Another busy week for walking month this week. This week’s challenge was for each pupil to make a Rainforest Animal Mask in class and then go out exploring on their walk with their mask. We have seen lots of lovely, creative masks and the children all really enjoyed stomping and roaring through their walks dressed as their favourite animals. Well done everyone!
Happy International Walking Month!! The theme for this years walking month is the rainforest and how reducing our carbon footprint will help the rainforest and the animals that live there. This week each class has gone on a local walk and have been on the hunt for some rainforest animals on their way.
See how many you can spot in our photographs….
This year the theme for Earth Day 2025 was Our Power, Our Planet. Each class fully embraced this theme by exploring solar lights, windmills and planting some seeds for our garden and helping to decorate our new special memorial garden.
Each class also took part in activities in class creating some lovely art work using paints and handprints to make Earth pictures which was lots of fun and lots of mess!
Take a look at how busy we have been!
Another busy term in the Pentland Class! We have all been working so hard on our activities in class and having the best time with our friends and adults in class. We have lots of lovely visitors including Diesel, Sparkles and Willow the ponies from Happy Hoofbeats, Live Music Now, Dance Namaste and the theatre group Imaginate. We have loved all of these experiences and have been able to express ourselves in lots of different ways.
Some of the learners in Pentland have been out to Bathgate Xcite for swimming and others have enjoyed some hydrotherapy in school. We all love the water and are growing in our confidence and skills every week.
Here are some photograph’s of some of the fun things we have been up to in class and out and about! Enjoy!
Happy Easter!
Another fun and very busy term in Duntarvie !
There’s been a big emphasis on keeping our bodies moving this term and learning new skills as we do so. Everyone has either been out at swimming to Bathgate Xcite, or in the hydrotherapy pool this term, and some of us have been at both. Being in the water is so beneficial for our bodies and you can see from the photos how happy it makes us!
In the senior phase, we’ve been out in the community lots, working towards our “Sport and Leisure” ASDAN awards with Louise, with some fabulous experiences including polybat, bowling and golf. It’s been brilliant to hear all how our young people have been developing skills and understanding more and more about these games each time.
As part of our “Hobbies and Interests SQA”, we’ve had the chance to enjoy some of our favourite experiences while achieving our awards. One pupil has even been out at the gym! Another has been raising his game on the Xbox, while another has been knitting some gorgeous scrunchies, and one pupil has been acting as school librarian!
Our S6 pupils have also been expressing their bodies regularly out at Musically Active Dudes with Marcia and John, meeting up with some old friends from Beatlie and making some new connections too. Social group has also been a great opportunity to do this, and we’ve had plenty of dancing here too, as well as a visit from Potter Around and Callum from Cool Creatures. Our S6 pupils have also been working towards their Duke of Edinburgh Awards both out in the community and at school too.
In school, Charan from Dance Namaste has been keeping many of our Duntarvie pupils’ bodies both active and relaxed. We’ve shown some super engaged interaction with Charan. One of our pupils has also been using the Innowalk regularly, which has been a brand new experience, and she’s doing so well with it!
Some of us have been attending PE groups with friends from different classes, and those who haven’t yet, soon will. Again, some lovely progression of skills here.
Cafe Duntarvie has kept the staff of Beatlie well fed this term, as part of our school Enterprise project and another SQA award. We’ve been learning about taking orders, preparing food, delivering orders and handling money. We’re very popular with all the adults currently, and it’s been a great chance to work on our communication skills and interacting with the whole school community!
Celebrations across the school have been a big part of this term too – we had a ball during celebrations for world book day, science week and comic relief. It’s so lovely to come together as a school on special days!
Other highlights have included getting the chance to meet and care for the theraponies and build up confidence around them, Paracise, fun with our wonderful Clown Doctors, being involved in the cross schools Growing Together project, choir, and various cross class communication groups to name but a few …
Easter week is also shaping up to be a fun one, with a big egg hunt and cosy movie afternoon on the cards, with our friends from Ochiltree!
We wish all our families a restful, and enjoyable Easter break.
Love Team Duntarvie!x
What a busy week we had last week on the run up to Comic Relief, we all worked really hard in art and cooking to prepare for our cafe. It was lovely to see everyone who came along and there was lots of games, music, prizes and delicious cakes and bakes. To top it off we managed to raise £501.75 so a huge thank you to everyone who contributed.
We had a visit from the Barrowland Ballet Company on Thursday. They explored their ‘Poggle and Me’ story with some of our pupils over two sessions. Their imaginative production really caught the attention of our pupils and the interactions during the show were amazing to watch!
Everyone had a wonderful time exploring different stories around the school
Bedtime stories, silly puppet shows, fairy tales and linking music to stories through a book hunt in the garden.
We have also made a whole school story massage which we carried out altogether at assembly. This will live at reception for anyone to look through.
Lammermuir have been busy bees since coming back from the Christmas break. We have had lots of fun activities arranged around our topics of Winter, Robert Buns, Chinese New Year and Valentines.
For our Winter topic, we made snowman sensory bags, played with real snow in the garden, made our own snow and also explored some hot chocolate powder and marshmallows in our messy play sessions. We made igloo paintings and melted snowmen in art, using white paint. We used lego bricks to print our igloo pictures. We explored winter treasure baskets and also enjoyed playing games like building up a big snowman made of boxes and trying to knock him down. This activity was one of our favourites and we were all really good at turn taking.
For Chinese New Year we enjoyed listening to Chinese music, exploring the treasure baskets and playing Chinese restaurants with the home corner materials. We made Chinese lanterns in art and explored some rice and noodles in messy play.
We had good fun learning about Robert Burns too. We made our own tartan pictures using pieces of paper and done some mark making to colour in our Robert Burns picture. We dressed up in tartan items and enjoyed our whole school ceilidh and Linda’s son, Isaac came in and played the pipes for us too. We really enjoyed it. Some of us tasted porridge for snack and some of us explore it with our hands for messy play too.
We explored some red jelly and angel delight for valentines messy and play also red water play with heart shapes. We made some canvas pictures and sun catchers for Valentines too.
We are all looking forward to the February break for some well earned rest, ready to tackle the next term!
We have been really busy this term doing lots of fun things for Christmas. We have all worked so hard on our Nativity performance. Everyone look fantastic in their costumes and they all used their switches independently at the appropriate time too! We have been doing lots of Christmas crafting and Christmas cooking. We made truffles, Christmas bark, melted snowman biscuits in our cooking groups. We made some lovely decorations, calendars and Christmas cards and coasters in Art. All the children enjoyed our Christmas music and movement group, everyone liked the Christmas songs, ribbons, bubbles and the parachute. We hope you all have a lovely Christmas and Happy and healthy New Year. See you in 2025!
