JUNIOR ROAD SAFETY OFFICERS SEMINAR

On Tuesday 24^th September 2024, we went to Kay Park Church Hall for our seminar. This is the event that helps train us for our roles as Nether Roberlands’ Junior Road Safety Officers.

We arrived early to school on the Tuesday so that we could get the bus to take us to Kilmarnock. We left school at 8.45am and we walked to the bus stop on the Robertland Hill. When the bus came, we got on and sat together up at the back and it took us to the bus station.

We used all the correct crossings when we got off the bus to keep us safe and when we arrived at the hall, we were met by a lady who registered us and gave us a goody bag which included our JRSO notebooks.

Lots of other schools were attending and we were in the green group with 2 other schools.

The first activity that we were doing was with Barbara, who works for Ayrshire Roads Alliance. She talked to us about The Green Cross Code and got us to make posters. We used different coloured paper and we had the choice of lots of crafty items to use.

The next station we went to was to listen to a new initiative that JRSO’s are being asked to join in with. It’s called ‘STARS, we strive for 5’. We are being asked to do 5 things over the year and aim to get 5 starts. The things we have to aim for are….

1. Sustainable Travel Initiative.
2. Bikeability/Cycling
3. Road Safety Campaign
4. Run a school travel or road safety competition.
5. Create and maintain a noticeboard or school blog.

We are looking forward to the challenge and hope to earn the 5 stars.

We then stopped for a snack. There was juice and biscuits provided for us and we were extra lucky as Miss McMillan bought us snacks too!!

After snack time, we joined Chloe who asked us how we arrived at school. We were asked if there was different ways we could encourage pupils to walk, cycle etc, rather than taking the car.

We had to use our imaginations for her next task. We were to come up with crazy ideas to get to school without using electricity! Water slides, trampolines, jet packs and flying carpets were just a few of the funny ideas!!!

Before we knew it, our morning was over. It had been really enjoyable and we have taken lots of new ideas away with us.

It was time for us to get the bus back to school. When the ladies heard that we were using public transport, they were very impressed that we hadn’t used cars or taxi’s to get there…..a big gold star for us!

Our class teachers have planned learning for the session for their classes. If you would like to see what the planned learning is to support with this further at home, please take a look at the document for your child’s class by going to the ‘Sharing Learning’ page in the menu above. The planned learning is subject to change.

Please find the three week rotation lunch menus for this session below. We will be starting with week one menu on the first week back.

You will find the menus on the school Blog and on our app. You will also find a reminder in the app calendar for the menu week.

School Lunch Menus

School Holidays 2024-2025

A huge well done to our Girls’ Football team for an excellent performance in the East Ayrshire Girls’ Premiership final yesterday. They worked hard to secure second place in East Ayrshire, which is a wonderful achievement. We would like to say a massive congratulations to Lainshaw in achieving the 6-1 win.

Thank you to Mrs Mason and Miss Hunter for all you have done to support our team and to our Stewarton Annick Football Coaches for training our girls and in promoting respect, teamwork and fun at all times. We can’t wait to see what next session brings for our football team!

Our P6 cohort have been lucky to have received fitness sessions over a six week period by our local gym, Aristos, with the last session taking place at the Aristos gym. Every pupil involved have had a great time learning about fitness and ways of keeping healthy and out class teachers have gained some great tips and hints to incorporate ideas in their future lessons.

We are delighted to share that Aristos have donated skipping ropes and we have been busy using these to promote fitness during our PE lessons.

Thank you Kirsty and staff at Aristos for organising these sessions for the second year and for supporting us to promote fitness and wellbeing in our school.

 

Dear Parents and Carers,

As you will be aware, we announced in our last JRSO blog post that we will be starting a Road Safety Campaign. We would like to highlight that we feel that road safety in our school could be improved upon if more families use the drop-off service. We would now like to take this opportunity to share our ideas and plans with you.

At most schools, there is always problems with parking, especially in the morning when children are coming to school and at the end of the day when school is finishing. School related traffic congestion poses a risk to the safety of the pupils, staff, families, motorists and residents in and around our school. As your Road Safety Officers, we would like to highlight some of the dangers that we have witnessed.

• Some cars are parking just outside the school grounds on Pokelly Place making it difficult for our buses and taxis to safely enter our premises. This is also a hazard for other users trying to access our designated drop off area.
• Children are often spotted walking through the car park with an adult and we would strongly advise for you to use the paths around the perimeter of the school to safely enter the playground. This may add a few extra minutes to your commute, but walking through a car park must be discouraged at all times.

We have also witnessed parking at our bin cage and parking in the staff car park making it hard for our teachers, support staff and visitors to access.

Most concerning is when our emergency exit is blocked.

Over the next few weeks, you will be able to easily spot us around the playground in the morning as we will be wearing Hi-Viz tabards and have signs encouraging you to think before you park. Look out for Phizz and Blair too who will be displayed outside and will be supporting you to park safely. We are again very grateful to Physioflexx and Blair Garage for sponsoring our signs.

We are very lucky at Nether Robertland as we have Miss McMillan who is one of our Pupil Support Assistants, offering a valuable service at our drop off area. She is there to welcome you and help to get us safely into our playground from vehicles entering our school area.

We would like to encourage as many families as possible to use this service. Rain, hail, sleet and snow, Miss McMillan is always there with a smile!

 

We would like to say a big thank you to our local businesses, Physioflexx and Blair Garage, for sponsoring our new JRSO team members. We will be thanking our supporters in our own way very soon. Watch this space.. We would like to introduce Blair and Phizz. Alongside ourselves and Miss McMillan, we will be carrying out a Road Safety campaign, focusing on safe parking and use of the drop off option, in the morning of week beginning 5th February. More information will be coming your way soon.

 

Rosie, Arran, Finn and Aimee

Thank you to everyone who completed the parent questionnaire during Parents’ Evening. Please see what the responses were below, along with some further information.

Question	Reponses		Additional Information
How many of our school values can you name? Please share these with us.	May 2023	November 2023	Parents/carers are more familiar with our values.
	29% knew all values	38% know all values
	20% knew two or three values	39% know two or three values
	33% knew no values	14% know no values
What is our vision?   Our Vision: Learn Today, Lead Tomorrow	37% know our vision and were able to share it with our P7 leaders		Our new vision was introduced at the end of the last session. We are delighted that many of our parents/carers know our new vision and to improve on this further, we will be sharing a family homework challenge in January focusing on our new vision.
	63% were not sure what the new vision is
We have experienced some technical difficulties with our school app. Are you now able to access it?	85% have experienced technical difficulties		East Ayrshire Council and the school have been working closely with staff for Safer Schools Scotland to trouble shoot some of the issues. As the app is our main way of communicating with you, we need you to let us know if you are continuing to have difficulties so that we can help with this. Please come into school to see us if this is the case.
	14% have not experienced technical difficulties
	1% do not use the app
Do you use the date section on our school app?	64% use the date section of the app (Calendar)		The date section of the app is a work in progress. It can be found if you swipe the tiles to the left. We are continuing to try to make this as user friendly as possible. It is an Outlook calendar. You can change the view to day, week or month. If there is one than one item in a date (You see the +2 sign), just scroll over to the right and you will see the items. Sometimes we add additional information for events and to view this, just click on the event.
	36% do not use the date section of the app (Calendar)
Rate how helpful you find our school Blog in providing information about our school.	3.5/5 star rating		The school Blog is a website that aims to provide parents/carers with static information that can be accessed at any time. This includes a variety of menus and is a place where we save documents and policies. Please take a look by simply Googling ‘Nether Robertland Blog’ or alternatively, you can access the Blog from the app by clicking on the second tile.
Do you follow our school Twitter/X	50% follow us		We currently have 544 followers. We use Twitter/X to share our school and classes successes and achievements. This is a platform that allows parents/carers to share in some of the wonderful learning that takes place in our school.
	50% do not follow us
If you follow us on Twitter/X, do you like the Tweets/posts?	55% like the tweets/posts		We would like our parents/carers to interact with our tweets/posts. We invite you to click on the love heart and/or leave a comment.
	31% do not like the tweets/posts
	14% sometimes like the tweets/posts
Do we provide opportunities for you to engage with the school and your child’s learning?	73% said that we provide opportunities		Ways we provide opportunities for you to engage in your child’s learning: ·         Weekly homework ·         Family homework challenges ·         Meet the Teacher event at the start of term ·         This session every class will have a parental engagement event ·         Competitions ·         School Blog ·         Twitter/X
	4% said that we do not provide opportunities
	23% said that we somewhat provide opportunities
Do you have any suggestions for how we can improve upon parental engagement?	·         Communication to be more in advance ·         More classroom visits ·         More Twitter/X posts ·         Parent/teacher learner sessions		We continue to reflect and act on parent/carers view to ensure that parental engagement is prioritised.
Are you aware of how homework is communicated for your child?	89% are aware how homework is communicated		P3 to P7 classes – Homework is communicated through Teams P1 – P2 classes – Homework is communicated through the individual class Blogs
	11% are not aware of how homework is communicated
Do you value homework as an opportunity to support your child’s learning further?	67% value homework		We feel that we need to gather more views regarding how we take forward homework at our school. We will be consulting with you on this in May 2024.
	12% do not value homework
	21% somewhat value homework

We would like to say a huge thanks to all of our families and children who took part in November’s Value of the Month challenge. This focused on our value of teamwork. We asked our families to share what teamwork looked in in your homes and in the community. As a family, you selected three words that describe the quality required to display good teamwork and you shared this by putting these words into Menti. We are now pleased to share what this looks like to you. This is represented by the word cloud below. The words that are bigger are those that were selected the most. We are delighted to see aspects such as fun, kind and cooperation are in bold.

This year our Rights Respecting Group have chosen the Stewarton Food Bank to receive our donations. The calendar is for guidance only and any donations will be most appreciated.

We would again like to thank all parents/carers for their amazing support.

 

Thank you for attending the P1 parents information session recently. Please find the PowerPoint below that was used during the session. This will provide you with information about our Literacy programme in NRPS.

P1 Parents intro to EA Literacy

Please see information from Stewarton Foodbank by clicking on the leaflet below.

Foodbank final

Anti-Bullying Week 2023 will take place from Monday 13 – Friday 17 November with the theme of ‘Listen Up! (Respect our Rights)’ – because bullying is never acceptable.

respectme, Scotland’s anti-bullying service, was launched in March 2007. Their vision is of a respecting, just, equal and inclusive Scotland in which all children and young people can live free from bullying and harassment and are encouraged to reach their full potential. Their work is driven by a focus on children’s rights.

During Anti-Bullying Week 2023, all children will be exploring the theme of Listen up! Respect our Rights through class activities and whole school approaches. Learning will be shared via Twitter/X so please look our for these and feel free to give us a like or comment.

To support your child further, please see the Parent Tool Kit below.

Anti-Bullying Parent Tool Kit 2023

As our value this month is teamwork, we are spending time thinking about how to show teamwork in school and at home. In school, we have identified the following ways we can show teamwork and we are working hard on this.

• Working together to get things done
• Sharing ideas and listening to others
• Valuing the opinions of others

This month, we invite you to:

1. Discuss with your family what teamwork looks like in your home and in the community. As a family, select three words that describe the qualities required to display good teamwork.
2. Click on the link or use the QR code below to share your responses with us at school.
   • https://www.menti.com/albu5dxhoyw
3. You will share your responses with the class week beginning 27th November.

To support living by our values in school, at home and in our local community, we have given every family one of our values magnets to display in your home as a reminder.

We were thrilled to have one of our previous pupils, Head Teachers and now the Interim Chief Executive of Education Scotland visit us on Monday 2nd October. Our little surprise was so special for all involved. If you’d like to learn more, click on the link below.

Click here for news article