Ministerial visit

Cathkin Community Nursery hosted a visit by Fiona Hyslop on Friday. They were celebrating St Andrew’s day witha variety of music, food, and activities. It involved children presenting a lovely framed print they had made to Fiona, a piper, singing and dancing. Liz the Head was delighted that the nursery was visited as it was a great boost for the children, the staff and the parents. As the Fiona Hyslop said “This visit made me proud to be Scottish but Scotland should be proud of all of you at Cathkin Community Nursery”. Liz was impressed to see the minister getting down and about things with the children and everyone had a great morning.

Just prior to the visit I’d popped in to say hello to Liz. As  I was leaving a parent said “It was nice to meet you Fiona”. For one scary moment I was sorely tempted in my new guise as Fiona Hyslop to announce a large injection of cash to education…… Ah the power…. But instead I just admitted I wisnae her.

St Andrew’s Day

 

 

Above are some of the backpacks the children sent off to Mary’s Meals, who will take them to Malawi. In total 73 full back packs were collected which was tremendous. This is all part of the build up work that has been going on for the cluster rich task related to Malawi.

Our nursery and P1 children have been working together in our new little enclosed garden area and here are some of our pictures of what they’ve been up to.They are in their new outdoor gear and you can see the wormery which was being built. They were doing lots of numeracy related sorting etc when doing the gardening.

Today was our St Andrew’s Day event – in the afternoon we opened the doors for family time.

 

This is very worthwhile but a bit scary for all the staff as we have to let go control slightly and leave the parents and children to move around and talk to each other!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family time

Last session we introduced “Tea with the teacher” in p1. This is a weekly drop in and chat session every Friday with the P1 teacher. This session P2 have taken this on to weekly maths family time when a group of parents come to watch maths in P2 weekly. Next week we have our second P3-7 family time of the session. Parents/carers will come in during the afternoon on Friday to visit classes, watch teaching and see what the children have done for their Scots Book Studies. It’s also St Andrew’s day so we’ll be doing related activities when we have our visitors.

This is breaking down barriers between home and school. A real community of learning has to be open and welcome visitors/carers in to see what’s happening. It’s always interesting to see how work like this pans out overtime. I’ll be keeping an eye on how this develops and impacts on relationships.

The children are collecting backpacks and the contents for Malawi at the moment. The contents of these are always very touching, children often give up very treasured possessions for others less fortunate. Last time we had favourite teddies and books sent in because they were so special to the child. We have a gran who collected over 60 shoeboxes of donations last time. This is real citizenship in action. A favourite thought of mine at the moment is service and duty and how  this is about a state of mind where we aim to be selfless and to give/serve unconditionally. Sometimes in schools we can learn so much about this from little things our children and others around us do.