Collective Worship

Collective Worship has always been a daily part of our school life at St George's.

In line with the new Prayer and Liturgy Directory 'To Love You more dearly' we are changing The term Collective Worship - to 'Celebration of the Word' and are incorporating more liturgical language, prayers and music into our worship.

At St George's we celebrate as a whole school, key stage and as individual classes. We ensure all of our worship sessions are inclusive and children are encouraged to be active participants through singing, reading and signing.

Our children take great delight in helping to set up our prayer spaces and can explain their choices of fabric and artefacts that they place on our worship tables each day. They like to ask what the theme of the week is and come up with some thoughtful and reflective ideas. No two prayer tables are the same!

We can celebrate and pray anywhere! Sometimes we set up our prayer space outside, in the nook or forest. Sometimes we just see things that make us go Wow and have a spontaneous worship session.

Remembrance Day - Each year we spend a week thinking and reflecting on the people who died during the war and conflicts of the past. Our children are very respectful and prayerful. This year our Spirit Squad planned, wrote and delivered our Remembrance Day worship.

Holy Week - Stations of the Cross

Holy Week - Stations of the Cross

To help us in our focus for Easter we celebrated the Stations of the Cross as a whole school. Each class took two of the stations (selected by the Spirit Squad). The staff and children had to create a focal A3 image for their two stations and these were displayed on each classes prayer table. Our lovely TA's then took our children on a 'pilgrimage' around the stations to help them walk through the events of Good Friday. Teachers in each class then gave a 15 minute presentation for each class including scripture, prayers and reflections for each station before the children moved on. A reflective, thoughtful and respectful afternoon - well done everyone.

The following day all of the children came together to place their station picture in the correct order and the Spirit Squad led a quick reflection and prayer for each.

The images created were so good that they have now been laminated and displayed proudly in the hall!

Our children enjoy planning their own Prayer and Liturgy sessions in class at the end of our curriculum topics and our 'Spirit Quad' do a superb job in planning assemblies and special prayer sessions. We hope to develop this even further this year.

Our Prayer and Liturgy sessions are planned out throughout the year and are based on a theme or Gospel value. However this is not a rigid plan and staff and children are encouraged to adapt planning where necessary to take into account of significant world events or events in the children's lives such as a family illness or death. It is lovely to see the children automatically ask for and give prayers for those in need.

Our year 4 boys came to school quite upset with the sad football news of Diogo Jota. They took it upon themselves to set up a tribute prayer table using his colours and planned a worship session for the class in 10 minutes! An emotional and thoughtful Collective Worship.

Sept 24 - Today we welcomed back our children with a lovely assembly about peace in our world. The children reflected on the terrible events over the summer, said and wrote prayers for the three special little girls and added their prayer ribbon to the tree.