Health and Wellbeing Workshop 18/11/15

Twelve parents attended this excellent workshop facilitated by Catrina O’Neil from East Ayrshire Council. This workshop aimed to show how looking after our own and children’s mental wellbeing can prevent problems of mental and physical health developing and as a result reducing the need to refer on to specialist services. The following websites were suggested for anyone wishing further information or support on this topic.

www.children1st.org.uk

www.handsonscotland.co.uk

www.samaritans.org.uk

www.nhsinform.org.uk/mentalhealth

The parent council would like to thank Catrina for coming to the school to facilitate this workshop.

Recently thirty three senior Technical Education pupils visited the new Forth Bridge Education Centre at South Queensferry, Edinburgh. This trip was organised to let pupils experience a “live” major civil engineering project while also helping to stimulate interest in design, engineering and architecture.

The group were initially given an informative presentation on the bridge construction where they learned about engineering principles and logistical information regarding the management of a large, international project. After the presentation pupils were then given a guided tour of the bridge construction site to give a clear perspective of the size and scale of this project.

Finally, all pupils were given a design challenge to manufacture a bridge structure from wooden dowel rod and elastic bands. The bridge spanned 7 metres in length and over 2 metres in height. (see photographs) Auchinleck Academy pupils excelled in this task and produced a high quality bridge structure within the given time constraints.

An interesting and enjoyable experience for all.

Congratulations to our S3/4 netball team who won against Kyle Academy 14-9. The girls played very well with Laura Purdie being voted the best player by Kyle Academy. Unfortunately the S1/2 B team were defeated, however played well with Carrie Fraser being voted the best player by Kyle Academy.

Auchinleck Parent Council will be providing a Health and Wellbeing presentation for all parents and guardians in order to support our young people both at home and in school. This session will be run by Catrina O’Neil from East Ayrshire Council on Wednesday 18^th November at 1900 hours and will be held in the Library of Auchinleck Academy.

The session will focus on the following core areas of our young peoples Health and Wellbeing and aims to help in Raising Awareness of Mental Health and Wellbeing Parent/Carer Session. This interactive session gives parents/carers an opportunity to reflect on how they can enhance their own and their child’s mental wellbeing. The parent/carers get an opportunity to work together to consider issues such as what is the difference between Mental Wellbeing/ Mental Illness and about simple steps we can take to support our young people. The session was created with support from East Ayrshire Council, NHS Ayrshire and Arran and third sector staff.

The aims for the session are shown below:-

• Understanding of mental health and wellbeing and why it is important.
• Be aware of ways to look after you own mental health and wellbeing and how to talk to your children about it.
• Be aware of what is going on in schools and the community to promote mental wellbeing.

The Parent Council would greatly appreciate your attendance and hope that you will take this opportunity to join us

Please see the attached letter for information

Health and Wellbeing Parent – Parent Council

Book Week Scotland runs from 23^rd to 29^th November and plans to celebrate it are underway. For more details see the Library News page.

Sixteen S2 girls attended Dumfries House last Thursday to celebrate 250 years since the great Scottish Engineer James Watt made huge improvements to the steam engine and sparked the Industrial Revolution. The pupils competed against Cumnock Academy in a series of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) hands-on challenges. Pupils successfully won £50 to be spent on science resources for the school.

The’ Geobus’ from St Andrews University visited the school on Friday 30^th October to deliver workshops on plate tectonics.  Half of S3 attended the workshops with the other half scheduled to take part in December.  Each class was given the opportunity to learn about the cause of earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunami’s and to try out a number of exciting experiments to simulate these earth forces.

The Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI) is a secondary school programme aiming to involve young people in current social issues, local charities and grant-making.

Auchinleck Academy has been involved in the YPI programme for the past few years and this project is for fourth year pupils to participate in order to develop team-working and leadership skills.

The winners from last year were Laura Borthwick, Christie Allan, Heather Morrison, Scott Weir and Lucy Hutton earning £3,000 for their chosen charity – Garden Leave.

Fourth year pupils are given a day off timetable every few months for them to work on their project. So far, they have had two YPI days and have already chose their charity. Their task now is to work on their presentation and do their research to provide an impressive performance for their year group and a few teachers who will be judges of the day.

For this year we hope S4 pupils will achieve their best and work their hardest to become responsible citizens, successful learners, confident individuals and effective contributors.

The S6 Charity Committee organised a fundraising day for The Ayrshire Hospice on Friday 9th October. A number of fun things took place throughout the day including a Bake Sale, Soak the Teacher and Paint the Seniors events. They also incorporated a dress down day where pupils paid £1 to attend school but not wear their uniform. A great time was had by all and the magnificent total of £947.30 was raised.

Last Friday Auchinleck Academy were represented at the Scottish Handball Finals in Motherwell by two teams, S1-3 and S4-6, competing against teams from across Scotland.

Both teams were placed in tough groups with experienced handball schools and started slowly, before a strong finish at the end allowed both teams to qualify out of their group and into the play-offs.

The S4-S6 team managed to make it to the 5th/6th play-off and came up against another school in East Ayrshire – Grange Academy. After going down early to two goals and then losing our player of the tournament (Colbi Welsh) the team rallied together and managed a fantastic 4-3 win to finish 5th in Scotland!

The S1-3 team started slowly with a 1-1 draw against Largs Academy, which would later come back to ‘haunt us’ (Halloween) as we missed out on the final by goal difference (2 goals). Here they came up against local school Grange Academy for 3rd place and with a strong performance from Sophie Reid (our top goal scorer) and Goal-keeper Courtney Graham the S1-3 team finished 3rd in Scotland! Awesome!

The day was a huge success and a massive thank you to Miss McKeich for coming along to help!