Appreciation Station

We have continued with the Appreciation Station idea which was launched by last year’s School Council. This year, we have decided to have the appreciation box rotate classrooms, spending two weeks with each year group. This allows everybody more time to think about who they would like to vote for and appreciate. We are also able to vote in our meetings for people we want to appreciate in our school community.

We have managed to make appreciation cards for some of the staff who helped us with our Christmas performances. We have also made tokens of appreciation for members of our community outside of St Thomas Aquinas, such as the Mayor and her team (who gave us lots of council ideas during our visit to her parlour in January) and Fr Gerard who always gives up his time to ensure that we properly celebrate important feast days within school.

Visit to the Mayor’s Parlour

We were able to visit the Milton Keynes Mayor’s parlour for a very exciting tour and meet and greet with Madam Mayor. It was a fantastic learning opportunity for us to see how a council and democracy work on a bigger scale and we thoroughly enjoyed asking her all our questions.

We learnt that Madam Mayor is a keen cyclist so we took part in a workshop style discussion about how to make Milton Keynes a greener, more eco-friendly city by promoting cycling. We had some great ideas that we shared with the Mayor and a couple of members of MK Council’s Transport department. Hopefully, we will be able to use some of these ideas in our school soon and get more people cycling!

MP Callum Anderson Visit

We were so lucky to have an exciting visit from our local MP, Mr Callum Anderson. We were able to meet with him and ask him questions about his job and his role in the community. He gave us advice about how to be successful and how to solve problems in our school or wider community. We really enjoyed preparing for his visit and were delighted to be able to meet him for a School Council Q&A session. 

Mr Anderson then spoke in an assembly to all Key Stage 2 children. He told us all about life as a Member of Parliament and what it is like to represent our community. He answered our questions and taught us lots about government and politics. We were so grateful for his visit.  

New Year’s Resolutions

At the beginning of the new term in January, we had a think about our New Year’s resolutions for ourselves, our friends and our school community. We want to be successful School Councillors and ensure that our classmates and communities are successful this year too. We used the first week of school to think about how we were going to achieve this. We had a lovely discussion about what we want to do this year and how we want to make it happen! It was a positive way to start the New Year.

During the rest of January, we met some important people such as the local MP and the Mayor; we made sure to ask them what their New Year’s resolutions are too. This inspired us and allowed us to realise that even important and successful people still have things they always want to work on!