Our Harvest Service was held at St James Church on Sunday 1st October, 2017. It was lovely to see so many of our families and people from the community attend our wonderful service. Children from our school Read and took part in Open the Book. All children that attended sang beautifully and helped to present the Harvest in the service.

As a school we collected non-perishables for Harvest and sent them to Maggs Day Care Centre in Worcester. They were truly grateful for all the donations of food.

Thank you as always for your continued support and your generous donations.

After being inspired by all the amazing Remembrance displays and in honour of all the service men, women and animals who have served, suffered and sacrificed their lives for our country since World war 1 (this being the centenary year), I thought it would be lovely to display some decorated “poppy rocks” around the war memorial at St James Church (our local church in Hartlebury) and to encourage the community to take part via the Hartlebury matters and Hartlebury rocks Facebook pages.

What better way to bring a village community and families together by spending a few moments decorating a stone, taking time to reflect and making our children aware of the importance of Remembrance Day.

Created by Mrs A Collins (Parent and Staff Member)

Remembrance

All they did for us,

100 years ago,

They marched in war against Germany,

To give us a better future.

The whistle of the shells,

The moan of the soldiers,

Roar of guns,

All of that,

To give us a better future.

5 months in,

The war showed no sign of ending,

Millions already lost,

Hospital carts everywhere,

All that to give us a better future.

Written by Year 5 children that they read out during our Remembrance Service at St James’ Church on Thursday 8th November 2018.

Open the Book takes place during our Worship and is run by Church Volunteers. Every Wednesday morning the volunteers perform stories from the bible with help from the children in our school. We finish each week with a hymn chosen by the Open the Book team.

Reverend Stephen Winter is new to St James’ Church and joined us for Open the Book on Wednesday 16th January 2019. Reverend Stephen Winter has also joined our Governing Body as a Foundation Governor. We hope he feels very welcome within our lovely community and school.

On Wednesday 20th March 2019, members of Open the Book presented the story of The Last Supper. Some of our children had small speaking parts and the children all sang Kumbaya. The children who took part in the presentation shared bread and “wine” (apple and blackcurrant juice) as part of The Last Supper demonstration.

After our MacMillan coffee afternoon, one of the children in our school and his little sister, helped with the cleaning up of the churchyard.

Please see the message below from their Dad that we received, along with more photos that can be seen in our Gallery.

Well Done Noah and Flo!

‘After speaking with Mrs Unitt at the MacMillan coffee afternoon which was lovely, here are some pictures of what me, Noah and Flo got up to whilst helping with the cleaning up of the churchyard. 

On Monday 11^th November 2019, our Year 6 children walked over to St James Church to take the role call and plant crosses in remembrance of those fallen soldiers within the parish of Hartlebury. This act of remembrance began at 10.45am and included the 2 minutes silence at 11.00am. The rest of our school took part in our own act of remembrance during assembly.

Lest we forget.

We will be holding our annual Harvest Festival at St. James’ Church this year on Thursday 7^th October, at 9am for Years 1, 2 and 3 and at 2.15pm for Years 4, 5 and 6.

You are all very welcome to join us!

This year we will be donating your gifts for Harvest to a local food bank.

Please could your child bring either tins of food or dried bought goods into school on that day, as a gift for Harvest. No fresh food I’m afraid!

We look forward to seeing you at our Harvest Festival celebration!

As is tradition here at Hartlebury, on October 7^th,  all the children took part in our annual Harvest Festival celebrations at St James’ Church. Although we had two services, just to be on the safe side, they were extra special this year as it is the first time we had been in church as a school since before the pandemic. The children performed songs, read poems and prayers and were just fantastic!

All our wonderful Hartlebury families also made donations of dried and tinned goods which, this year, were donated to The Worcestershire Homeless Appeal And Pantry. This is a charity which one of our families work very closely with and we know everyone there was extremely grateful for the generosity everyone at Hartlebury showed. As you can see, we filled a van full and the children who helped were really pleased and proud to be helping such a worthwhile cause.

Thank you as always for your continued support.

Reverend Stephen Winter came along to visit Year 1 on Thursday 18th November 2021.

Reverend Winter talked to the children all about his job and how special it is to him.

We were also very lucky as Reverend Winter read us a lovely story called ‘Jonah and the Whale’ which was chosen by Darwin.

Thank you for coming to visit us. We look forward to you visiting us again very soon.

Thank you to everyone who attended our Harvest Festival service on Thursday 5th October 2023 at St James’ Church. It was lovely to see so many of our families come along to support our children and hear their beautiful singing.

Harvest is always such an important celebration in the Christian calendar, a time to give thanks to God for crops and growth. It also provides our school community with the opportunity to appreciate those working in agriculture and food production.

We hope you all enjoyed the service.

Harvest is also a time to think of those in our local communities, who experience food poverty. Thank you for all of the generous non-perishable food donations that were blessed at our Harvest church service and donated to Worcestershire Homeless Appeal. We received a lovely heartfelt message from the charity, thanking us for our continued support.

“I would just like to say a massive thank you to yourself, the pupils and parents for picking ourselves again this year to receive your harvest festival donations your continued support is greatly appreciated and will help so many families. Thank you once again for your very kind support”.