: It is an important part of the “can do” ethos and community spirit of the school that, where possible, our pupils come in uniform. You should now have received your order forms for uniform for next session. Please remember the final date for orders for delivery on Monday 22nd August must be received by Monday 30th May.
Category Archives: aaWHOLE SCHOOL
Realigning Children’s Services
Survey of pupils in P5 to P7
Realigning Children’s Services is an important programme about the lives of children in Scotland.
This is an entirely new survey, designed specifically to meet the needs of the RCS programme. Children will complete a web-based questionnaire themselves during a lesson at primary school. All children in P5-P7 will complete the same questionnaire, regardless of which school year they are in. The differences in age are unlikely to have a significant effect on how they interpret and respond to the questions.
Children will be asked about:
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friendship and family
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how they find school
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play and what they do in their free time
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health and feelings
Before the Easter holidays further information will be sent out via pupil post with the survey planned to take place after the holidays.
Latecoming
We are all aware of how busy our households can be at certain times of the day, and getting everyone off to their various destinations in the morning can be quite a feat! We continue to monitor those children who arrive at school at least 10 minutes after the school day has started. We would much rather that our pupils were late, but here, than lateness causing a complete day missed. Our school life is pretty hectic and filled with so much that, as long as our young people are well enough to be at school, we really need them to be here and be learning. By the same token, though, the start of the day sets the tone: messages are given, information about the events of the day is shared and things get started. I would therefore ask that your child is, please, at school, whenever possible, for the start of the day. We do letter individual parents of our concerns. If this is an issue for you and your child please do not hesitate to contact the school so that we can discuss support. In accordance with national policy schools do track and monitor attendance. As such, our local authority guidelines are in place. Therefore standard letters are regularly issued to parents regarding this matter. We are always available to discuss any issues affecting your child’s attendance at school.
Open Evening
As usual during our spring term we offer an invitation to everyone to come along to the school to see what we’ve all been up to. This year’s Open Evening will take place on Tuesday 22nd March between 6.30 and 7.30pm. We invite all friends and family members to come along to visit from our nursery up to the top floor and share in all the interesting and colourful learning that has been going on recently. We are also opening our Fairtrade café again from 6.00p.m. until 7.15p.m. in the dining hall. Why not pop into the nursery and see all the colourful and engaging activities there where our learning journeys begin? In both P1 classes and P2 you can enter the Jurassic world of dinosaurs while P2/3 and P3 are Egyptologists discovering the wonderful world of the ancient Egyptians. On the middle floor you will be amazed at the scientific approaches to learning and problem solving around the world of plastic and just how amazing lego is in so many aspects of learning. Mrs Donald and P4/5 are researching the wonderful world of animals and finding out about habitats, conservation and a host of amazing facts. Meanwhile P5/6 are enjoying the French influenced world of Professor Layton as they tackle some tricky scientific based problems. P7 are embracing the use of technology based around Minecraft. This is always a busy, bustling time when the children and staff get to share all their learning with each other as well as their friends and families and we look forward to welcoming everyone.
Staff News
Both Mrs Ross and Mrs McQuade have been back into school working alongside everyone again. They were using their Keeping In Touch days and both aim to be back with us mid-June before returning to classes for the start of our new session in August.
At the request of the authority we were asked to release Miss Irvine to join a team in another school for the remainder of the session. Mrs Lesley Duncan has joined us on a temporary basis until the end of session, working with P1 to replace Miss Irvine.
Working with the Clackmannan Development Trust
Our Digital Leaders have been in consultation with a group from the Clackmannan Development Trust who are working to put together a Heritage walk around the village. Mrs Donald has been introducing green screening to make videos to be placed around the walk. We aim to create qr codes to direct walkers to the information. Here is a test of the video. What do you think?
Monitoring Latecoming 2016
We are all aware of how busy our households can be at certain times of the day, and getting everyone off to their various destinations in the morning can be quite a feat! However, recently we have noticed a number of our pupils who are persistently coming into school after the school day has started.
Can we remind parents and carers that children should enter the school through the playground doors with their classmates and not be dropped off in the school car park. Anyone entering the building through the front door after the bell will be marked as late unless a previous arrangement has been made with the school. The start of the day sets the tone: messages are given, information about the events of the day is shared and learning started.We would encourage families to get in touch with us if they are having difficulties getting children to school on time, so that we may consider ways in which support may be offered.
We track and record latecoming and our results will be available to view on the school website. We also share this information with our Attendance and Welfare officer who will be assisting us setting up support meetings for families who are persistently late.
I Love Paris
originally posted on https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/cl/PointstoPonder/
I have an eclectic music collection but the “standards” are never far away so listening to Ella Fitzgerald on a very rainy Sunday is always ideal. This morning one of my favourites came on about one of my favourite places-Paris. Given the dreadful events of Friday I stopped and didn’t start working again for several minutes.
How do you make any sense of the actions taken on Friday? As a teacher how do we protect, guide and support our young people in the light of such actions? The awfully clever DHT and I were out and about last week. We went up to Perth to be part of a national conversation with other colleagues from primary and secondary education. There were HTs and DHTs from several authorities and we were there to listen to speakers; including the Minister for Education talk about Social Justice. We chose to go because equity, equality, inclusion and just doing the best for our young people and their families, are at the heart of what we do in our school. As I often write; we are in the business of improving people. The Scottish Government has Social Justice running throughout their education programme we were interested to hear what was being said. To be honest it wasn’t anything new, but, as always talking with colleagues was interesting, reaffirming and challenging. We dissected, discussed and the DHT muttered as he does, on the journey home.
The message from everyone was we are doing our best for our learning community. The issues, challenges and successes were all very similar. There was a shared ethos in the challenges of budgets, training and hard-to-engage families. There were some tricks of the trade shared. The theme of helping our young people to use the opportunities we can source, to help enable them to be successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens is alive and thriving in our schools. Talking to colleagues from across Scotland, sharing our progress with staff, and working together as we will next week in our in-service days renews our sense of purpose. These four capacities are at the heart of our Scottish education system and they are real and tangible. Against all this hard work, compassion and commitment we then have to think about what events such as the tragedy in Paris means to our communities. We are global citizens, we are part of this. For me it makes me square my shoulders and renew my focus, along with everyone in our learning community, to do our best for our young people and count our many blessings.
Promoting Citizenship
We all influence our young people. Here in school we lead and work by example and support our young people as they gain their skills and knowledge of themselves and the wider community. It has been brought to our attention that several adults visiting the school grounds at the start and end of the school day are using inappropriate language. May I please remind you that we do not expect our pupils to hear unacceptable language at anytime while in and around school. I appreciate your support in this matter. We would ask that everyone respect the standards we set in school for our young people and lead by example by not swearing in and around our school.
Similarly, may I ask those of you who bring dogs onto the school grounds while collecting, or dropping off children, to be courteous to others who might not be at ease with dogs. Also to be aware of any dog mess that may occur on school grounds and ensure its removal for health and safety reasons. Dogs should not be brought into our school grounds at any time.
P4/5 Famous Scots Assembly
On Monday it was the turn of P4/5 to present their pupil post at assembly. Our focus this term has been Famous Scots.
The class have been busy researching Scottish inventions, creations and discoveries. From a list of over 100 things the children narrowed it down to 12 and began researching using the new Community Ipads.
Our assembly featured presentations about the television, telephone, radar, whisky, penicillin, Auld Lang Syne, Peter Pan, golf, MacIntosh raincoat, steam engine, refrigerator and tarmac
We could have easily chosen many more to talk about but these were our favourites and the ones we felt had perhaps been the most useful.
We have also looked at Scottish sporting stars and are aiming to look at music, art and TV stars too.
For a small country we are impressed with the magnitude of achievements that have come from our home soil.
