Our Lady of Good Aid Cathedral Primary School

Tuesday 21st February saw the first of a series of Family Learning workshops. Parents and carers had the opportunity to hear about Cathedral Primary’s ‘Active8’ approach, which organises learning and teaching across each school day in a way which maximises pupil engagement, challenge and personalisation & choice. Active8 also frees-up more time for teachers to deliver high-quality direct teaching input to ability groups, as well as work with individual pupils.

Following the presentation from Mr Young and two Primary 7 pupils, parents and carers visited their child’s classroom to see Active8 in action. Feedback from parents was overwhelmingly positive:

“I like the choice and flexibility it gives the pupils. It gives more of a chance for differentiation.” (P4a parent)

“Children seem excited about it. I think it creates independence and builds their confidence.” (P5a parent)

“I’m loving seeing all the children learn in different ways. They all seem so relaxed and happy.” (P6b parent)

“I think Active8 is brilliant! Gives children independence and choice and makes learning more fun.” (P4b parent)

“Great to have freedom to shape own learning to keep engaged.” (P4/5 parent)

“It will help with future learning and life skills.” (P4a parent)`

Please click on the following link to access our Parental Engagement & Family Learning leaflet, which outlines future workshops:

Jan – June 2023 Family Learning programme

Primary 2 pupils from our P2/3 class made fantastic junk models recently as part of their ‘Reduce, Reuse and Recycle’ topic. Each and every one of the children displayed imagination, ingenuity and skill creating their models. Well done, everyone!

Primary 5 pupils ran another successful coffee morning on Friday 17th February and, as always, the hall was packed with Cathedral families enjoying a good blether over tea and cake. A fantastic £835.56 was 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!

The Cathedral Primary curriculum doesn’t just consist of the learning which goes on in the school building but also encapsulates the wider achievements of our young learners. Cathedral pupils have the opportunity to log these wider achievements on their ‘Rose Trainer Achievement Award’ record card.

This musical Primary 5 pupil has been a talented tin whistle player for several years. However, he decided to take up the Irish flute (a much more challenging instrument) a number of months ago and popped down to Mr Young’s office on Friday 10th February to show off his progress by playing a traditional Irish melody. Mr Young was very impressed and hopefully it won’t be too long before this young musician shares his talents with the rest of the school community.

Primary 6b have been developing their general knowledge in recent weeks, particularly on capital cities around the world. These eight brain-boxes scored full marks in their class quiz on Friday 10th February, naming all capital cities correctly.

Would all of our newsfeed readers have known the capital city of Switzerland is Bern????

Congratulations to the young footballers pictured above for displaying ACE during training sessions:

A – Attitude

C – Commitment

E – Enthusiasm

Football is an important part of our Come Clubbing @ Cathedral programme and pupils celebrate their successes and update their achievements on their personal ‘Rose Trainer Achievement Award’ record card.

As a Sports Scotland (Gold Award) school, we recognise the many benefits of football:

Encourages an active lifestyle     Taking part in a competitive match, coaching sessions or simply having a kick around with some friends encourages children to get outside and keep themselves active.

Develops communication skills     Children can discuss their tactics or talk about other competitions they have attended in the community. Spending time with each other on a regular basis encourages the development of deeper communication skills and more involved conversations.

Enhances team skills and teamwork     To play football, a good team effort is required and playing regularly will help children develop their skills and work with their team successfully. Our pupils learn to play together and from their experiences, work out how they can be most effective as a collective unit. Being part of a team will also give children a sense of belonging and encourage them to think of others.

Helps to stimulate social skills     Spending time regularly with team mates allows for more complex relationships and more time being spent getting to know each other. Friendships will form and football may have started out as the common factor but it will soon become just one of the things that children have to talk about.

Congratulations, once again, to our ACE footballers!

On Tuesday 7th February, three Primary 6 pupils represented Cathedral Primary at the North Lanarkshire sustainability conference. The children had the opportunity to explore various exhibits and hear from several keynote speakers.

By the end of the morning, the three ambassadors had picked up lots of new ideas about how to care for our planet by living more sustainably and are looking forward to sharing these with the wider school community.

One of the priorities in our 2022/23 School Improvement Plan is reading for enjoyment and pupils and staff have already made great progress in this area. Of course, classes have access to our fantastic library each week and every pupil now reads for at least twenty minutes a day.

On Monday 5th February, two new features were introduced to our weekly assembly. Each week, one pupil and one adult will recommend a book to the rest of the school. The first two volunteers were a keen reader from Primary 5 who reviewed ‘Mega Monster’ by David Walliams and Mrs Campbell who recommended a favourite book from her own school days, ‘The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler’ by Gene Kemp.

Using our latest ‘Accelerated Reader’ data, Monday 5th February also saw the introduction of ‘Bookworm of the Week’ certificates, awarded to our Top 10 readers in P4 – 7 (based on number of words read). Congratulations to our first ten winners, pictured below.

Smart School Council, which gives every Cathedral pupil a voice, is continuing to drive forward change and improvement across our school community.

This term, we are working with the organisation ‘Respect Me’ to review our current approaches to preventing and responding to bullying. This work is being overseen by Miss Degnan, one of our Primary 3 teachers, and our twelve House Captains have already agreed on a number of ideas to take things forward. As always, these are set out on our Smart School Council action board so that our whole school community can be kept up-to-date with progress.

In the coming weeks, House Captains will engage directly with parents and staff to review our current anti-bullying policy; develop termly ‘bullying drills’ to regularly remind Cathedral pupils of what bullying is and how to respond to it; run an anti-bullying poster competition; explore innovative ways of establishing a ‘Friendship Stop’ in the playground for pupils who may be feeling lonely or anxious.

We look forward to sharing news of this important work in future newsfeeds.