Welcome back! Dear Parents and Carers, Happy New Year and welcome back to SJSJ! I hope you all had a happy and healthy Christmas break and enjoyed spending time with loved ones during the festive period. It has been an absolute pleasure having the children...
Dear Parents and Carers,
Happy New Year and welcome back to SJSJ! I hope you all had a happy and healthy Christmas break and enjoyed spending time with loved ones during the festive period.
It has been an absolute pleasure having the children return! As always, they have come back full of energy, enthusiasm and determination and have had a fantastic start to the new term – I’m extremely proud of what they have achieved already and know they’ll continue to make great progress as the term continues. I also wanted to say thank you for the continued support you show, not only to your incredible children but to all of us on the SJSJ team. We really do appreciate it!
We have much to look forward to this Spring with Oracy Day, World Book Day, British Science Week, Red Nose Day, our famous PTA Easter Egg hunt and our Easter performance in Church at the end of the term. Please also check your child’s class newsletter, which was uploaded to google classroom last Friday, to see what they will be learning this half term and speak to your child’s class teacher shall you have any questions.
Miss Gladstone
On Saturday 20th December 2024, our fabulous PTA organised a carol singing fundraiser at Highbury and Islington Station, where children and parents from St John and St James sang carols and Christmas songs for an hour; bringing lots of Christmas cheer to those travelling through the station. It was clearly delightful and very much appreciated as they raised an incredible £704!
We wanted to say a huge thank you to all those who took part:
Anna (Y6), Imogen and Lucia (Y5), Anoushka, Umut, Nagawa and Maya (Y4), Etienne and Florence (Y2), Rosa Lea (Y1) and Caspar (Nursery) as well as their parents and carers!
We are so proud to hear of them sacrificing some of their weekend time, particularly over the festive period, to raise money for the school whilst singing their hearts out. Thank you for being so amazing and for representing the school so beautifully in public. Shine your halos!!
We are pleased to announce that the annual Hackney RE calendar competition has commenced for 2025-26. Last year, over 120 entries were received across the borough so thank you to all children who participated. The calendar is sent to every school in Hackney and is a celebration of Religion and Worldviews teaching and learning in our schools. It also includes important dates of upcoming religious festivals and secular commemorations which help us when planning assemblies and collective worship. It aims to support pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development beyond the RE classroom.
All the artwork is selected through a borough-wide poster competition, which is open to all pupils across KS1-KS3 in Hackney Schools. This year’s Religion and Worldviews theme is on ‘Festivals and Celebrations’. The entries can show religious and secular festivals and celebrations to reflect Hackney’s diverse communities.
Entries:
Please note that ALL entries (originals only) should be:
If entries do contain some text, please check words have the correct spelling before submission. The closing date is Friday 28th March 2025 and all entries should be sent to:
RE Calendar Competition
Claire Ramalli
School Improvement Team
Hackney Education
Hackney Service Centre
1 Hillman Street
London
E8 1DY
As you already know, St John and St James is participating in the OPAL play programme, which is transforming our playgrounds and the way our children play within them. Research shows that play contributes to children’s physical and emotional health, well-being, approach to learning and enjoyment of school. Given the importance of play in children’s lives and current concerns about children’s health and opportunity to access time and space to initiate their own play outdoors, there are considerable benefits for children, parents, school and the wider community from participating in OPAL’s programme.
We are looking for enthusiastic parents to join our play team as Parent Play Ambassadors! We are looking for parents who can support the school to promote exciting and engaging playtimes for all children. As an ambassador, you’ll have the chance to make a lasting impact on our school community, through fundraising ideas, donation ideas and coming up with new ideas for resources which can be used on the playground to encourage creativity at playtime. If you are available, we would also love parent ambassadors to join us on our playgrounds and support the children in managing risk and using their imagination to play with resources provided in a range of ways. If you are interested in this role, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please let the office or Miss Gladstone know if you are interested.
Firstly, we wanted to say a huge thank you for all of the donations we have received from you during the Autumn term. It’s been lovely to see how many of you are supporting us with this initiative and to see the children engaging so beautifully with the new provision.
This week, we will be installing our new reading shed in the KS2 playground, which will be one of our ‘cosy cabins’. Therefore, we are kindly asking for any donations of bean bags for the children to sit on, or other comfortable seating arrangements such as gaming chairs, as well as any decorations, such as fairy lights, you feel the children would like to have inside.
All donations should be left in the donation station which is situated in the KS1 playground, or handed into to the main office. Thanks in advance for your support.
Mr Watson is our school’s Designated Safeguarding Lead.
If Mr Watson is not available, you can always speak to one of our school’s Deputy Safeguarding Leads:
| Name | Class | |
| Rose | Year 1 | For always making positive behaviour choices. |
| Jacob | Year 2 | For sharing amazing facts on animals! |
| Florence | Year 2 | For going above and beyond in her assessments. |
| Krystal | Year 2 | For consistently showing active listening and trying her best! |
| Zion and Ariella | Year 3 | For an amazing start to the new year. You have both worked incredibly hard in lessons and shown outstanding behaviour! |
| Lilliane | Year 4 | For beautiful handwriting in all books. |
| Christopher | Year 4 | For a fantastic start to our school. You have settled in so beautifully! |
| Jake | Year 4 | For incredible commitment to improving his fluency on TTRS. |
| Whole Class | Year 5 | For representing the school so well and being great role models on the class trip to Cardinal Pole. |
| Hawwaa | Year 6 | For outstanding effort in maths! |
| Anna, Lucia, Imogen, Anoushka, Umut, Nagawa, Maya, Florence, Etienne, Rosa-Lea and Caspar | Various | For spending time from their weekends throughout the festive period to sing Christmas carols at Highbury and Islington station in order to raise money for the school. You are all amazing. Thank you! |
This week, in Computing, we were introduced to our brand new topic: programming using Scratch. We recapped key terms that we have seen before, including ‘sprite’, and practised adding sprites and changing backgrounds independently. We then looked at what variables are in computing: a value......
This week, year 5 had the amazing opportunity to attend Cardinal Pole’s Catholic School for a sports workshop. This was a fantastic opportunity to experience a PE lesson led by a subject expert and to see what PE may be like in secondary school. We......
This week in Year 4, we have started our new computing topic of coding, we had so much fun! We got to code a character moving around on the screen and make sure we were providing the correct commands. If the character did not move the......
This week in RE, year 3 discussed the importance of making a promise and why we should try our best to keep our promises. The children were inspired by the Story of Abraham and the promise God made to him and his wife Sarah. The......
In maths this week, year 2 has focused on 3-D shapes and their properties. They named 3-D shapes they are familiar with and identified them based on the number of vertices, edges and faces they have. They then applied this knowledge to sorting shapes into......
This week in Year 1, our highlight was immersing ourselves in our key text of Moth. We acted out the different behaviours of the Peppered Moth and how it moves. We applied our key vocabulary and phrases from the text to mimic the movements. We......
This half term in Reception, we are learning all about winter and animals. In literacy, we have been reading Blue Penguin by Petr Horacek and this week we have used it as inspiration to write some character descriptions. We have been focusing on using our......
In maths this week, nursery have been focusing on developing their number recognition and one to one correspondence. One to one correspondence involves learning how to count a group of objects by assigning one number to each object and only counting each object once. As......