Birkie Bulletin – February 2019 from Birkhill Primary School on Vimeo.

Mrs Jenkins, our P6 teacher, applied to introduce a ‘classroom of the future’ at Birkhill Primary School. She was successful in her application bid and got not only new technology for the school but also new furniture to help pupils with focus and concentration. P6 may have the chance to sit on yoga balls and wobbly stools in the near future!

Last term, the P6 class did a topic on technology and had the opportunity to visit Sky Academy Skills Studios in Livingston. The pupils took on a variety of roles to create their own news broadcast about technology within the classroom.

Following their visit, P6 also had the chance to learn about coding. They are looking forward to seeing how the classroom may change as new things are introduced.

Article written by Zara & Sarah

A team of P7s from Birkhill Primary had so much fun participating in the annual Monifieth Fun In Athletics competition. Our team performed really well in the track and field events and came in second place overall. We would like to thank Jo Whaite (our Active Schools Co-ordinator) for helping to organise the event. We’d also like to thank the team of Dundee & Angus College students for overseeing the events and demonstrating the different skills for us each time.

Article written by Zara

This term P7B & P7J have been studying democracy as our topic. We have been learning about voting systems, voting behaviour, leadership systems and much more.

To practise what we have been learning, we held an election for our house captains. We decided to use the First Past The Post voting system and we prepared by writing persuasive speeches and posters/rosettes. We invited all of the pupils from each of the different houses to the upper area and we divided across four classrooms. We had lots of great candidates but our winners were…

Today we ended our topic with a visit from our local MSP, Graeme Dey. We prepared around 40 higher order questions to ask him and learned a huge amount about his work and what’s going on in the Scottish Parliament right now.

Article written by Zara, Sarah & Alan

On Friday 2nd September, P7B and P7J went to the Dundee Flower and Food Festival and it was an amazing day! We got to try lots of tasters and gathered lots of freebies. We even saw a miniature Oor Wullie. Have you taken part in the Oor Wullie Bucket Trail?

Article written by Zara, Sarah & Alan

This term P4 opened their own café as an enterprise project. This opportunity helped us to develop a number of skills for learning, life and work in the process.

• Learning about hygiene before and during food preparation
• Practising measurement when weighing ingredients and finding the correct volumes
• Finding out about profit/loss and what makes a business successful
• Learning about money, addition and subtraction so that we can calculate totals and change at our till
• Learning about safety while preparing and cooking food
• Practising our communication skills when interacting with customers
• Experiencing the variety of roles which make up one business

Our café was very well attended each week and we averaged over 50 guests on each of the five occasions that we opened. Before deducting the cost of equipment that we purchased for the café, we made a total profit of £835.75!

Due to the success of Dronley Delights café, we have covered all of the costs for a class trip to Edinburgh Zoo.  The children have decided that they would like to donate a further £300 to Guide Dogs for the Blind. We look forward to a visit from a dog and one of the trainers in the final week of term.

Dronley Delights would not have been so successful without the overwhelming generosity and support of the school community. Thank you to all of the adult volunteers who helped in school with baking, running the café and doing dishes! Thanks also to those who were busy baking at home and who generously donated items for sale. A special thanks to Mrs Reid for running a very successful after-school cooking club. The club was attended by 19 pupils across the four occasions it ran and was a lot of fun.

We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and hope that you did too!

Mr Johnston