Your child may have come home from school lately with a ‘Winter Ready’ sticker attached to their person or their property. If they have recieved one of these stickers it means that:

1. They know their GLOW Login and Password;

2. They know how to access GLOW from school and home;

3. They know how to continue their learning using GLOW and other resources in the event of a school closure due to bad weather.

It is inevitable that, in the case of severe winter weather, our school will close. But, through GLOW (The Scottish Schools’ Intranet), it is possible to continue learning and teaching in the event if  a school closure if your child has access to a computer and the Internet.

It is really important that parents know how to engage their children with GLOW in the event of a school closure and, as such, we will offer Parent Workshops to make sure that parents too are ‘Winter Ready’ for when the poor weather arrives.  If you are interested in attending a parents’ workshop on continuing learning and teaching during school closures, then please leave a comment on our Blog, to let us know, and we can organise parent worshops to address this issue.

Of course, we hope there won’t be any school closures, but then again, do we really believe in the tooth fairy?

A new initiative (fuelled by Curriculum for Excellence) is about to be launched at Stoneyburn Primary School. We have always had pupil groups who impact what we do and how we do it, but now we are taking the next step – EVERY pupil will have a voice as we go forward into this session. We have decided to extend opur Pupil Voice, so we have decided on having six pupil voice groups and every child will be involved in one or other of them. The groups were presented at Assembly on Tuesday, 25 October, and the children were asked to choose (from the list), which groups they would be interested in joining. The six choices were:

Eco Group

Health Group

Pupil Council

Communications Group

Transport Group

Playground and Golden Time Group.

We are pleased to report that every child  got either their 1st., 2nd. or 3rd. choice of group (we had to have some leeway or the groups would have been of unequal size and become unmanageable).

Monday sees the first meeting of our Pupil Voice Groups, where each will decide on how it will move its agenda forwad during the coming school year and what it hopes to achieve by June next year.

Please talk to your child about their involvement in our pupil voice groups and make sure that voice is heard. At Stoneyburn PS, we’ll be listening!

On Tuesday. 01 November, pupils from Stoneyburn and Our Lady’s Primary Schools will be planting trees to help make our community more ‘Green’. The project has beeen organised by Stoneyburn & Bents Future Vision Group and is being overseen by Central Scotland Forest Trust and the Woodland Trust. The lucky class which has been selected to carry out this task for Stoneyburn Primary School is Primary 5/4, under the leadership of our Eco Co-ordinator, Ms. McManus. So, come Tuesday, it’ll be Best Welly Forward as our children strive to improve the environment of Stoneyburn and Bents for the future and for future generations to enjoy

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The Halloween season started with a bang today at Stoneyburn Primary School, where a superb fun-day took place. We had a highly entertaining Halloween Parade, where some ‘volunteer parents’ were good sports and helped pick some winners from the vast array of costumes on display. After the parade, the children were involved in six different Halloween activities, including a real fun-dinger organised by the Soc-It Group. We’d like to say a very big ‘Thank you’ to everyone who took part in our Halloween Fun Day or who helped out in any way. Without you, it would have been no fun at all – a real team-effort by everyone!

On Friday, 28 October, children in Stoneyburn Primary School will be enjoying a Halloween Fun Day. The fun will begin at 9.00 a.m. with a costume parade, to which parents and friends are welcome to come along to see. At 9.45, the children will take part in a circuit of Halloween activities until 12.15 p.m.  Each class teacher and the Soc-It group will provide one activity each that all children will visit. We are looking forward to a great day.

After the judging – the waiting! Four directors of the Levenseat Trust arrived in school on Tuesday to judge our entry in this year’s Levenseat Project. Our school had three separate projects going on which made up the school entry. Primary 5/4 made an animated film about local mining in the past, Primary 6/5 made one about how landowning led to the development of our village as we now know it, and Primary 7 made a film about Farming in the past. All three films turned out much better than we dared hope as it was our first time using this technology in school, but we should have known better, knowing the resourcefulness of our pupils and staff. We do have some technical issues still to resolve with sound levels and wind noise, but we’ll work on those. We hope you are impressed with our work. Even more so, we hope the Levenseat Assessors were impressed with our work and it will be rewarded by a good showing at the Levenseat Awards in Stoneyburn Community Centre in November.  In the meantime, you can watch them now by clicking the links below:

The Midnight to Morning Miners

The Landowner Who Changed Stoneyburn

A Day in the Life of a Farmer in the Past

Please post a comment after viewing to encourage our children’s continued efforts to be Successful Learners.

Stoneyburn Primary pupils have been invited to take part in Film Education Schools Week this year. As we have recently invested heavily in animation software and equipment, this is a very timely opportunity to see how the professionals do it. Primaries 4-7 will be looking at how ‘Kung-Fu Panda 2’ came into being, while Primaries 1-3 will be looking at ‘Rio’. Both studies include a trip to the Vue cinema complex in Livingston to view the films. Seats for these viewings are free, so for the price of a contribution towards travel to and from Livingston, our children will get to see current film technology in action. Further details of these visits will be issued shortly

Three of our classes have been heavily involved in the Leavenseat Trust Project this term. Primaries 5/4, 6/5 and 7 have all been flexing their artistic muscles and have adopted the roles of film producers and animators to produce short films about our heritage in Stoneyburn. Primary 5/4 have been concentrating on Mining, Primary 6/5 on Landowning and Primary 7 on Farming. All three classes have been learning how to use Stop Frame Animation software to produce their artifacts, which will be assessed on Tuesday, 11 October by a Leavenseat Assessor. Good luck to all our classes.

The after-school club season will be with us shortly. Although we have some ideas for clubs, we’d like to know what kinds of after-school and lunchtime clubs you would like to see running in our school (a touch of reality please – hang-gliding just isn’t going to be in there!). You can make your views known by emailing the school at stoneyburn.ps@wled.org.uk or by posting a comment to this Blog. We look forward to hearing from you.

Our annual Harvest Assembly will take place in the school hall on Friday 30 September at 9.00 a.m. Parents and friends are warmly invited to join us to celebrate this event. It is traditional to organise a food collection for Harvest which is then later disbursed to a worthy cause. We would be very grateful for any donations of non-perishable foodstuffs that we could then pass on to the Bethany Trust Project in West Calder. Donations of tins, packets, jars. bottles, etc., should be sent into school by Thursday 29 September to allow Primary 7 pupils to set up the Harvest Table in readiness for the asembly. We look forward to welcoming as many of you as can make it along on Friday.