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 22^nd 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.

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.

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.