At St Joseph's we are proud to promote social cohesion and increase awareness and understanding of those living with dementia in our community. We want our children to learn to be active citizens and drive social change both locally and globally through our community links. Our School Choir visited The Memory Cafe at Harwich Library and shared Christmas songs as part of our inter-generational learning. 

For our European Day of Languages, Class 1 explored Poland. In Computing, we labelled the parts of a laptop in Polish.

The Archie Project

Children have been learning about different forms of dementia with a range of activities such as online meetings with professional dementia specialists, visits from staff working in a local care home setting, work books, reading books and educational board games. They have made links with a newly- formed local dementia cafe and also have the opportunity of using VR equipment to transport them back to the Year of the Queen's Coronation ( 1953) to provide a common thread of conversation with older people.

These activities support our learners to be equipped to be responsible, respectful, active citizens who contribute positively to society developing their appreciation of diversity and celebrating what we have in common.    

A group of Year 5 children visited the Dementia Cafe at Harwich Library. It was a wonderful opportunity to incorporate Essex Year of Reading with our Archie Project learning and meet people living with dementia in our community. Supporting inter-generational connectivity through mutually engaging activities increases our children's awareness of diversity. The children were able to discover what they had in common through sharing resources about childhood in years gone by compared to now. One in three young people know someone living with dementia and we are proud to be part of an enabling environment encouraging a proactive dementia friendly community.

The children shared art work and poetry they created for the cafe and reminiscence based literature which gave them plenty to chat about with visitors to the cafe. They also enjoyed meeting Jesse, the cafe's robocat!