Blackfell Primary School

School Council Spring Term 2024

Safer Internet Day Quiz

Thank you to everyone who entered our Safer Internet Day quiz. School Council sat down together and sorted through all of the entries. Everyone who correctly identified the apps and games, and found the correct age for use, was put into a random draw to win a £5 Amazon voucher. The overall winners were: Theo Y2, Isla Y4, and Ava Y6.

Meet our school councillors for the Spring Term of 2024 to work alongside Mrs Agar and Mrs McMeiken:

Year 1 - Frankie and Bradley

Year 2 - Oliver and Eadie-Rae

Year 3 - Alexis and Nate

Year 4 - Lewis and Molly

Year 5 - Harvey and Kaci-Leigh

Year 6 - David and Lily.

Our main theme this term is 'Health and Well-being'. Over the Spring Term we will be helping to organise competitions and events across school for all to enjoy. Our first project will be in preparation for Safer Internet Day (more details to follow soon). Keep checking our board and website for updates. We can't wait to get started!

School Council Autumn Term 2023

School Council: Our Pupils’ Sustainable Scarecrow Creations

We’re pleased to share with you the entries from our pupils for the Waste & Recycling Visitor Education Centre’s Sustainable Scarecrow competition. Our School Council has carefully chosen a favourite from each class to highlight below.

The competition challenged our pupils to construct scarecrows using only reused materials, with the aim of safeguarding the Centre's gardens from little intruders. It was a wonderful opportunity for our children to explore the importance of recycling and sustainability in a practical, hands-on way.

Embracing this eco-friendly approach, our pupils have used their creativity to give old materials new life, creating scarecrows that are as resourceful as they are delightful.

Our School Council, actively supporting environmental awareness, has been closely involved in the project. They have brought their own contributions to life and are also celebrating their peers' efforts by judging our school's competition.

Please enjoy viewing the scarecrows that stood out to our School Council, representing the thoughtful work of our pupils in their journey toward environmental stewardship.

Well done to the following pupils: Amber Y1, Lincoln Y1, Evie Y2, Pheobe Y3, Betsy Y4, Annabelle Y5 and David Y6.

Harvest Festival

We all came together this morning to celebrate Harvest Festival. We sang songs and listened to some readings by year 5 and 6. There was also a brilliant singing performance from Reception. Thanks were given for all the kind donations which will be collected by Washington Food Bank. The school council did a brilliant job of sorting all the tins and packets ready to be collected.

School Council - Pupil Voice at Blackfell

Meet our school councilors for the Autumn Term of 2023: Year 1 - Amber and Lincoln, Year 2 - Lola and Theo, Year 3 - Charlie and Ellie, Year 4 - James and Lani, Year 5 - Iaan and Annabel, Year 6 - Jack and Gabrielle.

This term, the school council is turning its focus towards sustainability and recycling within the school environment. In collaboration with The Waste & Recycling Visitor Education Centre, a unique "Build a Scarecrow" competition will be launched. The winner, along with their classmates, will be given a special invitation to the Campground Visitor Education Centre. Here, they will have the fantastic opportunity to bring their scarecrow to life with the assistance of the Waste & Recycling Coordinator. Participants are required to creatively design and label a scarecrow using recycled materials and accompany their submission with a short description.

In addition to the competition, the school council will also take a close look at how our school is doing things now. They want to find more ways to be friendly to the environment. The council is really committed to finding new and practical ways to increase recycling and reusing materials all over the school. This effort is a big step forward in making sure our school is doing its best to be environmentally friendly. It also helps in creating a culture where everyone – children and staff – is more aware and responsible about these important issues!

School Council Spring 2023.

This term School Councillors are Reception: Izzy and Caleb, Year 1: Alex and Faye, Year 2: Oliver and Mia Grace, Year 3: Leo and Isla, Year 4: Sebastian and Jenna, Year 5 Harry and Lana, Year 6 Neve and Riley.

The focus this term will be supporting the Speak out Stay Safe programme, revisiting recycling, working with Groundworks, supporting safer internet day and arranging a community event.

A huge thank you to all parent/carers and children who raised £142 for the NSPCC. On Friday 2nd February children came to school dressed in the colour green and enjoyed a fun number day. The school council helped count the money raised and we look forward to welcoming the NSPCC into school in early March who will be doing further workshops with Year 5 and Year 6.

The school council met with Groundworks. They enjoyed a presentation and quiz on the importance of recycling both in the home and at school. Children had to look at items of rubbish, check the signs and decide which recycling bin this would be put in. Ideas were shared what we can implement in school to enhance what we already do. Currently the children are helping to set up a recycling scheme with uniform ready for parents after Easter.

School Council Autumn 2022

We are all very excited to have been chosen to be part of the Autumn Term School Council alongside Miss Hepplewhite and Mrs Agar.

We would like to welcome Evie and Alfie from Year 1, Joseph and Isla from Year 2, James and Pippa from Year 3, Archie and Macy from Year 4, Cameron and Halle from Year 5 and Leon and Farida from Year 6.

Our main theme this term is Blackfell’s Community Spirit. Over the Autumn term we will be helping to organise events across school for all to enjoy. These include the Macmillan Coffee Morning, Christmas fundraising event and so much more! Keep checking our board and website for updates!

Thank you to everybody who attended our Macmillian Coffee Morning. We raised a fantastic £205.20 at our event. It was so nice to see the community of Blackfell Primary School come together for the first Head Teacher's Coffee Morning of the academic year.

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We would like to thank everybody for your fantastic donations for our Harvest Festival Celebration. It was lovely to see our wall of tins and has been donated to Washington Community Food Project. Our donation will supports lots of people in the Washington are. We collected an amazing 398 tins! Thank you for everybody who guessed how many tins we had collected. Well done to Molly Newton and Elliot Shaw who guessed 400. They received a lovely hamper full of lots of treats.

School Council Summer 2022

Summer Term School Council

Blackfell School Council would like to thank you all for your support during our fitness challenge. Well done to Year 4 who achieved the most completed challenges by one percent! It was lovely to see all of your photographs. All children who have completed the challenge have received a special fitness challenge badge. We had four spot prizes who each received a voucher for Sainsburys. Well done to Emily Walker, Pippa Rodger, Sebastian Monteith and Emily Beattie.

We are continuing to encourage a healthy lifestyle for all. Last week we had Be Safe, Be Fit, Be Healthy week where all the children enjoyed a variety of different activities ranging from Sports Day to Hoop Starz.

To continue with our theme of healthy lifestyle, School Council are running a challenge for you to complete at home. Over the next two weeks, we would like you to keep a tally of the amount of fruit and vegetables you are eating both at home and in school. Children are to be encouraged to bring their charts into school each day to complete. The class with the highest percentage of fruits and vegetables tasted will win a golden hour of activities with their class teacher and a healthy foods platter to enjoy with their friends. Please return the fruit and vegetable tally no later than Monday 18th July to their class teacher. The winning class will have their reward on Wednesday 20th July. If you have any questions please feel free to contact myself.

Thank you for your continuous support,

Miss Hepplewhite

Welcome to Summer Term School Council!

Please welcome Elliott, Laura, Phoebe, Harrison, Jack, Tilly, Phoebe, Jaxon, Grace, Leo, Theo and Amelia as your new school council for summer term.

We are all very excited to have been chosen to be part of the Summer Term School Council alongside Miss Hepplewhite and Miss Black. Over the summer term we will be helping to organise events across school for all to enjoy. These include the Queens Platinum Jubilee and End of Summer Picnic Event.

We have decided that our focus this term is all about looking after ourselves and leading a healthy lifestyle. Across the term we will be looking at what our friends and ourselves eat for our lunches and how we can improve this. We will be introducing daily exercise for all and improving our equipment for break times to get us all moving! Keep your eyes pealed for all of the exciting developments we will be making!

School Council Spring 2022

Phoebe, Harrison, Robyn, Lewis, Max, Ella, Ava, JJ, Neve, Callum, Nathan and Callum have been working alongside Mrs Hutchinson, Miss Henderson, and Mrs Reeves this term and will be promoting kindness, friendship, and positive mental health.

The children organised a wonderful Valentine's Day fundraiser, where the pupils and staff all wore red to school and made a donation to the local charity Washington Mind, raising a wonderful £131. We also had a lovely Valentine's day lunch and planned some activities for the staff and children to take part in to promote kindness throughout the school. School council will now be organising a tin collection linked to Red Nose day.

School Council Autumn 2021

Olivia, Arthur, Parnett, Eliott, Jessica, Ellis, Jack, Graysen, Zac, Charlie, Reece, Jaycee will be representing the School Council this term. Children helped organise World Mental Health Day across school by supporting Young Minds and raised a fantastic amount of £278.20. The children created some wonderful positive messages that have been displayed around school and shared with classes. Their next project will be organizing a fund raising event for Christmas.

School Council Summer 2021

School Council would like to send a huge thank you to everybody who supported with our raffle. We enjoyed drawing the prizes on Friday in class. We will keep you update with how much money was raised and the progress of our garden in the next few weeks. We have been planting lots of different plants and we are getting excited for the next phase of our project.

Year 3 are very excited being School Council over the Summer Term. Their focus will be the wellbeing of children and adults in school. Each week they are researching and creating a time table of well being activities around a theme. Our first week as, School Council, we created a range of activities around the theme of friendship. It has been great to see all of our friends around school enjoying their activities. We have talked as a Council and decided to create a project within school to help our friends. When looking at our yards we decided that we wanted to improve them. We feel they need more colour to brighten them up.

We want to improve the yards by creating friendship gardens. We have been googling ideas of what we want to create. We have lots of ideas how we want to create our friendship gardens but we need some help. We have all wrote letters to local businesses asking for donations of plants, soil, seeds, tools , plant pots and planters to help us get started with our gardens. On Wednesday we went and posted our letters and even gave some to local businesses.

We also asked for donations of gift cards and prizes for our exciting raffle to help us raise money for our project. Raffle tickets will be handed out after the Easter holidays. We are very excited to start our project and develop our yards. We have also applied for a Community Chest Grant to support the work.

Year 3 School Council have been super busy. As we told you before, they have been writing letters to different companies asking for donations and prizes. They have been very busy collecting donations for a fantastic raffle. Some of the prizes include:

£20 Marks and Spencer Voucher
£10 Marks and Spencer Voucher
Hamper from GeGes
£10 Love to Shop Voucher
£20 Wilko Voucher
House of Lord Wine
House of Commons Chocolates
Bottles of Proseccos
Giant Teddy
Slime Making Kit
Smiggle Pencil Case
Frozen Jewellery Box
Signed Everton Football
Air Hockey Table
Candles
Bubble Bath
Winnie the Poo Drinks Dispenser and Cup
Scented Candles
And much, much more!

The raffle will be drawn the 30th of April so please have all tickets back into school by Wednesday 28th April. If you require any more tickets please let Year 3 know by emailing : SBFYear3@blackfell.org.uk and the tickets will be put into your child's register.

We have already started to plant some of plants in the year so thank you for your fantastic donations and we will keep you updated with our progress.

Welcome to the School Council for Autumn 2020

This term the school council are made up of our Year 6 house captains. In Maple we have Jack and Alicia, in Oak we have Daniel and Lily, in Willow we have Leon and Isla and in Pine we have Lyta and Ollie. This term we have decided to really focus on health, raising fitness and considering diet and how this can be improved. In Year 6 we have introduce running, we aim to run three times a week (weather dependable!). We are hoping to involve more classes in fitness introducing some different exercise ideas for a morning activity. We are also looking to review the packed lunch policy and encourage healthy eating across the school. We will keep you posted on our progress!

We are delighted to announce the winners of our Healthy packed lunch designs! The winners had a range of tasty lunches and really thought about what a balanced diet entails!

Our winners were:

Nursery and Reception: Freddie

Year 1 and Year 2: Annabelle

Year 3 and Year 4: Gabrielle

Year 5 and Year 6: Sofia

The School Council launched a competition to all pupils to design a healthy packed lunch. We received many great entries and this week the school council have begun to chose their winners. Winners will be announced next week (week commencing 23.11.20). The school council have also launched their Christmas themed sponsored event including a fitness advent countdown and support Santa to run half a marathon during the month of December. They hope that with the money raised they can fun a virtual pantomime for all children to enjoy!

Welcome to the School Council for Spring Term 2020

School Council have been busy this week learning Yoga moves. We spoke to some children that have already attended Yoga club and shared some of the moves they have learnt. We enjoyed our yoga time and will be sharing with our friends.

The school Council for the Spring Term:

Daniel and Talitha (Y6), Leon and Ruby (Y5), Elijah and Amber (Y4), Harrison and Ava (Y3)

Ethan and Halle (Y2) and Lennon and Jasmine (Y1)

We are excited to be working with Miss Hepplewhite, Mrs. Hutchinson and Mrs. Reeves. We will be working together to teach others about coping with stress and anxiety through different exercises. We will be working with a variety of organisations, developing our relaxing areas and encouraging peers to be more open about what is worrying them. Keep an eye on our school website for all the activities we will be taking part in.

Welcome to the School Council for Autumn Term 2019

The School Council for the Autumn Term:

Malika and Bo (Y6), Lyta and Alexander (Y5), Mia-Lily and Shay (Y4), Neve and Charlie (Y3),

Oskar and Isla (Y2) and Megan and Ayaan (Y1).

Our first project as school councillors has been to plan and hold the Book Fair Competition. Children had to draw or design a character from a story and children in Key Stage 2 had to write a small description of their character to go alongside it. The school council voted for one character entry from each class and each winner received a free book from the book fair.

The school councillors helped to display and organise the donations received for our harvest festival.

Thank you for all the very generous donations!

The School Council welcomed Ethne and her dog Farena from Guide Dogs UK. Although Farena could not become an official guide dog as she has a sight impairment, Ethne has trained a total of 18 puppies whilst volunteering for Guide Dogs UK and was able to tell us how she does it. The whole school was intrigued by her stories and there were many interesting questions asked. After the assembly, the School Council spent time with Ethne and Farena to find out more about what the charity does and of course, have a stroke of Farena!

Welcome to the School Council for Spring Term 2019

Introducing the School Council for the Spring Term: Grace Anderson and Brendan Tetchner (Y6), Ellie Platts and Harry Beadling (Y5), Isla Martins and Alex Meager (Y4), Miya Wilson and Ellis Kerry (Y3), Jaycee Day and Aaron Coulson-Patel (Y2) and Lexi Quinn and JJ Beadling (Y1).

Over the Spring Term our School Council will be working together to focus on the theme 'Healthy Heart, Healthy Mind'. This will involve looking closely at the Key Stage 2 tuck shop and making some changes to offer healthier snacks at break time. They will be sharing the thoughts and suggestions of their classmates as we complete a pupil questionnaire and they will also be helping with Safer Internet Day by doing work around cyber bullying. In addition to this we will be fundraising for a local charity 'MIND' which provides support to those experiencing emotional and mental health. We look forward to the term ahead!

Miss Stockport and Mr Whitfield

For Safer Internet day, children from across the school designed posters to promote the safe use of the internet. Our School Councillors had the very tough decision of deciding the winners. There were so many entries that we first grouped the posters into Reception and KS1, Lower KS2 and Upper KS2 before picking out some of our favourites. We then worked with Miss Dodds to choose the overall winners. Well done to those who won!

The Headteacher's coffee afternoon was a huge success! The school council worked well with children from across the school to promote healthy eating by making fruit animals and they presented their work to parents confidently. Partway through the afternoon we were joined by our fantastic school choir who sang songs promoting happiness and mindfulness.

One of the final jobs the school council had was to raise money for the charity MIND based in Washington. They committed their own time to selling merchandise on the school gate and during Tuck Shop and overall raised over £100! They also arranged an assembly with Helen who joined us to explain her role within Washington MIND and what else the charity does.

Thank you for all your hard work this term!

Miss Stockport and Mr Whitfield

Welcome to the School Council for Autumn Term 2018

We are proud to announce our school council for the Autumn term are Dexter Lamming and Olivia Allen (Y6); Shaun Hair and Katie Fulton (Y5); Sadie Castling and Dylan Robinson (Y4); Chloe Jones and Jack Parkinson (Y3); Phoebe Wilson and Max Henry (Y2) and Ethan Clarke and Lily Beattie (Y1).

It has been a pleasure to work with School council this term. They have been dedicated to making the pupils voice heard and having an impact around school and the community. Over the Autumn Term School Council have made cakes, sold them and raised £350 for MacMillan Research. They set up a competition within school for the Book Fair. Children had to design their own character for a story and describe them. They managed to raise £200 for the school to purchase new books. Next they helped organised n assembly to mark the ending of World War One along with a traditional meal children would have enjoyed from the era. Next School Council helped raise money for The Poppy Appeal by selling poppies, rulers, rubbers and much more on the school the school gates on a morning. Some of us managed to squeeze in a visit to the Anti Bullying conference where we talked to other children about our school. We did not stop there! Our next charity we raised money for was Help For Heroes. We sold bands and badges on the gates and organised a bingo bonanza at Mrs Watkins Coffee Afternoon. There was bingo games, raffles, tea, coffee, cake and a chance to catch up with friends. We raised an amazing £380 for the charity which will go to help soldiers who have served in the armed forces. Our last project of the term was organising the school Christmas fair. We thought of some games for children to play, prizes and even set up a magical station where you could create your own reindeer dust and make a wish to Santa. It has been non stop! but the School Council have been fantastic. Thank you for all your hard work. We look forward so seeing our new school council in the Spring Term and what projects they will be working on.

Miss Hepplewhite, Miss Henderson and Miss Jackson