Catholic Life

Jubilee 2025

I N  T H E  D I O C E S E  O F  N O T T I N G H A M

As the Year of Prayer in preparation for Jubilee 2025 comes to a close, we look ahead with excitement for the opening of the Jubilee Year which has been titled ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. Pope Francis will launch the beginning of the Jubilee Year in Rome on Christmas Eve 2024, and Bishop Patrick will do the same for our Diocese on Sunday 29th December 2024.

The Jubilee Year will be a wonderful opportunity for us to live out our faith and to be disciples of Jesus. We are looking forward to holding a Jubilee themed retreat day in the Lent term, making Jubilee pledges, learning the Jubilee hymn and exploring the themes of the Jubilee in lots of creative ways.

Here are some useful Jubilee 2025 links and resources:

Official website for the Jubilee

Jubilee Year 2025 – CAFOD

Diocesan Guide To The Jubilee

 

2024 – The Year of Prayer

Prayer and liturgy at Our Lady of Good Counsel

Prayer is central to how we encounter Jesus and God and the theme of “Encounter” comes from Bishop Patrick’s teachings on how we can be closer to God through talking and listening to him.

The prayer life of our school community is woven into the natural pattern of our school day. We have set prayers which are said at the beginning of the day, before lunch and at the end of the day.

Prayer and liturgy examples

Every Friday in school, we have a celebration assembly and invite parents in to celebrate their children’s success with us. Children are awarded Special Mentions, Star of the Week or Marvellous Missionary certificates for their academic and personal achievements.

We always have lots to celebrate and encourage pupils to bring in certificates from outside school too.

Stations of the Cross

Year 4 retold and re-enacted the Stations of the Cross with great respect.

May is the month of Mary and Catholics devote the whole month of May to celebrating and honouring her, the mother of Jesus. Mary is even sometimes known as the ‘Queen of May’. Deacon Tony chose our youngest pupils to crown Mary with beautiful flowers.

The children in Year 5 held a Pentecost party to celebrate the birthday of the church. They started  with a whole class liturgy and some children used their knowledge of weights and measures to make beautiful cakes  to share with everyone.

Reception pupils painted some pretty poppies for Remembrance Day. They painted them onto plates and stones. The pupils then went down to Sleaford memorial in the Market Square to place their painted poppy stones. They took time to think about the importance of their poppies as a token of remembrance.

Spontaneous prayer is also encouraged through our various sacred spaces in and around school. Pupils enjoy the opportunity to bring their own ideas to life to enhance these and they are regularly linked in with the current time in the liturgical year. On other occasions, the sacred spaces are linked to our school virtues.

Here is our current timetable for prayer and liturgy:

Monday: Gospel Themed Celebration of the Word

Tuesday: Value of the Week

Wednesday: Hymn Practice

Thursday: Class Celebration of the Word

Friday: Celebration Assembly

We are also lucky to be located within walking distance of our parish church. We attend Mass in church for special occasions and Holy Days. Our parish priest and deacon are very supportive too, often visiting our school to enhance our prayer life or support with the children’s Religious Education.

Please use the links below to see some examples of prayer and liturgy which have taken place at our school in recent years.

Sacred Spaces Around School

Our pupils learn about liturgical colours and special symbols in the church’s year. They enjoy creating their own sacred spaces and we encourage them to help prepare these special places around school. We have a universal sacred space in the centre of our school which is used by members of other faiths too. Catholic prayer groups are regularly held in this space during lunch time, especially at key times throughout the year of the church.

Our Outdoor Sacred Space

In the Spring of 2024, we successfully applied for some Sacred Space funding and began work on our new project – an outdoor sacred space on our school field. A group of Year 6’s helped Mrs Chawner and Mrs Wright choose what to spend the money on and together we decided that we wanted to buy some wooden planters which we would place in a semi-circle to create the new dedicated prayer area.

We added a statue of Mary, heart shaped wind chimes, a welcome sign and even a special angel wind chime. We hope that the angel wind chime will provide comfort for anybody who wishes to use our new outdoor sacred space as a place of remembrance of a loved one who has passed away.

As the weather begins to improve, our school community will be able to use the clipboards, pencils, colouring crayons and paper (which is stored inside our new plastic storage) to write their own prayers and post them into our ‘prayer post box’. Also within the plastic storage, there will be lengths of appropriately coloured ribbon (matching to the liturgical year) which the pupils can take and tie onto the wooden trellis as they pray for their own intentions. We also hope that in time the bulbs inside our planters will grow and that these will add colour and beauty to the area so that we can reflect on God’s wonderful creation.

Please check back in the future to see the development of this area through the seasons.

Helping our neighbours in need

Fairtrade October 2022

Our value for Term 1 was respect. As part of learning about what this value meant, Y4 were taught about Fairtrade and how they work to give farmers around the world the respect they deserve and ensure they are paid fairly for their goods.

The pupils looked at how Fairtrade worked and created posters on respect and how we can show respect by buying Fairtrade products. They also baked cakes using Fairtrade ingredients.

Later in the afternoon, they welcomed parents in to enjoy a cuppa and cake and requested donations for this. They shared their learning to spread the message of respecting everyone around the world.    

They raised £42.20 which was sent to Fairtrade. As you can see they learnt a lot, had lots of fun and raised an a great amount by living out our value,

Rainbow Stars is a local charity who offer support to families in Lincoln who have family members with additional needs. One of our pupils requested that we did some fundraising to support them, as it is a group close to her heart.  Grace and her family have received support from the charity who rely on donations to keep offering their services and resources and they wanted to and so she wanted to give something back.

On Grace’s suggestion, we all came dressed in colours of the rainbow and gave a donation for this. Grace also sold some trolley tokens and gave out information about the hospice after school. We managed to raise £121!

The Shining Stars Liturgy Team wanted to help our local community and recognised that times are quite tough recently for us all. They decided to help families in our own school and set up a “Drop and Swap” event.

Firstly, they collected and sorted donated school uniform and childrens clothing and then invited everyone in to come and take items they could use. This was a great way to follow Pope Francis’s Laudato Si teaching because we showed care for our common home, both by recycling clothes which meant less waste and care for our school family.

We had some clothing left after the event, which we were able to give to our lovely office lady Mrs Hunt to keep as spares when needed in school.

Over the period of Lent in school, every child and adult has been working hard to support CAFOD and walk for hunger. Over the last few weeks the children have all walked a mile a day and have aimed to do over 15 miles each as part of a sponsored walk to raise money to help other people in less fortunate situations than ourselves. The children have thoroughly enjoyed the experience and have hopefully raised lots of funds which we will bring in and tally up after the Easter holidays. Thank you in advance for all your great support and sponsorship.

During Lent, the children and adults in school took part in the Big Lent walk to raise money for CAFOD.  The children walked twenty times around the playground everyday.