This year, the children learned about poverty and homelessness and took part in a range of activities that both promoted their understanding of the key issues, causes and impacts of Poverty and Homelessness before taking action to make a positive difference to the issue.
Visitors from Canterbury food bank and Porchlight visited our school and spoke about how the children can be superheroes in helping to support the charities that directly impact those affected. The children reflected on how these issues, particularly those of poverty, impact our not just our wider community but also those within our school community.
After learning about poverty and homelessness, the children were tasked with a number of creative activities to reflect their learning and raise awareness. The children were asked to create some street art and looked at artists who are impacted by poverty and homelessness who have created similar art both on a local and global scale.
The children were also able to write their own song about homelessness, composing both the lyrics and the melody with our music lead. This song was then translated into a QR code so that we could share this with our wider community to promote social action from others.
In Creative writing, the children wrote to varying areas of our community to ask for change on all levels.
Year 3 wrote to local companies asking them to have food donation bins in their shops and created posters to persuade our local community to donate to food banks.
Year 4 organised for our own food bank bin to be delivered to school and wrote to families encouraging them to donate food to either our school food bank or when doing the weekly shop. Our year 4 children explained the positive impact this small change would make to our local community.
Year 5 wrote letters to major supermarkets asking them to do more to support food banks. Some children asked the supermarkets to match donations and others asked for more good to be done with food waste.
Year 6 wrote to people in power both in the UK and abroad to help the people in Gaza who are facing extreme poverty and homelessness. These letters were both sent to world leaders and also translated into QR codes and sent directly to them via social media.
With Rev Chris and Mrs Parrett, the children visited St Martin’s church where a homeless shelter had been erected. Children wrote prayers and messages of hope on paper doors and pinned them to the tent before sharing in a moment of quiet reflection and prayer.
On Friday, as with every SMSC week, we held a final SMSC worship where visitors joined us to celebrate the action taken but also reflect on how the work is not yet done. We invited parents, carers, governors and our local community into the building to see the work that the children had achieved and hear our message to share on.
As a school we know that fundraising also has an important part to play in social action and so we held a collection for the food bank and raised money for Porchlight which was presented to them on Friday. Over the coming terms, we will continue to both take action and fundraise during our Courageous Advocacy weeks and invite our community to join us as global neighbours to those who need it most.