Smithton Primary School

What a beautiful day to end the term! It has been a long, hard term with lots of children – even today – being unwell and catching bugs and nasties. I wish everyone who was sick today a speedy recovery – some whole households!

A massive thank you to all our coaches, and after school club leaders who give up their time every week for our children. More than 270 children take part regularly each week in activities free of charge at Smithton Primary.

Well done to the substance awareness No Smoking Day award winners: Kate, P5LM, Liam P5LM and the overall winner Oliva P7 whose answer to the question ‘The Most Important Thing I have Learned Today Is..’ was ‘Be yourself. Love others; smoking is bad. I have people that love me and I can talk to them about anything.’ Well said, Olivia! The parents who came all participated in a survey which will help us shape the next set of substance aware lessons in classes. As a thank you names were put into a hat and the MacDonald family (Carly and Maya) was drawn out. 8 places at Playzone…so I hope I get asked to join them…

All staff have worked so hard this term and I hope they all have a great holiday and come back refreshed. Mrs Brande in the nursery will never be replaced but Amanda McDonald has joined our team and settled in very well this week taking over her keyworker group. (See the slideshow for her photo.) There will be further changes to school staff next term which we will tell you about nearer the time and when we know of new staff coming.

Our young people have been learning lots during this term and we’re all very proud of the attitude and growing social skills. Just like we don’t expect children to come to nursery and school being able to read and write we can’t expect them to have developed mature social skills – we need to teach, guide, help and reassure along the way. Have a look at some of the photos in the slideshow this week of focused young people. You’ll see more on your child’s google classroom but here’s a flavour of learning, P7s on a treasure hunt at Culloden Academy, Isla winning basketball skills trophy, Oliver baking a cake for his sick mum, literacy skills achieved in a P7 classroom and many more including your amazing family Easter Means to Me exhibits! Have a look here for a cool, modern Easter message: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d0NzAiiLxAGjz78NamRtnBUqozQyjPnL/view?usp=sharing …

Have a good Easter break and trust that all rest, recharge and revive ready for the final term of the year (already??) Know you are loved and appreciated by all staff at Smithton ELC and school.

Aileen Mackay, HT

An advert for money off places…

What Does Easter Mean to Me exhibits to the rooms before school tomorrow please – ELC – P3 to hte room opposite ELC Butterfly line up area or P4-7 music room door from hte main playgroud. If your exhibit spans across teh year groups just choose one closest to your drop off point. Doors will be open from 8.40am

We close on Friday at normal times and there is no Easter service for families just an assembly in school as the church is in use. We can’t invite you in as the children take up all the room in the hall!

Many families struggle with bereavement, change and loss. Have a look at our programme – many of you will have seen this before but maybe your circumstances have changed and you are now looking for advice? Please read this from Lauren.

Looking forward to seeing you at the disco tomorrow night – remember an adult (someone 16 or over) must come to collect your child – including P7s. Thank you for your cooperation to keep to this. Any mobile phones, etc in use during the night should not take or send photos for everyone’s privacy. A good night should be had by all!

There are a number of you who have said that you would be interested in either supply work as nursery or PSA workers in a school. If you want to know more about this contact me directly aileen.mackay@highland.gov.uk

Have a good evening,

Aileen Mackay, HT

What does Easter mean to you? It’s time for our family activity at the end of the spring term. For Thursday 30th March please bring in either a presentation about Easter, design a Spring bonnet, a lego model, decorate an egg or anything else that, as a family, you have shown your creativity in design! See your child’s class dojo or classroom for details of where to take the creations on Thursday before school and nursery start.

A reminder that I will be holding a meeting for parents of P3 children on Monday 27th at 2.15pm in the Community Room to discuss the P3 leadership awards that we will be carrying out from after the easter holidays. I look forward to sharing with you what the children will be doing. COVID stopped us going ahead with this in P3 before so this is the first year that we will be looking to achieve these awards.

Delighted to announce that we are the winners of the Substance Awareness Award again! Thanks to all staff and pupils who helped make this happen. Although we’ve won it every year we don’t take it for granted and we are always striving to do better. We will summarise our report in our Standards and Quality Report at the end of the school year as usual but if you are interested please ask me what this is about.

Have you noticed just how much the playground is taking shape? Thanks to Donna and Elaine, the gardening group and various staff and children throughout the school the grounds are really beginning to take shape. Thank you to everyone involved and for your continuous hard work. Photos in the slideshow below.

MacRobert Cup took place this week on possibly the worst weather day of the week. Thanks to Jenna and her Wednesday night crew as well as Mrs Parke and Mrs Lambert for all their efforts..oh yes – and all the P2-P7 team that ran incredibly well. Photos to come next week and places for the teams…just delighted with their positions as well as attitudes. not every team can be competitive and friendly at the same time but with coaches who understand the importance of this and a team that follows this through…we’re all so very proud of you all.

P7 have spent time at the Newton Room in the grounds of UHI where they got stuck into science. P6 go next week. A great opportunity and hopefully inspiring some to think about a career in science. We also had a group of maths experts who ended up being joint third for their work around problem solving at a maths challenge day in Dingwall. A presentation of their day is being worked on so we will share here next week.

School disco on Thursday so looking forward to dusting off my spangly shoes and dancing the night away! As ever, we are indebted to the volunteer parents and the Parent Council organisers who make the evening run so smoothly – we can’t thank you enough.

Have a good weekend, everyone and our assembly song today was about building up each other and recognising the good in everyone. I love having a look at the google classrooms to see what comments the young people have made about each other’s work or congratulations on star awards to each other.

Aileen Mackay, HT

It has been brought to my attention that the gazebos need some work done. Please remind your children not to use them until I send an updated blogpost.

Thank you,

Aileen Mackay, HT

A reminder to those parents and carers who will be joining us after the Easter holidays or who are new to the setting that you are very welcome to an online briefing session tomorrow night 6pm for about an hour. Please use this code to join me for a short presentation about what you will find and an opportunity to ask any questions and get to meet new parents, too. https://meet.google.com/yof-joqa-xqt?authuser=0

Aileen Mackay, HT

It’s not easy to laugh or be positive when life is grim for us at times but as we said in assembly today we all need words of encouragement. Your children might be trying your patience at home but they are doing really well in school and nursery! Stay focused on boundaries and routines as we are trying to do the same, too. Good sleep, food and exercise as we know really helps so hopefully with the brighter evenings there will be more running about outside leading to better sleep and eating habits. There’s a very good website about sleeping routines you might want to have a look at Home – Sleep Scotland I’ve mentioned it here before but we’ve had a few people enquiring recently about sleep.

Comic Relief – always good to dress down or dress up! Thank you so much for your donations – £220. We created a school joke book…laugh out loud stuff! This will certainly lift your mood!

Read it here

We also ran with the Comic Relief theme of building…see some of the photos: a robot that only gives smiles, a free food machine and a sea pollution hoover to name just three!

Message from Kayla, Emily, Lexie W and Sophie in Primary 6: We have been learning about recycling as part of our Global Goals lessons with Miss Nicol. We learnt that not everything can be recycled but some items can be recycled (like sweetie wrappers) but they have to go in special recycling bin to be recycled. We decided that we wanted to become a better recycling community so we applied to be a public drop off point so that anyone in the school and community could recycle their sweetie wrappers at our school if they wanted to. To do this we needed to collect and decorate cardboard boxes so that every class could have their very own sweetie wrapper recycling bin and we also made a giant one for the foyer so that anyone in the community can come and drop their sweetie wrappers off at it. We have really enjoyed learning about this and decorating the boxes and we hope that this helps teach the rest of the school about recycling too. See the boxes in the slideshow.

Easter Holiday Programme HLH

A wide variety of sessions available during the second week of the holidays at Culloden Leisure Centre.

Limited spaces at all sessions, so book on ASAP!

Bookings available through QR code or via:

https://booking.highlifehighland.com/programme/12

Anyone who wishes to sign-up must be a HLH member, either a paying member or a PAYG member. To sign up to a PAYG membership to book on, please visit:

https://onlinejoining.highlifehighland.com/pay-as-you-go

Please get in touch if you have any problems or require any extra info:

david.shaw@highlifehighland.com

Dr Bike will be here on Tuesday 21st March so if your child’s bike needs a wee check please bring it to the bikesheds near the MUGA. Please also rememebr if your child takes bike or scooter to school to take it home on the same day. We do try to take bikes that have been left inside overnight but we can’t always do this. We will be having a family biking morning the first Saturday after the Easter holidays..more information to come next week…

Hopefully you get this message before Monday but I’ve been caught up with things and am still relying on someone from ICT services to post it with photos…enjoy the photos this week. Your children have great smiles and concentrating faces!

Have a good weekend,

Aileen Mackay, HT

Dress down tomorrow or dress in your comic relief red outfit. Lego building is the theme so each class will be having a construction led day! We will also be having a laugh when we compile our whole school joke book that we will share on the blog tomorrow. We realise we have asked for donations quite a lot recently but if you can spare £1 that would be great for the Comic Relief team and all they do across our country and beyond.

Aileen Mackay, HT

We have a view to start athletics on Wednesdays from 29th March in the field next to the school. 

(Not during Easter holidays) 

5:30pm – 6:10pm P1-P3 

6:10pm – 6:50pm P4-P7

We can only run this if we have at least 1 more coach/ helper in each session as at the minute we only have 2 permanent in each. 

If you would like your child to attend please join Spond for booking a space using this link.

We in Smithton Athletics Club are using the app Spond to organize activities and share information. Open the link to join: https://group.spond.com/FAQQX

We are a small independent outdoor charity based in Merkinch, Inverness, offering local and affordable outdoor activities for children and young people. https://aban.scot/

This year, we are continuing with our holiday camps, which run take place on weekdays over the Easter Holidays, a week in the Summer Holidays, and the October Holidays. We also run our holiday camps over in-service days and May Day. The camps take place at either Dunain Woods, or Culduthel Woods, who the camps are run in partnership with. https://aban.scot/activities/holiday-camps

The camps are £35 per child per day, with discounts available if booking multiple children/days. If the parents cannot afford this, it is possible to apply for funded places through the Highland Childrens’ Trust, meaning nobody misses out.

As mentioned above, we are a charity, and we are also on Highland Councils’ list of Approved Activity Providers.

If possible, could our holiday camps be shared with parents via school newsletters/emails to parents? We know that parents regulary receive emails from schools, and we would really love to have as many youngsters on our holiday camps as possible.

If you have any questions, please do get in touch.

Warm regards,

Calum Smith

Business Manager

Àban Outdoor Ltd