What an incredibly, successful week. On Tuesday we hosted our inaugural Bingo evening, it was extremely well attended and such a fun evening. A HUGE thanks to all who came along to support us. The success of this evening is due to the incredible hard work and commitment of our Wonderful Fundraisers, they worked tirelessly to ensure there were fantastic prizes and everyone on the evening had everything they needed. Absolutely brilliant. They raised £1540.00 – amazing. Thank you seems inadequate, I cannot tell you how fortunate we are to have such parental/family support, it is a big part of what makes our school an excellent school and a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of. I am honoured to be head teacher, I love it. Thanks so much to you all.

Tuesday morning our P5b class along accompanied by both Mrs McLaughlan and Mrs Murphy (and Mrs Findlay) headed off to Wellington Church in Glasgow to participate in a Cantata dedicated to Saint Columba. This was a super learning experience for our children, a unique way to learn about the history of our church and Scottish saints. As always, our children behaved impeccably and were a credit to themselves, their class and our school. Thanks to all who took part and to the staff and pupils for taking time to learn all of the parts of the cantata. Yet another reason to be so very proud of our school.

On Thursday we took delivery of a brand new crib to house our beautiful new nativity figures. Thanks to Mr Thomas Mellon for taking time to construct our crib – and to his dad for taking the time to share his wonderful carpentry skills with our school and building us such a lovely crib.

We owe huge thanks also to our school’s special friend who so kindly donated the exquisite nativity figures, they are stunning. This person is an immense support to our school in so many different ways but wishes to remain anonymous. I am truly humbles that someone shows such a keen interest in our children’s educational, spiritual and emotional development. Thank You.

Fr. Millar will bless our figures at our forthcoming Feast Day Mass on Friday 6th December at 11.15am in our school. It would be lovely for as many parents/carers to join us for this special occasion.

Prior to this I invite you to join us for our St. Andrew’s Day Mass, celebrating our Patron Saint. I offer my apologies in advance, as I cannot be there at our St. Andrew’s Day Mass due to a Head Teacher’s meeting.

On a sad note, as a school we were very sorry to learn of the death of the father Mr Ian Bulloch, our janitor. Mr Bulloch (senior) was cremated on Saturday, it was a beautiful service and on behalf of everyone from both schools I extended our heartfelt sympathy and our condolences. Please remember Ian, his mum, sisters and the extended family in your thoughts and prayers.

At long last on Friday we managed to find the time to re-establish our ‘baby choir’…Oops sorry.

It came to our attention our younger singers were not too keen on the name ‘baby choir’ so, as always listening to our pupils we asked them for an alternative. Thanks to Katie Hendry, one of our P3 singers who provided us with a wonderful new title…The Kiddie Choir. Brilliant.

The Kiddie Choir will sing alongside the nursery children supporting them at their Christmas Show. Our first rehearsal on Friday was great fun; it’s so good to find such talent in our younger children. Apologies to those children in P2 & P3 who did not manage to join the choir this session, we had to limit the numbers so selected 8 names, at random, from each class. This was the fairest way to select.

On Friday morning I was delighted to welcome Ms Beth Blue to our school. Beth is going to be our Community Learning Development Parent Support Worker. Beth and I had a great chat about how best to utilise her many skills in our school. More information coming soon. I have invited Beth along to our first curricular evening in the New Year to meet with the staff and to our P4 coffee Morning in January to say hello to the parents. I look forward to working with Beth in our school and in the local communities.

Friday was indeed a ‘blue’ day. Thanks to Mrs Loose for organising all of our anti-bullying workshops and our non-uniform day on Friday. Sadly, Bullying is a part of every school, we do our very best to ensure we highlight issues within school. We endeavour to deal with all incidents sooner rather than later and will continue to be pro-active in our approach.

Meanwhile……….What’s been happening down in the nursery…..
A 4 day week but still a busy week in nursery with lots of singing and preparation going on for the Christmas show.

•    In the writing area the children have been exploring the lightbox. They have been carefully tracing the outline of Ralph the reindeer and the results have been fantastic. The concentration on their faces has been priceless. Over the last few weeks the emphasis in the writing area has been to explore interesting materials for writing and different ways of recording the children’s ideas and experiences. They have used different types of technology to do this such as the smartboard, cameras, recording boards and the lightbox.

•    Over in the maths area the emphasis continued on 2D shapes and the patterns that could be made with them.

•    In the art area the children painted their very own 2D shapes and made pictures using different shapes. They also explored shapes in the sand and in the water.

•    On Wednesday Douglas from Hi 5 for fruit provided the children with a vegetable buffet. He challenged them to make a vegetable person from a variety of vegetables. They discussed the names of all the vegetables and then they all got the chance to eat their very own creations. Some children tasted vegetables that they hadn’t tasted before so Douglas was very pleased with the outcome.

•    On Thursday the Mini Movers programme continued with the children discovering what food gives them energy and what food makes them big and strong. Outside their ball skills and listening skills are improving each week. This week the game was all based on the film Toy Story which the children could relate to.
•    This has been a great learning experience and the coaches will be missed by all when it comes to an end. The graduation for the Mini Movers takes place on 5th of December. Each parent/carer should have received notification of this by now.

Thanks to Mrs Margaret Mary Murphy for taking the time to keep us so well informed about nursery life.

Thanks to you all for reading my blog.

Mrs Shields