Over the last two sessions in Ethos Club, we have been weeding and preparing part of the garden for planting. On Monday 10th July, Mrs Dean brought a plant pot of overgrown lilies for us to split and plant. We really enjoyed planting and feel we have made a great start to our Memorial Garden. 

Choosing a suitable space for our Memorial planting.

We wrote letters to the school governors to find out whether the would be able to allocate some money from school funds to support the development of our Memorial Garden idea. You can see our shared letter below. We can’t wait for their reply! 

24.4.23

A warm welcome back to Ethos Group!  It was lovely to meet some keen new Year 2 children this lunchtime. Today we put some thought into planning our activities for the term ahead.  The children came up with some really creative ideas.  We would love to get outside more during the sunny weather and aim to develop a 'memorial area' in our school garden, where children can reflect or say prayers for family members or pets who have died.  Eve had the idea of chalking pets' names onto pebbles to remember them.  Jakira would like to have a special 'memorial plant' in the garden.  After discussing some of these ideas with Year 4 afterwards, it was suggested that we could plant Queen Elizabeth's favourite plant - and by doing this we could honour her memory too.  Thankyou to Aidan H for this suggestion.  We will hope to plant Lily of the Valley as this was famously the queen's favourite.  One of our next activities will be to write a bid to the school governors to see if we could be allocated some money to buy this special plant. 

Everyone (Y2 and up) is welcome at Ethos club, whether as a regular attender or joining in from time to time.  One of our wonderful Y4 Ethos Group members attended every single session during the Spring Term.  Her ideas and contributions are always of the highest quality.  Well done!

Ethos Group Autumn 2022

St. Andrew's Ethos Group meets every Monday at 12.30pm and is attended by class 'Ethos Reps' from Year 2 upwards as well as anyone else who wants to 'drop in' and join in with our activities. There are twenty nine children on the register. Usually 12-20 children attend. Some have attended all of the sessions. Our sessions have centred around the Christian Value 'Respect'. The children were given time to reflect on what this means to them and from this we developed two strands: 'Respecting other People' and 'Respecting the Environment'.  They reflected on the passing of Queen Elizabeth and why we respected her so much.  The children collaborated to write a wonderful letter of condolence to King Charles and have then been busy writing their own letters to add to our special 'mail', including poems, prayers and artwork. 

We have nineteen letters ready to send which the children have composed at Ethos Club and at home. Some children have started to write prayers, which they hope to bring comfort to the king. Some copies will be kept in school and will hopefully be displayed and shared in worship.  Ethos group reps have shared our thoughts with classmates. This has resulted in more letters being handed in and more enthusiastic children joining in. 

Our next project, with the focus of 'Respecting the Environment' will see a collaboration with Community Litter Pickers 'Clean our Patch'. We will have the opportunity to borrow litter picking equipment and get families involved in our goal of encouraging more people to respect the environment. 

I have some Christmas activities planned. I would like the children to make cards to send to elderly or isolated members of the community.  We will start with our retired friends at nearby Wesley Court. If you would like to nominate a recipient, please let me know. 

Please feel free to share any ideas that you would like to see developed. It could be anything linked to strengthening the school's Christian Values, or providing opportunities for the children to put their values into action. We only meet for half an hour a week, but it's amazing how busy and creative the children can be between sessions! 

Mrs Dean

Well done to everyone who designed Christmas cards for our neighbours.  These have now been sent to residents of the retirement home Wesley Court, elderly / isolated people of Stonehouse as well as some our own family members who we thought might appreciate a little Christmas cheer.  I have already had some lovely, appreciative comments back from neighbours who were not only touched by the gesture, but were impressed by the quality of the artwork and thoughtful words written. 

Letter to King Charles from our Christian Ethos Group

Monday 7th November, 2022.

Dear King Charles,

We are writing this letter to say how sad we are to have lost our gracious, beloved queen. You must feel devastated as she was your amazing mother. We are so sorry for your loss and we wanted to send you our deepest condolences on behalf of St. Andrew's Primary School in Plymouth.

We are the school Ethos Group.  We meet every Monday lunchtime to think about how we can promote our school’s Christian values.  These are: friendship, love, understanding, trust, respect and honesty. This term we are focussing on ‘respect’ and we have been thinking about how we can respect our environment more (we are going to do some litter picking).  

One of the people that we have all known throughout our lives has been Queen Elizabeth - she felt like family to us.  We respect her because she was such a committed queen and worked her entire life to help other people (right until her last few days).  We admire her because she was always so kind, loving, graceful, inspirational and selfless. She was an amazing role model for us and helped us to be more determined. 

We are absolutely sure that you will follow in Queen Elizabeth’s legacy and strive to be as committed and loyal as a monarch as she was.  We are excited because in our lifetime we have never had a king reigning before! We are wondering whether you will make any changes.  We hope you will have all the qualities our lovely queen had and we hope you are as excited as we are about the challenges ahead. We feel like the queen was like a lighthouse and we were like the boats being guided!  Maybe now we will have an even better lighthouse to guide us!

We hope you have enjoyed reading our letter. 

Yours Sincerely,

St. Andrew’s Ethos Group.

Archive

Christian Distinctiveness Project

The Ethos Group have been involved with the Christian Distinctiveness Project, hosted by All Saints Academy Plymouth. As a group the children designed and created a banner to represent the Christian Distinctiveness of our school.

The children chose;

• St Andrew to represent our school saint. 
• Fish in the net to represent people being gathered up by Jesus. 
• Rays of light from the sun to represent the Holy Spirit guiding our lives. 
• A blue and white lighthouse to represent our location and school colours. 
• Fish with our Christian values on them to show the ways in which we try to live our lives. 

The banner is currently on display at St Andrew's church. We are looking forward to finding a special place for it at school where we can all enjoy it and be reminded of some of the important truths it represents. 

We are the Christian Ethos Group of St. Andrew’s Church of England (VA) Primary School.

The Christian Ethos Group is a group of children, governors, staff, church representatives, parents and our rector Joe Dent. This group aims to develop our Christian distinctiveness, promote our school values, enhance children’s education and develop links within the community. The children meet once every week and we invite the wider members to join us once each half term.  

Our school is multi-cultural, our school family is made up of children from many different faiths. We all share the same values and we are determined to uphold these values in our school. We would like to tell you a little about our Ethos group and the impact that it is having on our school.

The role of the Ethos group is to help our children understand our school Christian Values. We meet in order to discuss aspects of our school’s commitment to our Christian ethos, to work on the value for that term and decide on the activities we would like to do. During the academic year 2016/17 we have plans to carry out all sorts of activities, such as leading worship.  We ask fellow pupils for their opinion about our values and our worship and use their feedback to shape future worship. We report to our governors on what we have thought about, discussed and initiated.

Every half term Ethos group plan and deliver whole school worship on one of our values. The most important part of worship is reflection time, where children think about how the value can help them in their daily lives. The Ethos group place reflection prompts in each class's prayer space to encourage children to continue their reflection beyond whole school worship time.

Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path. (Psalm 119.105)