Coming this week for the first time ever…..Our Fundraisers BINGO Evening Tuesday 19^th November at 7pm. Tickets £1 from school office or pay at the door.

Refreshments provided and a whole array of fantastic prizes. Please come along, and bring a friend or two or three…

This week in school Monday was an incredibly exciting day as we watched our new permanent basketball stands and playground markings be completed in our yard. These new additions are a wonderful enhancement to our playground and allow all of our children to broaden their play experience and enjoy new challenges. Sincere thanks to Miss Lesley Phee, Principal Teacher who has successfully taken this project from start to finish. The basketball stands and playground marking selected were at the request of our children. A huge thanks also to our Fundraisers without whom we could not have financed this project. The total cost for our yard equipment is £3340. This seems an awful lot of money, however when you consider the number of children who day and daily enjoy playing with it, it is money well spent. Soon the seagulls will be complaining as there are no scraps to eat after playtime, our children now spend most of their time playing instead of eating – another health benefit!

Tuesday and Wednesday our children continued to enjoy learning in a whole variety of ways. As parents you will no doubt have begun to recognise the sounds of Christmas coming from our school. Our nursery, our infants and our upper school have all begun rehearsals for forthcoming Christmas Shows. Each of them is  very different and each promises to be fabulous fun, whilst keeping the true meaning of Christmas throughout.

All of our school children participated in Knights of Saint Columba Competition ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’. All children were asked to design an A4 drawing/painting illustrating the true meaning of Christmas. Many of these designs were excellent. Prior to the designs being collected I selected three to become our school Christmas Cards this year. This was a very difficult decision as I was spoiled for choice. Well done to everyone for the super effort. I won’t say who the Christmas Card design winners are as the children have not yet been informed. (I like them to be first to know)

Thursday evening our school hosted an In-Service for staff from across Lanarkshire. Fr. Stephen Reilly, in his capacity as RE Advisor asked if we could host this prestigious event. It was a very popular event with over 120 staff in attendance. I am, once again, incredibly grateful to our own staff who led by example and gave so willingly of their own time to continue to build on their knowledge and skills of how best to support our children in their spiritual development. Fr. Stephen remarked on the great number of our own staff who were in attendance.

Sadly, for Lanarkshire, Fr. Stephen has resigned his post of RE Advisor. Fr. Stephen has been the driving force behind all of our developmental work on This is Our Faith, he has led us through this transient time of RE Programme Work. Throughout all of this Fr. Stephen has endeavoured to encourage all staff to actively participate in all developments ensuring we feel ownership of our new programme. He has been an inspirational RE Advisor and a fantastic help to all. His wisdom and guidance will be sadly missed. However, I am sure the parishioners of St. Bernadette’s will be delighted he will have more time to devote to his beloved parish.

Thursday evening also marked a very important event in Lanarkshire where we celebrated a beautiful Mass of Thanksgiving to Bishop Emeritus Joseph Devine. Bishop Devine has been a stalwart supporter of our school throughout his 30 years here in North Lanarkshire. We were delighted and honoured to be asked to bring some of our P7 pupils along to lead the Procession of The Gifts. Well done to our P7 girls who volunteered for this special event:

Niah Welsh

Ciara Scullion

Caitlin O’Neil

Collette O’Neil

Alicia Brown

Weronika Kahl

Morgan Brown

Thanks also to our children who served so reverently on the altar:

Robbie Whitfield

Joey Leach

Robyn Leach (now S1 on OLHS)

Daniel inyang

Liam Knox

Keara Watson

We are very proud of the contributions our children make to parish life.

Our week ended on a magnificent note with P4 entertaining us all and educating us in the life of the Vikings. P4 assembly was absolutely outstanding. The children so obviously enjoyed learning all about the Vikings and their knowledge was immense. It was a truly comical learning experience. It makes me smile just thinking about it. I loved it.

A huge thanks to the talented P4 children who sang so well, who acted so professionally and who so proudly shared their knowledge with the audience. A fantastic example of a deep learning experience. A big thanks to Mrs. McCoy and Mrs. Gillies who scripted the show, sourced the music and taught the children with such gusto and delight, absolutely brilliant. We are so blessed to have such creative staff and such positive thinking children who are open to all aspects of learning. Thanks also to our support staff who work so hard behind the scenes with costumes and props. Thanks also to you, as parents, who are so very supportive of all we do in our school. We could not be as successful without you.

Meanwhile………Our littlest people have been very busy down in the nursery, here’s what’s been happening:

• In nursery this week the children have been SHAPING their lives in more ways than one.
• • In the maths area they have been concentrating on 2d shapes this culminated in a shape treasure hunt/survey within the nursery. The children had pictures of 2d shapes on their clipboards and they got busy finding the shapes and when they found them they had then to place them in the correct shape basket in the maths corner. They had great fun finding squares, triangles, circles and rectangles. The results showed that there are more rectangular shapes than any other in the playroom. This survey will continue next week outside.
  • In the art area they made shapes from playdough following the pictures on their new playdough mats and they got the chance to create shape pictures using potato printing.
  • In the snack area they made delicious homemade soup and this was accompanied by square, rectangular and triangular toast. The triangular toast was a request made by one of the children!
  • In the writing area the children told stories using the puppets and they also got the chance to write their stories in their own books which can be seen on the wall of the cosy library corner in the playroom.
  • Mini movers continued with the emphasis this week on how to protect our bodies when it is sunny and when we are on holiday. There is a lot of learning going on throughout this programme all about our bodies and the importance of keeping them healthy through fun exercise and healthy eating. One child recalled this week that “your heart pumps your blood round your body”
  • The children have started preparing for the Christmas show. Letters have been issued requesting help with some of the costumes.

As always, thanks for reading this Blog, any comments always welcome.

Mrs Shields