Congratulations to our winners of Catrine Primary School Easter Egg decoration competition 2023.

Primary 1  – Logan

Primary 2 – Ayla

Primary 3  – Paige

Primary 4 – Poppy

Primary 5 – Bette

Primary 6 – Ashton

Primary 7 – Ava

Thank you to everyone that came along to our Easter Service yesterday.  We are really pleased to welcome so many of our parents into the school.

Reminder that we close on Friday 31st March at 2.30pm for the Easter Holidays, and reopen on Monday 17th April.

Enjoy your Easter break.

Thank you so much to all Parents and Carers who attended their child’s appointments last night. Our teachers really enjoyed sharing their progress and achievements with you. We had an overall turnout of 92%, which is wonderful.

Our Captains were asking our parents and carers two very important questions;

• What makes a quality pupil?
• What makes a quality teacher?

We have collated your responses – please click on the links below for your feedback.

What makes a quality pupil

What makes a quality teacher (1)

Below is a really useful app to help your child with quick maths recall.  It focuses on subitising, adding, subtracting, multiplication (including times tables) and division.

This app is free, just search for 1-minute maths in your app store.

The Modern Languages Committee have been working so hard over the last few weeks and have been learning all about the French language, culture and festivals.

We started off our first committee meeting by talking about what we already knew about France and what we wanted to know.

We learned some some facts about France and some  French vocabulary. We learned how to say hello and goodbye in French and had lots of fun playing parachute games to practise the French words for colours.

We learned about the French festival of Mardi Gras and made our own Mardi Gras masks. They were amazing!

We learned about Easter traditions in France and got to try some French food. We tasted crepes, baguette, pain au chocolat, croissants, chocolate chip brioche and brie. It was delicious!

For our last committee, our STEM group were trying to survive a zombie apocalypse!

The pupils were involved in building shelters that would keep them safe from zombie bites! They also investigated their fingerprints to ensure they were all human! Finally, the pupils created new inventions that would help keep them safe and would help to rebuild civilisation.

All pupils had a blast and enjoyed putting their science and investigative skills to work!

The Health and Wellbeing committee group have worked extremely hard over the last few weeks to promote positive mental and physical wellbeing around the school.

On our first committee group day, we looked at the importance of mental wellbeing and our feelings.  We worked together in groups to create  mind-maps on what we thought emotional and mental wellbeing is.  We shared our different opinions and strategies we can use to keep ourselves in the ‘green zone’ and ways to help if we find ourselves getting angry/upset.

Many of the pupils agreed that they found colouring to relax them and take their minds off of other thoughts.  Therefore, we decided to have a mindfulness colouring session to calm down and relax.  We also tried some tricky memory games to then reflect on how it made us feel and what we could do to push ourselves back in to the green zone of emotions.

We also took part in a yoga class to help calm us down and relax our body.

As a way of showing our emotions, we decorated ‘mood jars’ and would use colours that relate to different emotions.  This was an activity we would continue to add to until the jar was full of emotions.

On the second committee day we looked at physical wellbeing and the importance of healthy eating and exercise.  We started our day with some games and exercises and would then discuss how it made our body and mind feel afterwards.

As we discussed the importance of physical exercise and healthy eating, we wanted to promote this around the school so we created posters to encourage all pupils to bring in their gym kit and different healthy foods we could eat.

On our final committee day, we worked together to write a letter to ask if our Active Schools Coordinator would like to take part during Health week and carry out different activities with the school.

We also looked at positive affirmations and the impact they can have on others.  We shared different positive comments we would like to hear and made our own cards to be shared around the school to cheer up others.

The Rights Respecting Schools Committee have some exciting news to share. Check out our video below to find out what it is.

The children in the Library Committee have been working very hard to set up the school library and celebrate reading within the school.  We organised World Book Day  activities including quizzes for P1-3 and P4-7.  On Wednesday, the committee went through all the entries and put all the correct names into a hat to choose the winners.  Congratulations to  Ellie in P1 and Eli in P5 who are pictured here with the lovely new books they chose.

We have been lucky enough to receive PEF funding from the school and a very generous donation from the Parent Council to help us buy books for the library so the children spent quite a bit of time looking through websites to create wish lists which we will be purchasing shortly.

We would like to say a HUGE thank you to Olly’s Gran for making these beautiful cushions for our library couches. They look amazing and they are so lovely and cosy to sit on. We have also been spending time making some book inspired artwork to help make our library look beautiful.

We still have  a bit more work to do before the library is ready to open but we are so proud of what the committee has achieved so far.

This competition is for children aged 10 and under and run by Children 1st.  All children that are in this age group, will bring home an entry form today. If your child wishes to enter, entries have to be returned to the school by Thursday 30th March.

We were delighted to welcome George Burns back to Catrine Primary this week.
George is a STEM Ambassador who has supported the school with many STEM projects in the past . As part of British Science Week, George came to share with P4-7 pupils his wealth of knowledge about engineering & his career. We really appreciate George taking the time to come & speak to us. We look forward to him returning on Wednesday, to work with the STEM committee.

A huge thank you also goes to Miss Murdoch & the STEM committee for organising such a fun filled week, with lots of different STEM based activities for us to try in our classes.

The whole school were involved in our first Home Circles session since March 2020 this week.

Each house – Avalon, Ayrbank, Marneil and Whiteflat – is split into four small groups, made up of pupils from all stages, and we all have a BIG question to focus on.  Our P7 pupils are in charge of each Home Circle and they make sure that every pupil – from P1 to P7 – has a chance to voice their opinion and give their answers.

March’s BIG question was based on Article 31 of the UNCRC and is part of our Rights Respecting School focus.

• Why is it so important for us to be able to play?
• How do you like to spend your free time?
• Who do you spend your free time with?

We collate all of the answers and it helps us to make changes and improvements to our indoor and outdoor learning environments.