A Window on the world at

St Mary Star of the Sea

Spring 2016 - Edition 4

Welcomeback to our ‘Window on the World’ magazine edition 4, where we give you an insight into our school life. We have great articles on sport, school assemblies, the environment and many other topics.As a rights respecting school we want to let the world know how important the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is to us and our everyday school life.

Remember: We all have rights!

Amber Rudd’s Visit

Before the UN Paris climate conference in December, the children learnt about climate change issues and wrote personal messages on postcards to the Hastings and Rye MP about all the things the world risks losing because of the changing climate.

This term Amber Rudd visited our school for the third time for an assembly to talk about the outcomes of the conference in Paris. The Ambassadors, I.P.C and Steering group were leading this - our school ambassadors welcomed her in, the I.P.C. showed her some of our ‘For the Love of messages’ for Climate Change on our display in the hall and the Steering Group led the assembly.

Amber explained the issues discussed and agreed in Paris and then spent over an hour answering many questions from our pupils e.g.‘How will we make sure that the targets set will be met?’

Along with Amber Rudd, John McLaverty from Oxfam came as this was part of the ‘For the Love of…’ campaign (an Oxfam project). The Steering Group, I.P.C and Ambassadors were interviewed and, these interviews were put on the Oxfam website.

Ania and Nayram were part of the group. Ania said “I think it was important for Amber Rudd to speak about what will happen if the world doesn’t meet its climate goals, because all we need to be determined to make the world a better place”. Nayram said “I think today was a great experience of how we should be respecting our world and what we should be doing to protect it. We all have the right to be safe.”

The activity was part of the Climate Coalition’s ‘For the Love of…’ campaign, which is the largest group of people dedicated to action on climate change. Supporters of over 100 charities in the UK, including Oxfam, are focusing on what the world risks losing and are asking for 100% clean energy by 2050.

Amber said “It was wonderful to be welcomed with such enthusiasm and answer quite detailed questions about what the Paris climate agreement means for the next generation.”

Mrs Rubi added “This was a wonderful opportunity for our children to be able to follow up the work they have been doing about climate change with a visit from Amber Rudd who answered their thoughtful questions.”

Rye Primary Visit

Recently, some teachers, along with the head teacher from Rye Primary School came to visit St Mary Star of the Sea as they want to become a Rights Respecting School. They came to look around and took inspiration from our class charters and all of the rights respecting aspects of our school. Mrs Rubi explained to them what it meant to be a Rights Respecting school and the steps that they would need to take to accomplish this.

The first thing they will need to do is to show the children a copy of the Convention for the Rights of the Child as this has all the articles that they will need to choose from to make their school and class charters.

We are hoping to visit the school at a later date when they have got their charters in place.

ASSEMBLIES

We have had many wonderful assemblies this year. Here are some of them: Martin Luther King

ARTICLE 12: Everyone has the Right to an opinion and be listened to

World Water Day Assembly

Isabelle and Sasha (Y6) did an assembly on World Water Day (22nd March)and explained how important it is to save water.

World Water Day is celebrated every year because we need to remember that not everyone has access to clean water and we need to remember that we need to save water in all of the possible ways there are! Water day is a time to think about how lucky we are to have access to clean water and how many people in the world still have to walk miles to access water and then it is often not clean.

ARTICLE 24: Everyone has the Right to clean water

Climate Change – a follow up assembly by one of our parents

We were very lucky to welcome Mr Fad Skews, a Year 3 parent, who very kindly did an assembly on his trip to the Climate Change Conference in Paris.

First of all he reminded us how important it is for us all to try to do something to help stop climate change and the children gave some examples of how we can help.

We saw a slide show of how he and some friends had cycled to Paris, taking 5 days to get there! It was great to see so many people joining in a friendly march to show everyone how much they care about our planet.

Mr Skews then did a workshop with Year 5 who made bunting about Climate Change in French as they had been doing work on this topic in their French lessons!

Merci Monsieur Skews!!

PLEASE LOOK AFTER THE ENVIRONMENT!

EASTER COMPETITION

Create a Rights Respecting Easter Egg!