We have been delighted by the arrival of new play equipment in the primary 4 to 7 playground. We came in from break absolutely buzzing with excitement at the new games that we can now play. We now have even more reason to look forward to morning break and lunchtime!

Some of us have been reading extracts from Zlata’s Diary – the diary of a young girl living in Sarajevo in the early 1990s. When the diary begins Zlata is 10 like some of us, and likes normal things: school, friends, pets, music and simply being a young girl. All this changes when war comes to Sarajevo. Zlata is not able to play with her friends any more, not able to go to school for lessons or even leave her house. It reminds us how lucky we are to have the freedom to play with our friends and have lessons at school.

We are delighted that the litter pickers have been keeping our playground really clean and that everyone is helping by not dropping litter. We are very pleased about our new green flag and are wondering when we will get a turn at being litter pickers at playtime?

We’ve been learning about Buddhism with Mrs Petrie.  Yesterday we designed our own Buddhist temples in co-operative groups.  We had to work together and use our imaginations and knowledge to come up with a variety of designs.  Our temple had had to include information on the 8 fold path, Buddha’s eyes and prayer flags.  We’ve learned that there are hundreds of small golden buddha’s in every temple and we also learned about the story of the Buddha.  We continue to learn about the Rights of the Child.  Every child has the right to choose your own religion and beliefs.  Your parents should help you decide what is right and wrong, and what is best for you. – Article 14. 

The assessors from Keep Scotland Beautiful are coming to our school on Tuesday (25th Feb) morning. We have been working really hard and we hope they will be impressed with our efforts and our plans for the future! Watch this space!!

Every year, UNICEF UK’s Day for Change focuses on a different theme. In 2014, Day for Change is all about education. Going to school gives children the chance of a brighter future. But about 68 million children around the world still don’t have access to education.

On Friday 7^th February, Clackmannan Primary school helped to support UNICEF UK’s Day for Change. In return for a donation of £1 to help UNICEF’s vital work, we had a ‘Dress down Day’. It was a great opportunity for our pupils to learn about and raise money for children in other parts of the world.

We would like to thank all those who contributed and are pleased to announce we managed to raise a total of £174 for this worthwhile cause.

Today we met up with Mr McLaren to speak to him about purchasing equipment for our playground.  Mrs Wieczorek was unable to meet with us so we’ve written a letter to keep her informed of our plans.  We have asked for some money to purchase some equipment for the school playground.  We think that if there was more equipment to play with then the children would have more to do and learn to play more co-operative games.  It would also reduce the number of pupils running around which would also keep our playground safer.  We had completed an audit of our playground equipment prior to the meeting and Mr McLaren agreed that we definitely needed some new items.  We are going to meet up with the support staff after the February break to look through some catalogues.

Hailie and Emma

In primary 2 we have been thinking about what it is to be a kind person and what it is to be a good friend.

We know it is important to be kind to each other because we all need to get on with each other (Jack Wilson). Kindness is needed to be friends (Connor Blain + Ryan Gardner). Kindness can stop arguments and nastiness (Logan Fair).
We have been using adjectives to describe a good friend. These are helpful, happy, kind, nice, funny, clever, cool in school, good, amazing and beautiful.

We have been covering our beanstalk in the class with kindness chains. This week, Jamie-Leigh and Emma stood at each end of the kindness chain and saw how long it stretched. We tried to skip with it, but we need to make them out of card next time instead of paper.

In addition to our Cool in School strategies, we’ve been thinking about the responsibilities that come with the rights we are entitled to. In particular, we’ve thought about our right to play and how we can respect the rights of our friends while still having a good time. Cool in School helps us to manage our responsibilities and we’re using our last chance warnings inside and outside of the classroom. We need to work hard at remembering our techniques but we are getting much better at helping each other to remember.

We’ve had our first meeting today of the Rights Respecting Group since the Christmas holidays.  We reminded ourselves that this session our focus will be on respect in the playground.  We think this can be done if people played with equipment and games more.  Our task is to audit what equipment we already have to play with in the playground. 

Jay and Isla told us about the equipment used in the nursery.  They have lots of outside games and equipment including bikes, a chute, hoops and balls.

We have been learning how to sort out problems for ourselves.

We began by looking at weak or aggressive responses and how we could tell how a person was feeling by looking at their face and the way they were standing. We had fun acting out scenes in class showing these responses.

We talked about ‘ a cool response’ and what that looked like. We should  use a firm voice but not to seem weak or aggressive. A cool response could be ‘Stop it. I don’t like that.’ We know that if we have tried our cool response and we are still unhappy we should tell an adult.

We are all going to try this at school whenever we have a problem.

All of the classes have been involved in following a programme called Cool in School! which has been helping us with appropriate strategies in a variety of situations. These have included reflecting on the way we think and respond to people and our body language.
In P7 we have been following the upper school programme and are currently in the process of recognising when our actions are “weak” and “aggressive” and how we can change these into “cool” ones. We have had an opportunity to practise these strategies through role-play which we enjoy.