“I will show you my faith by my deeds.”

James 2.18

Our Mission Statement

Together with God we reach for the stars.

We are a Catholic family and welcome all into our vibrant community. We strive to make Jesus the centre of our lives. Each person is unique and we seek to inspire each other towards knowledge and joy as children of God. We nurture everyone to reach their full potential.

At St Thomas of Canterbury we pride ourselves on the work we do on our two charisms; Ecological and Pastoral Care. These two charisms underpin our daily school life and teachings. Our chaplaincy team 'Thomas' Troops' have dedicated groups for our two charisms. Our friendship team and Eco team. Along with the prayer and sports teams, we work together to keep our school a Eco friendly and caring place.

Come and See programme

Come and See is one of the programme of Religious Education recommended by Salford diocese, and in order to achieve our aims and objectives at St Thomas of Canterbury Primary School, we follow this recommended programme. This was introduced September 2019.

Central to the programme are three themes which stem from Christian belief and the churches response in faith. The three themes are; 

• The community of faith – Church
• The celebration of ritual – Sacramental 
• The way of life – Christian living

Each year group has its own set of topics within the programme. The process of each topic is opened up through Explore, Reveal and Respond.

Explore helps children to begin to look at and focus on the experience within their own lives- concerning themselves, their relationships and their world and lasts for one week. 

Reveal is the heart of the process. This is when the children discover the Christian understanding of the mystery of the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They explore the mystery of human life as revealed in the person, life and gospel of Jesus Christ Christians. It will involve learning about Scripture, the teaching of the Church, prayers, rites, psalms, hymns and other expressions of Christian faith and the lives of outstanding Christians.

Respond lasts for one week and has three parts; Remember, Rejoice and Renew. At this stage of the process, children are given the opportunity to remember what they have been taught and think about how they will apply this teaching in their own life in order to serve others. There will also be a time for reflection and celebration within this part of the process.

Catholic Social Teaching

Catholic Social Teaching is taught throughout St Thomas of Canterbury from Nursery to Year 6. CST is based on the life and words of Jesus Christ, who came "to bring glad tidings to the poor...liberty to captives...recovery of sight to the poor" (Luke 4:18-19).

At the core of Catholic Social Teaching are a number of key concepts and principles. These are; Family and Community, Solidarity and the Common Good, Rights and Responsibilities, Option for the poor and Vulnerable, Dignity of Work, Dignity of the Human Person and Stewardship. 

Catholic Social Teaching is based on the belief that God has a plan for creation, a plan to build his kingdom of peace, love and justice. It holds that God has a special plan for every single one of us, whoever we are. Our part in this plan isn’t just limited to things ‘spiritual’, or times when we do “religious things.” It involves every aspect of our lives, from the things we pray about, to how we live as a responsible global citizen.

Each term, every year group has one CST focus to explore deeply and to link to their wider curriculum areas. See Long Term Plan below.

Using ‘Caritas in Action’ as a guide, the teachers carefully plan a unit of lessons based on one of the CST concepts to help the children; understand, explore and act. This work is then shown in their RE books or class 'Big Books'. 

The teaching of RE is split into 9 key concepts, which are taken from the Come and See scheme of work. These are; Domestic Church (Family), Baptism/Conformation (Belonging), Advent/Christmas (Loving), Local Church (Community), Eucharist (Relating), Lent/Easter (Giving), Pentecost (Serving), Reconciliation (Inter-relating) and Universal Church (World).

Each of these areas have their own ‘Big Question’, which the children discover the answer to. These can be found in the Long Term Plan. They questions all have a focus linked to the liturgical year. 

Reading

During each lesson, the children read a bible story and/or pieces of scripture. The children discuss the vocabulary and the meaning of any unknown words, in a similar structure to guided reading sessions. As a class, the children will then answer questions to comprehend the meaning/message from the story or scripture to develop a deeper understanding.

Inclusion

As we are a multi-cultural school, all children no matter of their religion are involved in all lessons and collective worship. This also includes children with SEND. Children of other faiths are welcomed to share their faith and use the prayer room, where we have prayer mats available. A week per year is dedicated to the World's Faiths and help the children to understand the faith beliefs of some of the children in their class. 

Character development

Through RE teaching, Collective Worship and Catholic Social teaching, the children develop the gospel values;

Hope, resilience. Perseverance

Love, generosity

Non-violence, gentleness

Justice, gentleness

Forgiveness,

Compassion, kindness, service of neighbour

Simplicity, non-attachment to wealth

Humility, lack of ego, disinterest in status, dependence on God

Integrity, honesty, truth-telling

Preferential option for the lost and the least

In the EYFS, the children, along with the rest of the school are taught RE using the Come and See scheme. The exploration and work they do is shown in their year group 'Big books'. The children explore a big question in each of their units and complete activities based on these. Whether that is indoors or outdoors in their 'leading their learning' time.  

As well as this, the children in Nursery and Reception do daily collective worship. This is sometimes held in the class room but is also held in God's Garden, which they visit at least once a week. 

Collective Worship

Collective Worship

Year 5 led a wonderful collective worship in Year 1, reminding them that they must take care with their words.

Nursery Collective Worship

Nursery participate in daily collective worship. These sessions are sometimes held in class and others take place in God's Garden.

In Reception the children are keen to reflect and share their thoughts during collective worship. They also enjoy taking some private reflection time during continuous provision at our prayer corner, where they can write down a prayer or message to God. Take a look at the pictures below:

Catholic Social Teaching

Nursery have been studying Solidary & the Common Good as our CST topic. After learning about how Jesus was a good friend to all, we have been considering how we can follow in His footsteps and be good friend's ourselves. Come and see the friendship bracelets we have created.

We have taken our CST topic to God's Garden. Here we were thinking about how games played as a group can build friendships and bring our school family closer together. We have been playing hide & seek, which of the Nursery children can you spot...

Year 2 – Option for the Poor and Vulnerable.

We have been discussing lots about why people have plenty and others have very little.  We have created posters to show the difference between extremely rich and extremely poor – explaining why it’s unfair that there is such a difference between the needy and the affluent. We created mindmaps to explore what fairness means and what it means to ‘act justly’.

In Reception we have been learning about Solidarity & The Common Good. Above are some pictures of the children sharing toys they had brought from home. We discussed how, together with God, we can learn to share and play together in love and peace. 

What is happiness?

We started the session by discussing our understanding of happiness and shared our happy times, like Christmas time, jumping in puddles, playing with our friends and spending time with out family. We enjoyed some quiet reflection time, as we drew our happy experiences. We talked about how the happy times we drew all involved other people and how it makes us feel when we share our happiness with others- proud, great, wonderful, delighted, needed, were some of the words. We drew one of these emotions next to our pictures of happiness.

How can I make the right choices?

First, we talked about the difference between good and bad choices and gave examples of these from our own experiences. We then explored the good and bad choices made by different characters in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the text we are reading in our English lessons. For each good and bad choice, we shared our reasoning, and for the bad choices, what the character should have done instead.

Armish said, “Little Red Riding Hood should never have spoken to the wolf because he was a stranger and we should never speak to strangers.”

Other Faiths

World Faith Day 2022

In April, the children celebrated and learnt all about other faiths. 

Year 1 - Buddhism

Year 2 – Buddhism continued

Year 3 - Judaism

Year 4 – Hinduism

Year 5 - Islam

Year 6 - Sikhism 

Day of Reflection 2021

On Tuesday 23 March, the Government declared a day of reflection to mark the first anniversary of the first coronavirus lockdown. Bishop John invited our school to take part in marking the occasion in prayer. 

Each class to contributed to our whole school rainbow of reflection by writing or saying a prayer/poem for each of the colours of the rainbow. Please see our contributions below. 

Lent 2021

From: Caritas, Diocese of Salford

Due to the restrictions, we are ‘resting’ the St Joseph Penny Appeal boxes this year for everyone’s safety. Instead, we are inviting schools and individuals to think about 1904, when the Appeal was first launched, and consider challenging themselves to raise that amount of money.  It could be £1.90, £19.04 or even £190.40!  We are encouraging you to share ideas to fundraise safely and creatively at home.  We have created a JustGiving page for fundraising to link to, and to safely collect sponsorship money.

Advent Hampers 2020

A HUGE thankyou to all of the staff and friends of St Thomas of Canterbury who donated so many wonderful items to our Advent hamper collection this year. 

The children worked hard throughout Advent to earn their Advent tokens and on our penultimate day in school, Mr Deane conducted our very first (COVID safe) virtual draw. The whole school watched on as over 20 names were pulled out of the hat and the children and their families were then presented with a hamper filled with range of food and Christmas gift items. 

Dear parents and carers,

Just an update on our fundraising that we did for CAFOD, back in December. As a school, we raised £513.00, which is an amazing amount. Thank you all so much for your generosity.

As a school, we have decided to buy the following world gifts, which will make so much difference to those in need.

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Parents are called to teach their child the ways of faith. We are here to support you in that. At home, you can teach them prayers and pray with them.  You can take them to church and make sure they learn their catechism.  You can help them prepare for the reception of the Sacraments so as to grow in grace and you can teach them how to live a moral life by their words and their actions.

Assessments are completed by teachers at the end of each term,  after teaching a block of 3 Come and See units and/or Catholic Social Teaching and an Other Faiths unit. Assessments grids are used to track where the children are working at.