St Bartholomews

Primary 1 – Gabrys

Primary 2 – Ryan

Primary 2/3 – Cara

Primary 3 – Hayley

Primary 4 – Jayden

Primary 5 – Jake

Primary 6 – Des

Primary 6/7 – Olivia

Winning House: Lochend

Cool Class Cup: Primary 5

Friday already! I’m looking forward to finding out this week’s eight Pupils of the Week at assembly. As always, there’s been some great work going on across the school and I imagine it will be a tricky decision for each teacher to choose just one pupil.

The children are now busy practising for their Christmas concerts and it’s lovely to hear various festive songs coming from classrooms as I walk through the corridors. Don’t forget to buy your tickets in advance from the school office, priced £1. Due to fire regulations, we are limited in the number of chairs we can set out in the hall, so please don’t leave it too late to purchase your tickets.

Finally, thank you once again to all parents, carers and friends for supporting the Christmas Fayre. £2200 is a phenomenal amount of money to have raised and will allow us to:
– continue to subsidise ALL class trips throughout the year
– provide ALL pupils with a samba drumming workshop on 11th January
– provide ALL pupils with a Zoo Lab exotic animals workshop in February
– buy new games and benches for the playground, including a new painted fitness circuit
– provide ALL pupils with a music workshop from ‘Fischy Music’ in March

…. all fantastic things to look forward to!

A huge thank you to Mr Morris, one of our P1/P5 parents, for giving so generously of his time earlier this week to begin getting our library back into shape. Mr Morris worked the whole of Tuesday organising our non-fiction books into the Dewey system to allow pupils to locate books on different topics easily. He’ll be back in St Bart’s next week to put fiction books into alphabetical order and then our new library will be ready to open its doors to classes. Thank you, Mr Morris!

I’ve mentioned it on my blog before, but I really do want to highlight again the extraordinary dedication of St Bartholomew’s staff. There were three different after-school clubs on last night, all run by class teachers who had already had a busy day of teaching and still had a pile of marking to do. I know how much the children enjoy their clubs, and I’m sure the boys and girls’ enthusiasm makes the extra time and effort worth it for the teachers. However, I want staff to know that this extra work does not go unnoticed, either by myself or by parents and carers. Thank you!

We’re now into December and well through the first week of Advent. It’s lovely to see the Christmas decorations up, especially the crib in the foyer to remind us of the true meaning of Christmas. Pantomimes, concerts, parties, advent calendars, cards, presents are just some of the things that will be fighting for our attention over the coming weeks. However, the words from today’s Gospel reading at Mass – ‘It’s not those who say to me, “Lord, Lord,” who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the person who does the will of my Father in heaven’ – challenge all of us not just to focus on the ‘surface’ things of Christmas, but to allow our hearts to be changed and to try our best to reach out to those less fortunate than ourselves. Let’s not just sing about peace, love, hope and joy, but work together to bring peace, love, hope and joy to those around us and be ready to welcome Jesus into our hearts at Christmas.

A very happy St Andrew’s Day to you all! Our school community will gather together this morning for an assembly to honour our national patron saint and celebrate Scotland’s special day.

St Andrew was a fisherman, so what better day to welcome Euan McArthur from the Apostleship of the Sea back to St Bartholomew’s. The Apostleship of the Sea – perhaps unfamiliar to many of you – is a Catholic charity supporting sailors and seafarers worldwide and is St Bartholomew’s chosen Advent charity this year. The organisation provides practical and pastoral care to all seafarers, regardless of nationality, belief or race. Given that we’re never more than 50 miles away from the sea in Scotland, this is a very worthwhile charity to support. Euan will be working with all pupils during the course of the morning before joining us for our St Andrew’s Day assembly.

Our Christmas concerts are fast approaching and tickets go on sale TODAY, priced £1.00. Dates are as follows:

Primary 4-7 concert: Wednesday 14th December, 1.30pm
Primary 1-3 nativity: Monday 19th December, 2.00pm

The nursery concert takes place on Friday 9th at 10.00am and 2.00pm

As promised in yesterday’s blog, the winning names from the ‘Christmas Plate’ competition are as follows;

Nursery (am)- Caleb Wilson, Nursery (pm)- Iva Romanski,

Primary 1 – Kaiden Doran, Primary 2 – Ava Menzies, Primary 2/ 3- Kalvin Doran, Primary 3- Layla Murray, Primary 4- Jennifer Fleming, Primary 5- Molly Cairns, Primary 6- Oscar Duncan and Primary 6/7- Leah Eadie.

You can see from the picture below that all of the winning entries deserve their place in the competition and children were awarded individual prizes as a reward. Well done boys and girls!

All of the proceeds from the Christmas Fayre have now been counted and we have raised a whopping £2200!!!! This will be a great boost to school funds and will be used very carefully over the reminder of the session to contribute to the enhancement of children’s learning experiences. We look forward to keeping you up to date with our plans…

Mrs Bolland 😀

A huge thank you to everyone who supported our Christmas Fayre on Saturday. It was a huge success and we will share the total amount of monies raised as soon as we have a final count. Again, we couldn’t have done it without all the help and support from a number of our parents who have dedicated themselves to this event for a number of weeks. An announcement for the ‘Christmas Plates’ competition will be made on tomorrow’s blog. This was a very difficult to conclude as there were so many fantastic entries.

Primary 7 parents have a Parents Information evening at St Ambrose High School this evening from 6pm – 7pm that will contain important information about the transition to High School. Further meetings will follow and as always, we will keep you up to date.

The boys and girls who attend our after school Dance club will be delighted to know that it is back on today from 3pm-4pm.

Mrs Clare is sending out a text this morning to remind everyone that the Parent Council meeting is on tonight at 6pm. As always, please feel  to pop along and join us. Yoiur contributions will be greatly appreciated.

Mrs Bolland 🙂

We arrive at the end of what has been a very busy week. I received feedback from our visitors yesterday and they all spoke very highly of St Bartholomew’s: polite, well-behaved, hard-working pupils, highly committed and loyal staff, very good teaching across the school, great resources and exciting spaces to learn. A massive thank you to our phenomenal team of staff for all your hard work both in the lead up to, and during, the visit… you did us all proud! An equally massive thank you to our AMAZING pupils for being your wonderful selves: every one a star! And I mustn’t forget the parents who had a chance to speak to our visitors and made so many positive comments about the school. I left the children and staff with a wee thought at the end of last week’s assembly: LET’S BE AMAZING TOGETHER! That’s exactly what we did this week. Well done to you all!

We have another busy day ahead today getting organised for tomorrow’s Christmas Fayre. The stalls and games will be getting set up in the hall during the course of the day and Santa’s grotto will be built in time for his arrival tomorrow morning. I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am to the team of parent helpers who have organised this year’s fayre. You’ve done an amazing job! Of course, the best ‘thank you’ our school community can give them is to turn up in huge numbers tomorrow morning and help raise lots of money for our school funds! See you at 10.00am!

St Bartholomew’s welcomes back Mr Duffy, Head Teacher of St Mary’s Primary, today along with Mr Beers, Mrs Hanlon and Mr Moore from the Continuous Improvement Service. Our visitors very much enjoyed their time in the school yesterday and, for me, we got one of the best complements possible: “Your children are really polite.” Well done, boys and girls, for being your usual friendly, polite selves!

Included in the day was a meeting with the chairpersons of our six Pupil Voice groups and some Primary 3 representatives from the infant groups. The boys and girls spoke enthusiastically about their work to improve the school.

Our four visitors will be visiting classrooms again today to join in with the children’s learning; I have no doubt they will continue to be impressed by Team St Bart’s!

Please remember that our Christmas Fayre takes place this Saturday at 10.00am. It’s always a fun-filled event and this year will be no exception, with lots of great stalls to keep everyone amused. There will, of course, be the usual visit from Santa. He spoke with me briefly on the phone yesterday to double check the directions to Townhead… he said the trip will be a good practice-run for Christmas Eve! The Christmas Fayre is our main fundraiser of the year, so please make a point of being there and encourage your neighbours and friends to come along too.

A very warm welcome this morning to four special visitors. Mr Jim Beers, Mrs Gillian Hanlon and Mr Stephen Moore from the local authority’s Continuous Improvement Service will spend today and tomorrow in St Bartholomew’s to observe learning and teaching across the school. They will be joined by Mr Brendan Duffy, Head Teacher of St Mary’s Primary School in Whifflet. In every walk of life, it’s always helpful now and again to have an outside pair of eyes look at what you’re doing. We have a fantastic team of staff here in St Bartholomew’s and, as our Twitter page says, ‘children who are, quite simply, OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD!!’ The next two days gives an opportunity for the great work of St Bartholomew’s to be recognised and celebrated and, just as important, for the school to get some useful feedback on things that can be improved to make St Bart’s even better.

Please note that, due to our visitors meeting with teaching staff at the end of the day, all after school clubs have been cancelled. Our whole-school samba workshop which was originally planned for today has also been postponed until Wednesday 11th January. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Finally, please remember that the Christmas Fayre is this coming Saturday, from 10.00am onwards. Due to the setting up of the hall on Friday, there will be no hot school dinners. However, pack-a-snacks will be available for the children as usual.

A big congratulations to Cara in Primary 2/3 and Amaranth in Primary 3 who were competing in a dancing show at the SECC in Glasgow on Sunday.This is a very prestigious competition in the world of dance and the girls have done exceptionally well to win places in the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ themed show.We are looking forward to hearing all about it today!

Following on from the dental workshops that our ‘Health for Life’ group organised for the whole school, children have leaflets in their bags today.Please take a little time to read these as there are a few surprises in there about sugar content in popular drinks and foods that you may not expect…

Please note that our after school clubs are cancelled this week as we have visitors from NLC’s continuous improvement service who wish to speak to staff after the school day.

Mrs Bolland 😀