Our Lady of Good Aid Cathedral Primary School

As we approach the month of December, the latest ‘Spotlight this month’ has appeared in the library, focusing on books to curl up with this winter.

Cathedral learners continue to make great use of our library and twenty minutes of personal reading is incorporated into each day’s learning. Our use of ‘Accelerated Reader’ means pupils can complete a quiz when they finish a book and teachers can monitor the progress of every learner. ‘Accelerated Reader’ also allows us to award ‘Bookworm of the Week’ certificates at assembly and celebrate the Reading Class of the Week.

With Cathedral pupils being such avid readers, we know they’ll continue to commit to daily personal reading throughout the rest of this term as well as during the Christmas holidays. There are so many books to discover and enjoy in our fantastic library!

Another two teachers from St Mary’s Primary School, Bo’ness, spent Monday 25th November in Cathedral to see our Active8 approach in action. Once again, our visitors were exceptionally impressed by Cathedral learners’ behaviour, engagement, independence and the way they lead and take responsibility for their own learning. Something else which caught their attention, however, was the beautiful artwork displayed around the school.

Mr Young couldn’t agree more. Here’s some impressive artwork, created by Primary 4a, which recently stopped him in his tracks. The children’s pastel masterpieces beautifully capture the spectacle of the Northern Lights.

Catholic Education Week runs until Friday 29th November, when Cathedral school community will gather to celebrate Mass in honour of St Andrew. This year’s CEW theme is ‘Pilgrims of Hope’, giving pupils and staff the opportunity to look ahead to the upcoming Jubilee year. These two Primary 7 learners worked together to create a poster on Jubilee 2025 which they shared with Mr Young on Monday 25th November. Mr Young then took the opportunity to pop onto the school website to give them a preview of the special Jubilee Door of Hope which will be installed in Cathedral later this month:

https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/olga/jubilee-2025-pilgrims-of-hope/

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!