A fabulous week where our focus was on ‘anti-bullying’. Following a great presentation from our Health Committee at assembly last week our children have all been busy creating anti-bullying posters and inventing catchy, punchy, meaningful slogans. Watch this space next week for our poster design winners. Thursday and Friday our upper school pupils all enjoyed anti-bullying workshops, which proved a great success. A fun, inclusive way to deliver a very important message. Grateful thanks to Mrs Loose and the Health Committee for all their work ensuring the message was clear across our school community.
Other fabulous learning experiences taking place in our school have been researched and highlighted by our Digital Leaders. We’re working hard to create a working link which you will be able to view through the Blog each week….watch this space. Huge thanks to Mrs McCulloch and her P6 Digital Leaders who are pioneering new ways of capturing our work in school, our children are truly leading the learning. In the meantime check out the App for a direct link to this fabulous, innovative work.
Primary 7 pupils this week have been representing our school in some very ‘professional’ ways. Sarah Allan & Daniel Watters represented our school, and North Lanarkshire Council at a meeting with Inspectors from Education Scotland. The theme of the inspection is ‘Readiness for Empowerment’. This was a wonderful opportunity for our senior pupils to demonstrate all that is excellent about our school. There were four primary schools represented from our authority and in the words of our representatives, ‘We talked the most, cause we had loads to say about our school’. Absolutely brilliant! HUGE thanks to Sarah and Daniel.
Staying with Primary 7 successes, as reported in June of this year, Anna Queen won the competition to re-design Duchess park play area. On Friday Anna, her friend Jessica, Mrs Tominey and Anna’s gran and grandad all cheered as Anna cut the ribbon to officially open the play area designed by her good self. What a brilliant achievement, well done Anna we’re all very proud of you. Photos to follow on the App.
Thursday of this week we were honoured to remember Mrs Lynn Gillies at a beautiful Mass in school dedicated to the work of Mrs Gillies. We were delighted to welcome a number of Mrs Gillies family and friends who were overwhelmed by our children’s reverence and respect throughout. A fitting memory for a wonderful teacher.
Meanwhile………Down in the nursery….
As the season changes and the nights get darker we asked the children what they want to learn about. They made a mindmap and they wanted to learn about foxes, owls bats and torches.
They gathered the resources to make the home corner into a dark den. They used material and different sources of light to create the illusion of a campfire. They sat around the campfire and read stories and role-played toasting marshmallows.
In Literacy they read the story of the ‘Owl Babies’ watched the story on the Smartboard retold the story in their own words. They made Owl puppets using brown paper bags, feathers and collage. They used them to fly around the room.
In science they made an underground den for the badgers and foxes, painted a tree for the owls and role played with the nocturnal animals.
In Numeracy they used the big visual to match and sort the animals into daytime and nightime.
The art area was busy as the children made tea light holders from saltdough, they painted them and placed their little candle in them to take them home.
Outdoors they went on a walk to look for light sources and signs of nocturnal animals. On their return they drew pictures of the things they saw.
Over the next few weeks the children will be learning all about Light and Dark.
As always, thanks for taking the time to read our blog, please leave a comment or two.
Mrs Shields
