at the end of the week.
A MASSIVE WELL DONE to the community of Grace Darling for helping raise over £3000 for charity.
Last month, pupils at Grace Darling took part in a barmy fun run for the launch of Shaun the Sheep on the Tyne Learning Programme and to support and raise money for St Oswalds Hospice.
Not only the children but the teachers also took part, dressing up as sheep dogs and waiting for the children to pick up hose pipes and water buckets and soak them. Everyone had so much fun! The wonderful kitchen staff wore sheep masks and made shaun the sheep themed treats for all the children to enjoy.
Grace Darling aimed at raising £400 from this event for St Oswald’s Hospice but in fact raised a whopping £3,000! Well done all for your fantastic achievement. If you want to read more, take a look at the full article here – https://www.shaunonthetyne.co.uk/sunshine-smiles-and-whole-lot-of-sheep/
On Friday 5 th May 2023 pupils at Grace Darling were invited to come to school wearing their favourite red, white and blue outfit to celebrate King Charles III Coronation. The miserable weather did not dampen the spirits and children enjoyed their picnic lunch and street party together. Throughout lunch our fabulous musicians played traditional music bringing a real sense of pomp and circumstance to the day.
ollowing lunch the children came together along with the musicians to sing our coronation song and the National Anthem. Throughout the day the children completed a range of coronation activities including making flags, creating water colour stamp designs, traditional garden games and craft activities. Throughout the day staff painted children’s faces and an unexpected visit from the ice cream man finished the day on a high note.
Today in school is ‘All you need is love’ day. Children across the school are sharing stories, completing activities and discussing key themes including: valuing diversity, celebrating difference, being unique, gender, different family same love, acceptance and understanding.
As the Admissions Authority, NCEA Trust are proposing a change to the school Admissions Policy for 2024-25 and onwards. This is our formal notification of a consultation period from 10th October 2022 until 29th November 2022.
We propose to change the oversubscription criteria in the following way:
Remove criteria 5 “Children who already have a sibling at the school and are living outside the catchment area” and amend criteria 2 “Children who already have a sibling at the school and are living within the catchment area” to simply “children who already have a sibling at the school”.
This change would mean that sibling families are ensured a place at the same school. This is important for attendance, punctuality and transportation to one school destination by the most efficient method.
For any queries or comments please contactconsulation@ncea.org.uk
What do you aspire to be? A question children at Grace Darling have been thinking about a lot this week as part of National Careers Week.
Throughout the week, children have been thinking about their future careers and exploring the qualities and qualifications needed to complete each role. Children have each completed a career passport, exposing them to six new careers and written questions to help them find out more about each role.
A huge focus of the week has been on challenging gender stereotypes in career choices and throughout the school children have dressed up, taken part in role play activities and participated in virtual visits with professionals from various sectors.
Click on any of the photos below to view images in a slideshow
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Children in Year 4 at Grace Darling Primary gave their bikes an important safety check, dusted off their helmets and checked they fitted securely before working with Marcus from the Cycle Partnership to complete their level 1 Bikeability training in school.
Bikeability is the only UK Government recognised cycle training scheme funded by the Department for Transport and is designed to teach pupils the skills and confidence to cycle safely. Bikeability Level 1 aims to develop cycle handling in an off-road environment and prepare riders for cycling on the road.
Marcus was very impressed with the behaviour and positive attitudes displayed by all the children and thoroughly enjoyed his day at Grace Darling. Each child who took part successfully completed the assessment and will receive a Bikeability Level 1 badge and certificate.
Dear parents/carers,
It has been brought to our attention by a parent from one of our Trust schools that a suspicious looking email, seemingly sent by members of staff within the Trust, has been issued. The emails have a ‘zip file’ attachment and password to use to open it, however, this is not a legitimate email so please do not click on the attachment.
While a thorough investigation is still being carried out by our IT team, we can confirm that this is part of a wider cyber security issue which highly likely originated from outside of NCEAT, but is now having a direct impact on our own communications systems.
We have increased our internal online security as far as possible and are working with providers to ensure that as many of these potentially harmful emails are ‘filtered out’ of our network, however, if you do receive any suspicious looking emails, claiming to be from Grace Darling Primary, please do not click on any links or attachments and mark the email as ‘spam’.
To help you to identify a potential scam, please see some guidance below:
- The “sent by” address will either be a jumble of random letters and numbers or have an unusual domain (not .com or .co.uk)
- The email will contain links to click to ‘confirm your details’ or ‘make a payment’
- The email may have an attachment which looks strange or unsafe to open
- The email may give you a limited time to reply
- There might be spelling mistakes, bad grammar and sentences which don’t quite make sense
- If the email contains any logos or images, these may appear ‘pixelated’ or blurry
- If requesting money, the amount will usually be quite specific, not rounded up to the nearest pound/pence to try and make it seem legitimate, eg £692.88 instead of £700,00.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. We are working as quickly as we can to resolve the issue. If anyone has any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to get in touch.
