St Mary's has been awarded the Basic Skills Primary Quality Mark.

Holiday Dates for PUPILS

Academic Year Sept 2007 – August 2008

From To Half Term
Autumn Mon. 3rd Sept. 2007 Fri. 21st Dec. 2007 Mon. 22nd Oct. Fri. 26th Oct 2007
Spring Mon. 7th Jan. 2008 Fri. 4th April 2008 Mon. 18th Feb. – Fri. 22nd Feb. 2008
Summer Mon. 21st April 2008 Fri. 18th July 2008 Mon. 26th May – Fri. 30th May 2008

All dates are inclusive.
There is only 1 training day for teachers this year

INSET day – School closed for pupils
1. Mon. 3rd September 2007

Easter Bank Holiday weekend is Friday 21st March and Monday 24th March 2008
Bank Holiday is Monday 5th May 2008

A day will be held in reserve for General Election and will be taken second half of the Summer Term, the date will be sent out nearer the time.

St Mary's has worked so hard this year and all this work has been well rewarded.
Healthy School Award
First, we have achieved the Healthy School Award from Gateshead. These children represented our school at the presentation by performing a fantastic skipping display to show how we make physical activity fun!

Rights Repecting School Award

Next, we are one of the first schools in the North East to receive an award from Unicef

We have also achieved the requirements to be awarded the Impetus Award; this is a relatively new award. The presentation of this award will be made on Tuesday 10th July at the Civic Centre. Pupils who represented the school at the assessment session are invited to attend the award ceremony. The aims of the Impetus Award are outlined in detail on the Summer Newsletter update.

St Mary's has been linked with other schools in Europe for the last 3 years.

We now have 3 new partner schools in Italy, Germany and Spain.

Each year there is a different focus where we share our local interests and cultures.
This year the theme is artists.

St Mary's have chosen Ivan Lindsay, who is a local artist based at Tynemouth.

We are very lucky at St Mary's as we have nice school fields to play in, but these are always really muddy in the Winter. During half term a Nature Trail has been built on some of the area so that the children can enjoy more space and have plenty of excercise while having fun at the same time.

Dear parents and Children

We thank you for all the shoes we collected for the Blue Peter Appeal. We collected an astonishing amount of shoes, around about 250 pairs. Last friday we loaded them all in to Miss Hunt's And Mr Mc Carthy's Cars and took them to the collection point at Clarks shoes in the Metrocentre .As you know we are sending them to Malawi to exchange for money and equipment for the children’s corners in Malawi. Blue Peter gives many thanks to those who brought shoes in to our school to help the Aids Orphans in Malawi. But we don’t stop here! We stop collecting the shoes on the Friday the 15th.

Many Thanks

The Make Poverty History team Fraser,Matthew and Nicholas.

A special well done to Fraser for organising the collection at school! Also thanks to Anna and Kate who helped carry all the shoes to the Metrocentre.

After settling in well, the children have experienced many opportunities over the year.

One of our most successful ventures has been the Buddy System. The Y5 children tried very hard to welcome your children into school. We hope they remain firm friends next year and who knows after that.

We enjoyed performing our Nativity Tableaux live at the Metro Centre. It was a daunting task in front of such a vast audience, but they rose to the occasion and I was very proud of the children!