Our Lady of Good Aid Cathedral Primary School

To mark Book Week Scotland, these Primary 5/6learners had great fun working together to design and construct reading dens from cardboard boxes on Friday 22nd November. There were some fantastic ideas, with one group even appointing a bouncer to stand at the entrance to prevent anyone disturbing their reading for enjoyment time! Well done, Cathedral learners, for THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX!

LIT 0-01c “I enjoy exploring events and characters in stories and other texts, sharing my thoughts in different ways.”

HWB 0-35a “I explore and discover where foods come from as I choose, prepare and taste different foods.”

WELLBEING INDICATOR: Achieving

Our young learners have been enjoying exploring the characters in different stories. The children have developed their knowledge of characters and events within a story and shared their thoughts and ideas with their friends. Some children can talk confidently about the sequence of events within a story and have had the opportunity to retell the story in their own imaginative ways.

Our young learners have also been developing their awareness of quantities of numbers and how we use them to count. Some children have begun to correctly subitise items from looking at small amounts. All children are beginning to understand that we always count from zero.

We have been discovering where different foods come from and how different cultures sometimes eat foods that we may not normally have. One of our afternoon parents, Miss Irfan, kindly made some delicious pakora for our children and staff to try together and one of our practitioners, Mrs Kodenets, gave our children the opportunity to make Ukrainian dumplings called varenyky. The children were very curious about the different ingredients and enjoyed tasting them at the end. All nursery families are invited to share their favourite home recipes so our young learners can become aware of, and try out, lots of different foods.

Primary 5 pupils ran another successful coffee morning on Friday 22nd November and, as usual, the hall was packed with Cathedral families enjoying a good blether over tea and cake. There was an extra treat for guests at this term’s event as our ‘Gie it Laldie’ choir entertained families and friends with several songs.

By the end of the morning, a fantastic £947.50 had been raised for school funds.

As always, many thanks to the Fundraising Committee for over-seeing the event and well done to our incredible Primary 5 pupils for setting up, running and clearing away the coffee morning. It certainly was Developing the Young Workforce in action!

Lynda Keith, who supported school staff to develop high-quality play in Primary 1 and 2 from 2021 – 2023, was back in Cathedral on Thursday 21st November to work alongside our nursery practitioners. As many of you will be aware, there have been significant changes to nursery staff since June 2024 and Lynda’s input is part of Cathedral’s strategy to build a fresh team with a shared commitment and the collective capacity to provide the highest quality learning spaces, learning experiences and learning interactions for our children.

The focus on Thursday 21st was integrating literacy and numeracy across all areas of our nursery, including the outdoor area. Cathedral’s nursery practitioners thoroughly enjoyed working alongside Lynda and, by the end of the day, had not only made some physical improvements to spaces but were left inspired and equipped with lots of ideas to take forward in the coming weeks and months.

Priority 2 in Cathedral’s 2024/25 improvement plan is: Improve the quality and increase the impact of Religious Education RC across all stages through a systematic and active review of the ten characteristics in the Charter for Catholic Schools.

Cathedral was delighted to welcome Barbara Coupar, Director of the Scottish Catholic Education Service, to our staff meeting on Thursday 21st November. Barbara gave teaching staff the opportunity to revisit Scotland’s RERC syllabus, ‘This is our Faith’, and begin to explore together how its content can be translated into high-quality learning experiences for pupils.

Many thanks to Barbara for taking time out of her busy schedule to support Cathedral in taking forward this aspect of our improvement plan.

This Primary 7 learner has campaigned tirelessly over the past year for  a cause very close to her heart and her incredible efforts and contribution to the success of the campaign were recently recognised and reported on BBC Newsround. Everyone here at Cathedral was blown away by her confidence and exceptionally professional presentation skills… definitely a journalist or television presenter in the making!

Despite only taking up Irish dancing two years ago, this Primary 3 pupil is already making her mark in the world of Irish dancing. She has had a string of sensational performances, racking up a number of trophies and titles. She even went viral on TikTok a couple of weeks ago dancing next to a busker in Dublin! It’s no wonder, then, that she recently made the front page of the local press. Everyone at Cathedral is so proud of you!

Our Lady of Good Aid Cathedral was packed with family and friends as Primary 7 pupils received the Sacrament of Confirmation on Wednesday 20th November. Each and every pupil participated attentively and prayerfully throughout the liturgy and the beautiful music, led my Mr Greechin and Cathedral school choir, added to the prayerful atmosphere.

Many thanks to Bishop Toal and Fr Lamb for celebrating the liturgy, to parents and families for accompanying the children on their on-going faith journey, to Miss Cameron, Mrs Shevlin and Mrs Allison for preparing their classes for the sacrament, and for all those – from the school and from the parish – who worked so diligently behind the scenes to ensure everything ran smoothly on the night.

We continue to keep all those pupils who received the Sacrament of Confirmation in our prayers.

Primary 7a learners were very excited to receive video messages from their penpals in South Korea on Wednesday 20th November. The initial connection was established when Miss Cameron visited a teacher friend in South Korea during the summer holidays.

This Cathedral pupil was thrilled to hear from his penpal, finding out that his birthday is on 14th June, that he enjoys soccer and that one of his favourite foods is apple. The questions his Korean friend wanted to ask included, ‘How do you say hello in Polish?’ and ‘What is your favourite football team?’.

How amazing to have friends at the other side of the world!

Cathedral Primary hosted visitors from St Andrew’s Primary, Falkirk, and St Mary’s Primary, Bo’ness, on Tuesday 19th November.

Four pupils, two teachers and the Head Teacher from St Andrew’s Primary, who we have been working in partnership with for over a year, carried out a learning walk of the school to evaluate how effectively we use our various learning spaces to support high-quality adult-led, adult-initiated and learner-led learning. Two of our Primary 7 pupils led the learning walk and there was some great bouncing around of ideas amongst the group. It has been an absolute pleasure working with St Andrew’s to help them get Active8 up and running in their own school and we wish them well on the next part of their journey.

Meanwhile, four teachers from St Mary’s Primary spent the morning in different Primary 4 – 6 classrooms finding out how Cathedral’s Active8 approach works. They then popped down to the Play Zone at the beginning of the afternoon to see Primary 1c engaged in their various activities (play, of course, lays the early foundations for Active8). All four teachers were extremely impressed with the engagement, enthusiasm and independence of Cathedral learners across the school and are looking forward to taking what they saw, heard and learned back to St Mary’s. We look forward to welcoming another two teachers from St Mary’s Primary to Cathedral on Monday 25th November.