Year 5 had a special visitor on Monday from Newcastle College. The children worked in groups to make working wind turbines and tested how many volts these produced. This workshop helped to embed their learning on renewable energy

We would like to give you an update on how we are getting on with our fundraising for CAFOD through our Big Lent Walk.  Here are some photos of our whole school walk today.  Everyone has been working very hard in school to get our steps in each day to add to our whole-school total distance for our virtual pilgrimage to the Vatican and back.   Lots of classes are almost at the halfway point for reaching their target which shows their commitment to trying hard to help our brothers and sisters around the world by supporting CAFOD.  If you would like to support us in our efforts, please donate to our Just Giving page: St Alban's Big Lent Walk 2025 is fundraising for CAFOD We hope to invite you in to walk alongside your child in the coming weeks.  Thank you for your support.

Congratulations to our year 5/6 boys football team who are the Northern  Pokémon Primary Schools champions. Teams from Durham, Greater Manchester, Cheshire, South Yorkshire, Cumbria and Merseyside came together to play in what was a fantastic day of football.  We now go to represent the North of England in the  National finals to be held at Stoke City’s ground in May.

On Friday we came together as a whole school to get more of our steps in for our Lenten walk. Our Children in year 5 and 6 helped our Reception and Nursery children walk round.

Exciting news—ALL 10 of our eggs have hatched! We received the eggs on Monday, and now we have 10 fluffy chicks in our classroom! It’s been amazing watching them grow stronger each day. To celebrate, we read and performed poems about our hatching experience. We’ve love taking care of our new feathered friends and can’t wait to watch them continue to grow next week. 🐣🐥

Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday. We read "Mr. Wolf's Pancakes," then made and decorated our own.

Our Year 4 class went to Mass today where they received their ashes alongside our parish community. We brought some blessed ashes back to school with us and our Year 4 Mini Vinnies were proud to help with distributing these to the other children and staff in school during a Celebration of the Word.

To start our charity fundraising in preparation for Lent, our Mini Vinnies decided that they would like to sell pancakes. We had a lovely time enjoying our delicious pancakes together out in the quad and our Mini Vinnies did a great job of serving us!

Father Jonathon came to celebrate Mass with us as a whole school yesterday. We were pleased to welcome some of the parishioners from St Anthony of Padua, who stayed after Mass to have some tea, coffee and pancakes, served by our Mini Vinnies. This also gave our Mini Vinnies a chance to tell our visitors all about our Lenten fundraising plans.

Our Mini Vinnies have been working hard to think about ways that we can live out our Christian values in school as we approach Lent.  They have lots of exciting things planned, and their first step is to begin collecting for the food bank.  They would like to do this every Friday and we are asking for donations of cans of food ('canny' Friday), dried foods like pasta or rice, cereals, tea, coffee or toiletries.  It has been great to see our Mini Vinnies working together to design their posters and going to each class to tell them about their plans.  We would be grateful for any donations that you can make and our Canny Friday box will be on the yard at the beginning and end of the school day every Friday.  Thank you for your support with this.

On Friday evening some of our year 5 pupils took part in the Hoops 4 Health competition, at the Newcastle Eagles Arena. They were successful in the semi-finals which meant they got to play in the final. This took place during the Eagles match at half time. It was a great experience being able to play in front of a crowd and on a full size basketball court. The final went down to a shoot out and St Alban's won! Congratulations to everyone who took part.

We have had a great afternoon with Lucy Turner. All of our classes have taken part in a fitness circuit with Lucy. Our nursery and reception children started trying out the exercises. The rest of the school took part in a fitness circuit. The children were amazing and gave each exercise 100%. We finished the day with an assembly. We found out all about Lucy and how she became a GB heptathlete. Thanks to everyone for a great afternoon.