This week in school we have celebrated Children’s Mental Health Week raising money and awareness to support the work of the amazing charity Place2be. The campaign this year aims to empower children and young people across the UK to embrace self-awareness and explore what it means to them.

This year’s theme was ‘Know yourself, Grow yourself’ and all of the children were invited to come into school on Friday in clothes which make them feel most ‘like them’. It was great to see the children and staff expressing themselves in their own unique way; from fancy dress to football kits, dresses to pyjamas.

Each class also had bespoke activities in their PSHCE & SEAL lessons linking to mental health and on Friday afternoon we celebrated with treats and the movie Inside Out.

For more resources accessible from home please follow the link below:

Children’s Mental Health week 2025 and Mental Health Awareness week 2025 – BBC Teach

Class 1

We have been learning about emotions and how we cope with them as well as talking about what makes us feel different ways at home and at school. We used the visual representations of the characters from the film ‘Inside Out’ to help us recognise what these feelings may look or feel like.

Class 3

Class enjoyed coming in their own clothes, that allow us to express ourselves. We have been talking about our feelings in our PSHCE lesson and times when we have felt happy, sad, frustrated and joy etc. We then had a lovey afternoon watching Inside Out!

Today we launched our new Cornerstones Topics through a day of imagination & creative writing with the local author and storyteller; Adam Bushnell. It was great to hear how he started his career as an author and all about his dream from a young age – it definitely inspired many children across the school 🙂

Class 1

Our children in EYFS worked incredibly hard with Adam to create their own super-animals based on the interactive and engaging story he told us all about ‘The Wise Old Man & the tortoise”. The children created their own sounds and actions for different parts of the story and had so much fun retelling it with great articulation. They were astonished when at the end of the story a tortoise statue appeared out of Adam’s special cage…. Which then turned into a real tortoise when we thought of our longest and craziest magic word “bomballiniosa”

We had so many children want to write more about their super-animal and some even created sentences for theirs. One of our favourite was the “elephant that had laser power eyes” 🐘

Class 2

Class 2 enjoyed working with Adam to launch our topic of Splendid Skies. e had lots of fun drawing our own characters and describing then in detail. We discussed where our character would go and what they might see in the splendid sky!

Class 3

Class 3 had an excellent time working with Adam Bushnell, introducing our new topic ‘Gods and Mortals’. We looked at some Ancient Greek armour and clothing before creating our very own heroes and monsters. We used our literacy skills to think of noun phrases to describe our heroes and monsters.

Class 4

Class 5

Today we came back to school to see that our school has been sprinkled and sparkled with a dose of Christmas.

Each class have their own beautiful decorations and we took part in the special tree decorating assembly – every child helped and added a toy decoration to our huge Christmas Tree; there was lots of singing dancing and festive fun, before settling down for the big switch on and a famous Christmas poem 🙂

This year for Children in Need we came into school wearing Superhero costumes… from Spider-Man to nurses, parents to princesses; the children made a wonderful effort with all of their costumes / pudsey merchandise. We would like to send a big thank you to everyone who supported our fundraising for Children in Need. We had fun learning about working together to make a difference to children’s lives all around the UK. As a school we raised £89 towards this worthy cause.

It was so much fun taking part in the gladiator challenges on the BBC children in need live stream. We added a nettlesworth twist to the challenges and held our own games in the school hall. The children’s highlight, by far, was the teacher challenges at the end of a wonderful morning 🦸🏻

UNCRC Article Link: 38 – Governments must do everything they can to protect and care for children affected by war.

On the 11th day of the 11th month; on the 11th hour Nettlesworth Primary School got together to take part in our annual Remembrance Day assembly.

This year the children have worked incredibly hard in their classes and in assemblies to pay respects to those who fought for us in WW1 and those who are still working to create a safe world for us to live in.

We have created a gallery outside of the wonderful artwork and had a remembrance service in school on Monday where we held a minute’s silence.

Thank you for all of your donations to the charity; Royal British Legion.

Class 1 Remembers…

Class 1 created some wonderful handprint poppy paintings and watercolour poppy fields in our Art lesson. We also visited the local area and counted all of the Poppies that had been put up by our Parish – we loved the wreath and soldier silhouette. We added our paintings to the whole school gallery on the fence too!

Finally, after our Remembrance service we baked Poppy biscuits and took them home to enjoy with our families 🙂

Class 2 Remembers…

Class 3 Remembers…

Class 4 Remembers…

To commemorate Remembrance Day, we created some beautiful collage pieces to display outside of the school entrance. We used a range of materials for our designs to create eye capturing poppies. Following on from Mrs Lee’s beautiful remembrance service in assembly, we donated money to The Royal British Legion on our giant poppy. We’ve been working hard in learning about the importance of Remembrance Day in our History session this week. Lest we forget.

Class 5 Remembers…

There are over 6,000 different genetic conditions and lots of children are affected by them: 1 in 25 in the UK in fact!

Today, at Nettlesworth Primary School we raised money and awareness for this wonderful charity! For more information please check out the PowerPoint below:

https://nettlesworth.durham.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Jeans-for-Genes-Day-2024-1.pdf