Courageous Advocacy in God’s World

Our school helps us to walk with Jesus, to be the best that we can be.  Through God’s love and guidance, we create an ethos of shared endeavour, friendship and co-operation to help us flourish academically, emotionally and spiritually.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Philippians 4:13

At Baxenden, we understand the importance of learning about other cultures and fighting against injustice in our diverse and beautiful world. We try to help others by supporting charities and events which are close to our hearts – in our local community, nationally, and across the world. The blogs below share whole school initiatives, and as you scroll down the page, you can see individual fundraising events, which the children have chosen to complete. However, we must remember that courageous advocacy is about making the world a better place, not just about raising money!

Please visit the ‘School Parliament’, ‘God Squad’ or ‘Equality Group’ page to see how they are being courageous advocates for our school and wider communities on behalf of everyone in the school. Scroll down the page to see our ‘blogs’ about what we have been doing to raise money for charity and also to help others.

Live the Faith

Summer Term 2023

During the summer term, we did things slightly differently with our values of ‘Justice’ and ‘Truthfulness’! Rather than choose only one person who ‘Lived the Faith’ from each class at the end of a half term, we chose one person each day in worship to share how they thought that they lived the faith and talked through the activities on the website homework. When we asked at the end of the year how the children preferred to share how they ‘Lived the Faith’, all of the children talked to said they wanted the ‘Live the Faith’ sheets to go home so they could share the value with their mum and dad. This is what we will continue to do now. Here are the sheets we talked about:

Spring Term 2023

Autumn Term 2022

Please read our blogs to see what we’ve been doing!

• Attentive Advent 2024
  Mrs. Baynes has worked with the ‘Wellbeing Warriors’ to create an advent calendar with wellbeing quotes that we share every morning in our whole school…
• Christmas Charity
  Rebecca in our Y6 class has made us all extreamly proud! Last summer, she had a stall at our summer fair in church where she…
• Arabella’s Walk for Alder Hey
  Arabella in our Reception class walked 3km for Alder Hey hospital on Sunday 12th May. Arabella raised £260 and completed the walk with family and…
• Nyaluru – Our Sister School
  Amani is a charity that assists the development of community groups within Kenya. One area of the charity is to link schools in the uk…
• Elimination of Racism – 19/10/23
  For our cultural diversity week, the Equality Group decided to make and present a worship about what racism is. The video is not very loud,…
• Christianity – A Living World Faith – 11/10/23
  We had a visit from the Bethany children, who come from Tanzania in Africa. The headteacher of the Bethany school, Emily, has brought three of…
• Disability Worship – 10/10/23
  Inspired by Harry’s worship about his cerebral palsy, the Equality Group wrote, made and led a whole school worship, to raise awareness of what different…
• Cerebral Palsy Day – 06/10/23
  Harry wanted to talk to the school to raise awareness of what cerebral palsy is, and how it does not hold him back. Harry and…
• Macmillan Coffee Morning – 06/10/23
  A great time was had by all and we have raised a total of £774! Thank you to all for your support.
• Harvest Service – 05/10/23
  Our school harvest service was held in St. John’s church, led by Mrs. Green and Amanda. We raised £81 for the Bishops Harvest Appeal and…
• Y5 – Cancer Research
  Eli, Halle and Holly (who are now in Y6) wanted to raise some money. They came to Mrs. Green to talk about what they wanted…
• Guardian Angels
  During the summer term, each Year 6 child is paired up with one of our new reception starters, and once a week for the autumn…
• Year 2’s Friendship Poems
  Year 2 have written some amazing friendship poems based on the Aladdin song ‘Friend Like Me’. They thought of the qualities needed to make a…
• Red Nose Day 2023
  Why do we raise money during comic relief? The money raised will help people experiencing homelessness, mental health problems and food poverty, as well as…
• Children’s Mental Health Week – February 6th-10th
  During the week commencing 6th February we spent time thinking about Children’s Mental Health Week. Miss McCormack led a worship along with the schools Well-being…

Events Before and During Covid:

The Green Mentors have asked for second hand books to recycle for the Hyndburn Book Heroes – a project to give books to children who do not have many of their own. They managed to collect 452 books – well done to all!

Ellie Helped the Beehive

Ellie made some Christmas decorations with her mum to sell at the school fair. Don’t they look beautiful? Thank you Ellie.

Harry, Emily and Ashton’s Fundraising

Harry raised £8 by selling the eggs from his chickens and Ashton & Emily worked together to make and sell tie-die bags, making £150. Watch the video to see our Champion Fundraisers receiving their trophies!

Leland and Nikolai’s Fundraising

Leland in Y4 and Nikolai in Y1 set themselves the challenge of walking 50 miles in May around the local area of Baxenden and Accrington. They raised £360 for our Beehive, which is amazing! We are really proud of both boys and they each received a special trophy, as you can see in the video below!

Riley’s Beehive Fundraising

Riley in Y3 gave up gaming for Lent and replaced it with family activities everyday, linked with ’40 things’. Amongst other things, he planted 40 sunflowers one day, completed 40 exercises another day, spent another day finding 40 objects etc. We are really proud of him and he received a special trophy, as you can see in the video below!

Riley raised £330 in total for our Beehive – thank you, you and your family are amazing!

Red Nose Day – Find Your Funny! (national fundraising)

As a school we all raised £212 – well done to everyone!

Community Fundraising

We are so proud of Esme and Charlie! For Halloween Esme & Charlie raised over £200 for the Hyndburn Hub food bank by organising a scavenger hunt to enable local children to go trick or treating safely. They got lots of other families involved and raised money too.

They have also gone through their own toys and filled 10 boxes between them for families who won’t be able to afford gifts for their children this year.

Some of our children wanted to help the local foodbank by collecting boxes – what compassionate children we have! Here is Lucy with her huge box of treats! Thank you to everyone else who has made a box for our local foodbank!

Armistice day – Raising money for the British Legion (our national fundraising)

Miss. Shore, our History Lead and Y3 teacher led us in our Remembrance service, ‘Service & Sacrifice’, which was beautiful. We are waiting to hear how much money we have raised!

MacMillan Coffee Morning – our national fundraising

Wow! We have raised over £418 for MacMillan – what an achievement! Even though we had some classes isolating, we managed to ‘zoom’ or have them when they returned to school. What a great achievement.

Harvest 2020 – Our Global & Local Fundraising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cMCFIEFskw&feature=youtu.be&safe=active

Sienna’s walk for NICU at Burnley

Sienna has been busy walking to raise money for NICU at Burnley hospital as she spent 4 months there when she was born and we’ve been discussing the wonderful work the doctors and nurses do there. 
She has met her £500 target, so thankyou for your help! 

Rebecca’s Walk for Alder Hey

Rebecca in Y1 decided to walk a marathon (26 miles!) before the end of May to raise money for a little baby she knows, who is currently in Alder Hey hospital called Erin Bates. Erin is very poorly and has just beaten covid-19 but remains in intensive care. Rebecca wanted to raise money for the hospital to help them to make Erin better. A week later she smashed this and she managed to walk 23.5 miles – she then extended the challenge and achieved 50 miles before the end of May.

She has now raised over £1500 and if you include gift aid it’s over £1800 !

Denys’ Covid Fundraising

Denys, in Year 2 has decided that he would love to raise money to help people during the Covid 19 crisis. He had seen lots of inspirational stories on the TV of people raising money, especially Captain Tom Moore and wanted to do the same.

Denys would love to raise money for ‘Springhill Care Home’ because he visited them at Christmas with his class and has already met many of the residents and carers. They would like to buy some good sturdy parasols so that the residents can sit under them in the summer. As a school family, we would like to support Denys in raising money for a great cause in our local community.

Denys managed to raise £712 overall, with £68 from Baxenden! Well done Denys – what a great achievement!

R.E. Today Competition

Baxenden have been asked personally by the magazine ‘R.E. Today’ to submit some work for the next issue of their magazine. If some thought is put into it, then the work has a good chance of being published in RE Today magazine! If we have lots of entries, we will choose a few to send to the magazine. If there are only a few entries then we will send them all for the magazine to choose from.

The piece of work is called ‘If the Earth was only…’ and can be accessed by using the Powerpoint below . The completed work needs to be scanned in (high resolution) and sent to photos@baxenden.lancs.sch.uk OR you can drop the original work into the school office, for us to send in the post/scan in for you. THE FINAL DATE FOR US TO RECEIVE THE WORK IS: FRIDAY 1ST MAY

RE Today Project

Jacob Vaughan

Task 1

1. I like how the poem shows how tiny in comparison to the universe the Earth is, yet how important it is to us and other creatures.  Looking down on the Earth and being able to marvel at it, which we cannot usually see.  It illustrates how tiny the Earth really is, yet how important it is.
2. The poem is about a tiny planet in the centre of a field that people worship.
3. I believe that humans are destroying the Earth, we don’t see what we are doing to the Earth causing pollution, causing waste and damaging the oceans.  We have forgotten that God gave us the Earth to cherish and protect and not to destroy it.  In this pandemic CO2 is being released less as there is less pollution.  Nature is clearer to see and hear and the air is cleaner.  We are starting to be able to see the beauty of the Earth again.
4. We must remember the changes that are happening during this pandemic, and how we can start to see the stars clearer at night and hear the birds singing during the day.  We can see this whilst still carrying on with our lives, more people are working from home and travelling less which means there is less traffic pollution.  We must remember this and continue this change all of the time.
5. Everyone needs to change to help the earth.  Leaders need to change, the owners of the big industries need to change and everyone needs to try to be a little bit more eco-friendly.

Holy Week Reflections

Shahne Vickery of Imaginor has put together a series of reflections for each day of Holy Week which is suitable to be sent out to families. The material is free for anyone to download,  https://imaginor.co.uk/journey_to_easter and has an arty/crafty theme.  Journey Into Easter  is inspired by some stunning recently commissioned paintings from the Ethiopian artist Nebiyu Assefa