Our Lady's Catholic Primary School
Welcome to our Virtual Tour
Welcome to Our Lady's Catholic Primary School in Cowley, Oxford. Please watch the virtual tour video with some of our Year 6s explaining about our school. The rest of this web page is then dedicated to explaining all about our school- focussing particularly on our Sunshine Nursery and Reception classes. If you do have any other questions that you would like answered, please contact our office team on 01865 779176 or by email on ourladys@dbmac.org.uk and they will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible.
'You are Young, You are Precious, You are Loved'
St John Bosco
RUAH
In our school we use St John Bosco as a role model for our teaching and way of life. His system, The Preventive System' is fully embedded throughout our teaching practises and School Mission Statement (mentioned above). This manifests itself in the acronym, RUAH (meaning the breath of God) which stands for RESPECT, UNDERSTANDING, AFFECTION and HUMOUR. Our unique and completely bespoke curriculum has been designed with RUAH at the heart of it. This enables us to say that every child at the end of their primary school journey with us at Year 6, will become a RUAH child.
Salesians of Don Bosco
We are proud to have such important links with the Salesians of Don Bosco and are a Salesian Fellowship School- The first primary school to become one. We pride ourselves in teaching in a Salesian way, based on the methods of St John Bosco who is one of our patron saints.
FMA- Daughters of Mary Help of Christians
The Sisters of Mary Help of Christians (FMA) are the sisters who opened our school in 1932. Over the years they have taught thousands of children in our community and now continue to be a part of the children's lives at school. The founder of the FMA was a woman called St Mary Mazzarello, another of our patron saints who worked alongside St John Bosco.
Sunshine Nursery
Our nursery opened in September 2019 and has been very popular. We offer two sessions throughout the school day with wraparound care over lunch times as well. The lunch time does incur a small cost to cover staffing. Our morning session starts at 8:30am and finishes at 11:30pm. Our afternoon starts at 12:15pm and finishes at 3:15pm. We offer both 15 hour and 30 hour places which are flexible to parents' busy schedules. If you require an application pack or have any further questions about our nursery then please call our office and ask for Dorota.
Upon opening our nursery, we were able to create a wonderful outdoor learning space for the youngest children in our school. It really compliments the 7 key areas of learning and development in the Early Years. These are: personal, social and emotional development, communication and language, physical development, literacy, mathematics, understanding the world and expressive arts and design.
Reception: Sunflower and Buttercup
Our Reception classes have two teachers, including Mrs Rooney, our Early Years Leader. The whole team works hard to ensure that the children receive an exciting curriculum which fully covers the 7 key areas of learning and development, preparing the children to achieve their Early Learning Goals (ELGs) and ready themselves for the more formal education in Key Stage 1. Our intake for Reception is 45. This is a one and half form entry set up which we believe offers further breadth to building social skills with children across different years groups as well as exposure to more complex learning.
Outdoor Learning Area
Our Reception classes have two teachers, including Mrs Rooney, our Early Years Leader. The whole team works hard to ensure that the children receive an exciting curriculum which fully covers the 7 key areas of learning and development, preparing the children to achieve their Early Learning Goals (ELGs) and ready themselves for the more formal education in Key Stage 1.
Phonics at Our Lady's
At Our Lady’s Primary School, we follow the Letters and Sounds phonics programme. Letters and Sounds is a systematic phonics programme which consists of six phases. Children progress through the six phases from Early Years all the way through to Year 2. The teaching sequence for Letters and Sounds consists of four sections per lesson; revisit and review, teach, practise and apply.
What Phonics Looks Like...
Revisit and review - The children will play a quick fire game to practise something they have learned before and help build their confidence.
Teach - The children will be taught a new phoneme/grapheme or a new skill - this will be taught in a fun multisensory way and may well involve: songs, actions, pictures, puppets, writing giant letters in the air.
Practise - The children play fast, fun games to practise the new thing they have just learned. Many of the games on this site will be used in this section of the session.
Apply - The children will have a quick go at reading or writing sentences that involve the new thing they have just learned.
Our Playground
Our wonderful 6 tower climbing frame was installed in the summer of 2019 and has provided increased activities for the children in our school. Open to the children from Years 1 to 6, it provides many different spaces for them to play, socialise and exercise. Don't feel bad for the Nursery and Reception classes though! They also got their own new climbing frames more suited to their developmental ages.
Our Multi-Use Games Arena (MUGA)
Installed in the summer of 2018, our Multi-Use Games Arena (or MUGA) adds extra useable space to our playground and surrounding land. It has enabled even more high quality P.E lessons as well as support the children doing what they love most at play times- playing football. After the limitations of the pandemic, our skilled sports coaches have plans to run different sports tournaments and invite other schools to compete.
Library
Our library is full of a diverse range of books from many different authors and genres. We are constantly looking for new and exciting texts which are relevant to the children's interests and also reflect the diverse society in which we live.
Our next fundraising target is to bring the library outside onto the playground. More about this in the future.
Thank you for your interest in our school. We hope that this short tour has answered many of your questions. If not, please do look at our website or contact the school office. We will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible.