Celebrating our Catholic Life

Our Catholic faith is at the very heart of our school and is evident as soon as you step through our doors in what you will see, hear and feel inside St. Joseph's.

St. Joseph's serves a vibrant multicultural, and multi-faith, community. Care and respect for individual differences is very much at the heart of our ethos. This is emphasised regularly throughout the day. As well as the daily acts of collective worship our children pray regularly throughout the day in their classrooms.

The school arranges visits to other places of worship within our local community so that children can learn about the beliefs of others.

Serving Our Parish and School Community

We serve our parish of St. Josephs and the local community in many ways sharing God's message of love with others whenever we can. Some ways in which we do this are:

Holding special, reflective services and liturgies in our church for our school and parish communities, especially during Advent and Holy Week.
We organise school-parish Masses throughout the year where children from our school lead the collective worship for the parish.
Assemblies are held on Fridays and members of our community are invited and encouraged to attend. These always have a religious focus.
Shared preparation in school and in the parish each year for the Sacraments of First Holy Communion and every second year the sacrament of Confirmation. We also hold regular parent meetings to ensure that families are fully involved in preparations.
Working with Parents as partners in our Nursery and Reception classes.

Charities

We support lots of charities throughout the year and staff, children and their families are always extremely generous in their support of others.

Money is raised through fund raising events, fairs and charitable donations from the school community. In recent years we have made donations to CAFOD, Macmillan Cancer research, Father Hudsons, the Royal British Legion and many other worthy causes.

We also support the The Good Shepherd, Wolverhampton by collecting and donating food and toiletries during Harvest and Advent.

Celebrating St Joseph's Feast Day!

Year 6 visited St Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham. They were an absolute credit to the school and really impressed their tour guides with their knowledge and understanding of RE and the Catholic Faith. Their excellent behaviour, responses and reverence in Mass were also noted and commented on by parishioners. The staff and Dean of the Cathedral were so impressed with our children that they sent a special letter to Mrs Hinton.

With some help from Mrs Kaur, some of our Key Stage Two children decided to spend their lunchtime tidying up our prayer area and planting some flowers ready to honour Our Lady in the month of October. Well done children!

We love school retreat days. We had a joyful, prayerful, song filled day with Dan & Emily from One Life Music finding out more about ‘The God who Speaks’

In their RE lesson, our Year Two children considered the question on display in our school hall- 'Who is God calling me to be?' They thought about the vocations God might be calling them to when they are older and then dressed up to show their responses.

In September, Fr. Craig joined us to lead a special welcome liturgy for our Reception parents and their families. The children told Fr. Craig how much they had learned about the Creation Story in their RE lessons and enjoyed singing 'If I were a butterfly'. Fr Craig showed the children pictures of the churches in the parish cluster and explained to the children that they were part of the school and parish family and that God loved them very much. 🥰

Inspired by the invitation of Pope Francis, we joined Dan and Emily from One Life Music every day until 4th October for a short liturgy to celebrate the Season of Creation.

Mrs Waller retired after (almost) 33 years at St Joseph’s. We thanked her for her hard work, celebrated a special thanksgiving Mass with her and presented her with a beautiful certificate from the diocese, thanking her for her dedicated service to Catholic Education.

We celebrated the Sacrament of the Eucharist with our Year 4 children for the very first time.

Our Year 4 children shared in a very special retreat day. The children were able to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation, reflect on the importance of the Eucharist, learn some songs and sign language, produce some artwork and celebrate Mass. Thank you to Fr. Craig for joining us in school and helping us to understand and to celebrate the Sacraments together.

Our May procession was a VERY special day... it was the first time our school community had been able to praise and worship together in a VERY long time. We were very grateful for the dry weather, which meant we could keep our distance from each other and still pray together as a whole school. A huge thank you to all the families who provided the flowers to honour Our Lady and to Fr Craig for helping us with our May Devotion today.

We had a lovely virtual retreat morning in school. We spent time reflecting on how 'Unique & Valuable' we all are in the eyes of God. We really enjoyed our prayer time, the reflection activities and the chance to learn some new music and sign language. Thank you Dan & Emily from One Life Music for a lovely prayerful morning. Here are some photographs of our Year 2 children enjoying their day. 🙏

The Year of Saint Joseph

Pope Francis has proclaimed the year from 8^th December 2020 to 8^th December 2021to be the “Year of St. Joseph.”

This year we are invited to follow St. Joseph’s example, pray with him and entrust our work to him as the patron saint of workers.

St Joseph’s Feast Days are 19^th March and 1^st May.

Who was Saint Joseph?

Saint Joseph was a very important person in Jesus' life. He is also very important to us at St Joseph’s school and to the St Newman Cluster as two of our parish churches are named after him.

Saint Joseph was the husband of Mary, the foster father of Jesus. St Joseph was a very important figure in the life of Jesus, but we actually know very little about him. In the Bible there are no recorded words spoken by St Joseph - not one!

The Bible does tell us that Joseph was Mary’s husband and Jesus’ foster father; that he worked as a carpenter and was humble, and not wealthy, and that one of his great, great ancestors was King David – that’s the same David who killed the giant Goliath with a stone!

Thousands of schools and parishes around the world are named after St Joseph. There are 21 primary schools just within the Archdiocese of Birmingham under his patronage.

And there are several countries -Mexico, Canada and Belgium, that have Joseph as their patron saint.