The Equalities committee have been learning about Ramadan. This is what we have learned:

Ramadan is the 9th month to Muslims and what they do for Ramadan is when they fast all day and eat at night. In other countries like Muslim countries they have school half a day but in Scotland we have full days because 1.4% of Muslims live in Scotland even though that seems like alot that isnt actually even half in big Cities.  in the Uk their are mosques which is like a place of worship. By Sienna

After Ramadan has finished, Muslims celebrate with a big festival called Eid – Daisy

Daisy and Isla:

Islay and Zara:

Ruaridh and Kamaran:

Lewis and Lewis:

During January, The Rights Respecting Committee have been collecting and sorting donations for the local food bank. We have collected a huge amount of food and supplies and are very grateful for the kind donations. These will be collected at the end of this week.

Article 24 – Every child has the right to the best possible health.

Thank you so much to everyone in the Cross Arthurlie Community for all of the generous donations. Over 100 bags of essentials, toiletries and Christmas treats have been welcomed by Barrhead Food Bank and will help people to enjoy the Christmas season!

Congratulations to Freya  for her poster representing Article 1. Fabulous job!

What an amazing start to our, ‘Reverse Advent Calendar Appeal!’  All contributions will be delivered to Barrhead food  bank which they are extremely grateful for. There’s still plenty of time to bring things in. All items will make a huge difference.

We have been working hard sharing our knowledge of children’s rights and going for the gold award.

Well done to our Aaliyah for designing Rights Respecting Roxy, our equality mascot.

Pupils from S2 and S3 in Barrhead High came to deliver a lesson on ‘Respect’ to our Primary 7 pupils. They were impressed by our knowledge of rights. They posed different scenarios to us about respect and we had to decide if we agreed and disagreed with the statements.

We took part in an ‘iceberg’ activity to identify feelings and issues we share with others and things we may keep ‘hidden’, things we are not as comfortable discussing with others, e.g. poverty, family circumstances. We talked about strategies we can use to support  and show respect towards these issues and feelings.

We have been making a Fairtrade wall display using the Fairtrade packaging the whole school collected.

We have looked at the results from the Fairtrade survey completed by each class and the P7 Equality reps have collated it into a spreadsheet and bar graph.

The Equality Committee organised a Fairtrade Story Hunt around the school to raise awareness of how Fairtrade Cooperatives help farmers across the world (who produce our chocolate, tea and bananas) get a fair price for the work they do.
We know this will help farmers and their families have access to their right to education, shelter and clean water.

The equality committee picked one winner from each class to win a Fairtrade bookmark and chocolate bar. We were very pleased to see Cadbury chocolate are supporting Fairtrade farmers.

Our Primary 7 Equality reps created a survey to monitor our progress towards the GOLD award and identify any areas where we needed to improve. Mrs Gauld asked parents to complete this survey during Parents’ Night.

51 parents answered the survey and then The Equality Committee looked at the results.

See a summary of the results here:

We discovered that only half the parents knew we were working towards the Rights Respecting Award and that all parents who answered didn’t know what the ABCDE of rights or the Global Goals were. This means that not all pupils are sharing their learning about rights at home.

Parents were very positive about their children becoming empowered, confident and responsible by learning about rights and commented that pupils are developing the knowledge of how to help others gain access to their rights.

Parents shared their opinions on what we should campaign towards, identifying the changes in local environment, such as vandalism to local parks and the building of housing taking away green space, as areas for concern.

As a committee we will debate these issues further to see what we will campaign on in the New Year.