Catholic Life at St Mary's
Our school mission statement is:
“Full of grace, we grow and learn together.”
Our pupils learn about what this Mission Statement means for our school community.
Each class has produced some work for a shared display, which you can see in this photograph.
Class Scripture & Catholic Life "Big Books"
Each class has a piece of scripture which pupils know and understand. Each class displays this scripture at the entrance to their classrooms.
EYFS: John 3:23 “Love one another”
Year 1/2: Psalm 29:11 “The Lord blesses his people with peace”
Year 3/4: Psalms 18: 28 – 30 “The Lord my God lights my darkness”
Year 5/6: John 6:54 “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life”
Each class also records celebrations, prayer and liturgy and other events during the Liturgical year in their big book.
Charity Work
Every Autumn, St Mary’s community come together to support our local foodbank in Stockport.
Throughout the year, we have many families who use the foodbank regularly so we try and give something back at Harvest time.
Our Faith Leaders lead on this by informing pupils about the collections and by organising and collecting food from classes.
We enjoy giving something back to our local community and thinking about others in our local community.
Laudato Si: Caring for our Common Home
Our Faith Leaders, guide our pupils in ways in which we can protect our Common Home. In school, our Faith Leaders ensure lights are turned off and screens are not on when they are not in use.
We also encourage all our pupils to protect our local environment. Litter picking happens throughout the year. Faith leaders lead classes in this and our after school club support this at different times.
We follow in the footsteps of Pope Francis who asked us to think about how we care for our Common Home.
Our Autumn term prayer stations focused on the themes of Laudato Si. Faith leaders guided pupils through a range of prayer stations considering how we can take responsibility for protecting God’s creation.
We encourage our pupils to “Live wisely, think deeply, love generously.”
World Car Free Day
Our pupils and pupils from Our Lady’s RC Primary school in Stockport took part in a competition with Stockoprt Council.
They designed a poster for World Car Free Day and our pupils had their work displayed in Stockport town centre.
CAFOD
Throughout the Liturgical Year at St Mary’s, we support CAFOD in order to support our brothers and sisters around the world. During Advent, our raffle raised money for CAFOD WORLD GIFTS. We enjoy giving to those around the world who we have not met but we know are in need of life’s basic essentials such as food, clean water and often an education which we are lucky to have.
During Lent, we supported CAFOD through the BIG LENT WALK.
We were fortunate to welcome Charles Flannery, a CAFOD representative to school during Lent. Charles delivered an assembly to the whole school and then worked with EYFS and our KS2 pupils through workshop activities (pictured).
Caritas
Our Faith Leaders worked with Kath Ansley from Caritas Salford. Kath discussed the work of Caritas and how our Faith Leaders can lead our pupils in this work throughout the school year.
Each Lent, our families support Caritas by taking home the St Joseph’s Penny boxes and collecting what they can for those in need in the Salford Diocese. We think of those we can help during Lent at this time when we “PRAY, FAST, GIVE”.
Catholic Social Teaching is referenced in our assemblies, during every RE lesson and through other curriculum subjects.
We have a Catholic Social Teaching Award for pupils. This award is given in recognition for outstanding achievement for putting “Love into Action”
Faith in Action Award
Our Year 5/6 pupils have been working throughout the year to achieve the “Faith in Action Award – Discovery Level”.
This rewards young people’s active service in helping Building the Kingdom of God on Earth. This award encourages young people to take service into their wider community and accept greater responsibility for their Faith in Action.
As we reflect on everything the pupils have done this year, they soon realised that they had done so much to demonstrate their faith in many acts throughout the school year.
