Yesterday we had a small speed networking session with some local businesses.

We had visitors from Dustaco Engineering, KFC and the Scottish Government.

Over the next few days we will have some more visitors to tell us about their jobs and what skills are needed to do them.   Check back next week for more updates.

Thank you to Kevin and our Parent Council Volunteers for helping build and paint our new pirate ship.  This was made possible by a recent bid to the lottery at Love Newmilns.  The boys and girls are having great fun on their new Pirate Ship already – Mrs McCracken’s toes were nearly bitten by a passing crocodile this morning when she visited!

Burns and Scottish Poetry

Each year at this time we hold our Burns and Scottish poetry competition.  This is an important part of the curriculum in terms of Listening and Talking and also finding out more about and celebrating our Scottish Culture.  We are very proud of all the children who have shown a growth mindset and determination in learning their poem.  We will bring this work to a close on Thursday with our whole school celebration, we will hear the poetry winners, sing some Scottish songs and here a little more about the poems and songs we sing!  We will also have some shortbread and Irn Bru as a treat!

Together Time

At Together Time over the last few weeks we have been revisiting our school rules;  Ready, Respect and Safe.  We have also been thinking about how we are all different and need different things at different times.  We will be re-visiting our school values after the break and thinking about what excellent learning looks like!

The document below provides a reminder to families about our school vision and values and how we celebrate success and deal with conflict when it arises.

Positive Behaviour and Relationships Summary

Newmilns Teams

On a Tuesday afternoon, P3-7 we work on our Newmilns Teams focus:

Primary 3:  Global Citizenship

Primary 4:  Health and Wellbeing

Primary 5/6: Pupil Council

Primary 7:  Rights Respecting School

Learning Lab and P6 and P7 representatives:  Clean Green

We get regular, monthly, updates on our Rights Respecting School Journey and our Clean Green Award Journey – we have been successful each month in Windy’s Clean Green Challenges!

Here is our latest certificate!

This month’s Rights Respecting School, articles of the month are: article 17 (I have the right to be able to access information, particularly from the media).   Article 19 (children and young people have the basic human right to dignity.) and Article 34 (children and young people have the right to be protected from sexual abuse)The Rights Respecting Schools group have linked this to Internet Safety.

Tuesday 6th February was Safer Internet day, this was the focus of our Together Time.  The document below shares some of the key messages we thought about.

Internet Safety

Wellbeing 

Twice a year all pupils carry out the Glasgow Motivational Wellbeing Profile.  Overall the results were fairly positive, but the main benefit of using the the tool is helping us identifying the different areas where we can improve and work on to help children feel better about themselves and their learning.  At the in-service day next week staff will consider the areas of focus for the whole school and individual classes.   This is just one way, we are using the children’s voice to drive forward improvement.

My Voice Matters is the theme of Children’s Mental Health Week this year, and we considered this last week when we heard from Connor from Young Carers, who shared with the children what it means to be a Young Carer and how to access support if this is role any of the pupils have.

After returning from Christmas children were introduced to Our Building Resilience strategy “Have a Goal”  In this unit we are looking at the importance of setting and pursuing meaningful goals.  While no-one starts a goal expecting to fail, we will likely hit setbacks along the way.  With better resilience we understand that working at something takes energy, motivation and effort.

Have a look at the leaflet below.

Have-a-Goal-Parent-and-Carer-Leaflet

Keeping with the theme of wellbeing and our Respectful rule and value, click on the link below to see how we can promote friendly actions over February – we are a little late but we sure we can catch up!

Feb 2024

Here we are at the beginning of another new year!  I hope everyone had an enjoyable time over the recent break and look forward to working with you all as we continue with our 23-24 school year!  Before long we will be talking about sports day and end of year outings!

Last term was really busy!  In amongst lots of learning in classes and in the nursery, we had our Christmas Fayre, Christmas Show, Christmas Parties and Cinema trip!

In school we talk about kindess being the golden thread that joins everything in our school community together.

We shared some kindess with the wider community last term!  Primary 7 pupils made some lovely Christmas Cards and these were delivered by a few children from Primary 5-6 to businesses in the community.  ECC children made cards and delivered these to Lady Flora’s and other residents in Gilfoot!  We also made a food donation to the local food bank with donations given at Parents’ Evening and our Parent Council arranged for left over selection boxes also to be donated to the food bank.

We must also say thank you to Love Newmilns for their kind donation of selection boxes for the whole school and to Gilfoot TARA for donating a small gift to our P1-2 pupils.

Last week we had our annual Christmas Lunch.  The hall looked amazing thanks to our Dinner Ladies and Mrs Campbell and Mrs Jones for helping with table decorations.  The children enjoyed either yummy steak pie or turkey!