Primary 7s are off on their break

Tomorrow P7 are off on their outward bound week to Castle Toward in Dunoon. Bless em it might be a bit chilly, but they were so excited in Friday they were fit to burst. There are only a few not going and they are going to be trainee classroom assistants next week, helping with the nativity etc!

The week before Christmas we are having a maths theme week to encourage active learning throughout the school in maths. We are using the supporting materials developed by South Lanarkshire as a starting point. These are for P4-7 classes and approach maths in much the way the infant staff do – using washing lines etc. In the meantime everyone is revising addition and subtraction processes P3-7 – the maths scheme (I won’t name it) we use is teaching the thought processes behind concepts but we are increasingly finding it is not balancing this with any processes. So children at times work things out in the most round about way. After Christmas we are going to have a look at multiplying and dividing. Some of these publishers have a lot to answer for and I’m hopeful that CfE will not become something else they can cut up and produce schemes for. For too long many have followed schemes blindly with no thought for real learning and teaching.

Our visitors from Norway, New Zealand, LTS and our disrict HMIe are now all coming on the same day next Thursday. And our head of attainment is popping in too! It’ll be like an education party knees up thing! I thought of plying them with some mulled wine…. but I think they’d see past that ploy and still ask tricky questions! Our children are quite excited at the thought of these visitors from afar and have been polishing up their door opening and welcome techniques.

On our big Christams tree at the front entrance we have a wee enterprise going. We have been selling shiny gift cards which the children have been writing their Christmas wishes on. They have been well worth a read and I’ve seen a few glistening eyes from even the most hardened staff. One of my favourites wished that, even though they had been up to mischief they wouldn’t only get a piece of black coal on Christmas day. It reminded me of when I was little. My nana spent many weeks every year threatening me with just the same dreadful thing. When I had a better, less rascally day she would say that I’d moved from the bit of black coal to a tangerine and a wooden peg. Apparently she was lucky if she got a tangerine, a sixpence and some wooden pegs for her Christmas (she was fairly old at this point). Apparently many a game could be had with wooden pegs in those days. I think she maybe read too much Ivor Cutler.