RAF- Rochdale Anglican Federation
YEAR 4 BANNER SERVICE
Our Year 4 children represented our school brilliantly and attended a church service led by Bishop Mark today and St. Andrew’s Church, Dearnley followed by a picnic altogether. This is an annual event organised by RAF, which involves Year 4 pupils from the Anglican schools in Rochdale. Lots of church schools from across the borough came together to take about peace and how they can be the ones to make the difference in the world. This year, the children designed and made a peace offering to share at the service. Our olive branch complete with children’s prayers is now displayed in our lobby area.
Fairy Godmum and Creative Crosses Project
Following on for working together on the 'We Are One' project this year all 19 Rochdale Church of England Schools who are part of the Rochdale Anglican federation (RAF) met over the course of 3 days to work together to create creative crosses using the gems and jewels we have been collecting in school with The Fairy God Mum- Wendy Moore.
We chose five of our Year 5 children to attend the event at Holy Trinity School in Littleborough on Wednesday to create our cross- they did an amazing job. They were very creative and our cross is beautiful it contains the five values- love, courage, forgiveness, faithfulness and respect which are the values we all used when making our ‘We are one’ film last year. We also decorated a structure for our worship table which shows a mirror, window and door. This is how we help to develop children’s understanding of Spirituality here at St. John’s-
'We Are One'- an idea which came from head teachers of the RAF group coming together to focus on diversity.
Nico and Lottie have been working with two children, with of a mixture of ethnicities/diverse backgrounds from 12 other church schools across Rochdale to create a short film called ‘We are One’. The film highlights diversity and how we are all different yet through shared values can work together. The aim of the project was for local church schools to work collaboratively with a group of young people to explore Christian values and celebrate 'we are one' but we are still ourselves. The project has resulted in the creation of a high quality short film with lesson plans which will be used as a resource throughout schools and other appropriate settings and digital platforms. The sessions gave the children the opportunity to come together in different schools to explore, create, develop team work, enable characterisation, stage craft and develop script writing. We hope the film will be rolled out locally and nationally and entered into film festivals.
On Friday Lottie and Nico, along with their parents, school staff and governors and Year 6, went to the launch of the video with the 11 other schools across Rochdale. It was shown at the Odeon Cinema at Sandbrook Park. There were lots of other people there too, including Bishop Mark, Cannon Maurice Smith and the Education leaders from the Borough along with local Councillors. Both Mrs Abbott and myself were very proud to see our school on the credits and we look forward to having our own launch in school after the holiday. Here is a link to the film so you can watch it too-