St. Teresa's Mini Vinnies 

‘Mini Vinnies’ is a St. Vincent de Paul Group in a Primary School. At St. Teresa’s we have a group of Year 6 pupils who get together to pray, and to organise and talk about helping others in need within our school community and beyond. What makes Mini Vinnies such a valuable experience for the children who are part of it, is the change it makes in our school community. We look to develop the prayer life of our school.

Our Mini Vinnies group meet once a week during break-time.  

What happens at a Mini Vinnies’ meeting?

Our ‘President’ leads the meeting and organises the group. Mrs Smalldon co-ordinates the group and gives help and practical advice. The President opens the meeting with a prayer.

• A short spiritual reading/reflection/piece of music/meditation follows. The Group members take turns to do this.

• Group members then talk about the Mini Vinnies’ activities they have done since the previous meeting.
• Any future plans are then discussed.
• The President concludes the meeting with a prayer. 

What a busy Autumn term we have had!  

We have led three assemblies this half term introducing and explaining to the whole school our aim of achieving the CAFOD live Simply award.  We have asked our school community to each write a pledge that we will display in our school hall for all to see. 

We will keep you posted on our progress.

Lenten appeal - What we have, we share.

We shared our appeal with the school in an assembly at the start of Lent.  We discussed all the things that we have, that we could share with others.  The mini Vinnies sent a letter home to the parents asking them for any clothes, toys, books or blankets that they don't need anymore to be sent into school during Holy Week.  

We collected 49 bags of items that we took down the Penwortham Community Centre which will really help local families in need.  

A massive thank you to our families for your generosity.  You have done us Proud!

Christmas Foodbank Appeal

We launched our foodbank appeal asking the families of St Teresa's to bring in one item of food per family to help support different families in need.  A massive thank you to our families and their generosity as we delivered over 415 items of food.  This will help many families over the Christmas period.

SVP Christmas party

We were very lucky to be invited to the local SVP party.  We really enjoyed ourselves while helping serve food, handing our raffle prizes, chatting to the parishioners and having a dance and sing a long.  

Laudato Si' 

Pope Francis has written a letter addressed to every person on the planet, asking us all to protect the earth. Will you play your part to protect our common home?

Our new project for this coming school year 2022-2023 will be focusing on caring for our common home.  

We have spent some time creating our prayer garden.  With the help of one of our Grandads we added a cross with the words Laudato Si, care for our common home and then as a group of Mini Vinnies we planted some colourful plants.

Our Ukrainian refugee appeal

We have all been affected by what is going on in Ukraine and as a group wanted to do something positive for those people in real need.  We contacted two Preston charities, International Aid and Tippytoes Babybank and asked what donations they would need to send to the Ukrainian refugees.  They sent us a list of items so we wrote to the parents and asked them to help.  In usual St Teresa's style, our families were amazing and we sorted, packed, labelled and loaded over 1000 items which have been sent to the Polish borders.  

Our work during Lent

We are planning and delivering Collective Worships across the school each week during Lent.  

Each week one class is invited to a Collective Worship in the Sunshine Room from 1-1:15pm.  

A massive thank you to the families of St Teresa's for helping us collect over 415 items of food for the Penwortham Foodbank.  

6 of our Mini Vinnies helped to deliver the food to Kingsfold.  While we were there, we spent time finding out how the foodbank works to help people in need and we packed bags ready to go!