Welcome back! We hope you all had a super break. Week 1 updates and reminders – thank you for all your ongoing support.

School photographer

Photos tomorrow (Oct 27th) and Wednesday (Oct 28th).

Family groups on Tuesday and Individual photos on Wednesday.

BOOK FAIR from Thursday 29th Oct – Tues 3rd Nov. If any pupils wish to order something from the book fair can they please send in cash or a cheque in an envelope and on the front of the envelope details of their order, name and class. Their orders will then be available for them to collect at some point that day. The leaflet is being shared online. Classes will not be visiting the Bookfair as in previous years.

DRESS DOWN/UP DAY

As we are not able to run our Fancy Dress Discos this year, pupils are invited to come dressed up/ come as you please on Friday 30^th Oct to enjoy the seasonal spirit and support our health and wellbeing culture.  A food donation e.g. tins/ cereal/ items with a long shelf life etc. would be appreciated instead of bringing in £1. The school could then offer the food items to the local food bank or be used locally.

BLYTHSWOOD SHOE BOXES

Could all shoe boxes be handed in by Friday 6th November. The pupils have received their leaflet today with all the relevant information. (One shoebox per family)

Please see attached zone map for the halloween scavenger hunt.

Entry forms are available to purchase from the class teacher at £2 per entry.

First and second prizes of a £20 Smyths voucher and a £20 voucher for Ness Walk Kiosk.

Entry forms to be returned by Tuesday 3rd November 2020.

Lochardil Parent Council Fundraising

Due to the Covid Pandemic Restrictions Lochardil Parent Council faces new challenges with regards to fundraising.

This term we would really appreciate your support with the Christmas cards the children are designing themselves. Last year this raised approximately £500 for the PC funds which was excellent but we’re hoping to smash that target this year! Look out for the form coming home with your child and follow the instructions to place your orders online.

Another way that Lochardil PC can raise money is through ‘Easy Fundraising’. This is a scheme anyone can sign up for.  Every time you shop online at a wide variety of retail outlets (including eBay, John Lewis, M & S, Sainsbury’s, booking.com and many more), a donation is made to the school.  Please visit www.easyfundraising.org.uk and support ‘Lochardil Parent Council – Inverness’.  One you have registered it is a very simple system to use and basically boosts our funds throughout the year.  Please consider using this service and encouraging Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents and friends to register too, as we recognise in the current climate and the run up to Christmas, more shopping will be done on line than ever before.

We have a Parent Council Fundraising Subgroup.  This small group of parents have been looking at fundraising ideas during the covid pandemic, like online quizzes or a virtual scavenger hunt.  Claudia would please like parents to email her any fundraising ideas or suggestions to claudiawills@hotmail.com.

There is an ethos within the Parent Council that money raised will be spent that academic year so it can directly benefit your children at the school. Thank you for your ongoing support.

Have you been down to Eden Court to see our Wee Flags for Change on display? Can you spot your flag amongst 1000+ flags? These look amazing all together, each individual flag is part of something much bigger!

Please see attached letter from Mrs Kellacher.

Thank you all for a fabulous term. Happy holidays! 🙂

It is proposed that Tempest will visit the school on Tuesday 27th October for family group photographs and on Wednesday 28th October for individual photographs. This of course is subject to government guidelines.

We made it to the holidays! 

What a busy term we have had getting to know each other and taking part in lots of fun, educational activities

We have continued to develop or addition and subtraction strategies. Last week we were using chimney sums to help us add and subtract bigger numbers. P4 absolutely LOVED this and were asking for more. 

We have been developing our French vocabulary weekly and recently have been going over our numbers and greetings. 

We took part in the Ness book fest and managed to read silently for a whole 20 minutes!!! Feedback from the kids was great. They loved the peaceful environment to enjoy their stories. 

Our fun phonics groups have been working super hard revising their sounds and taking part in lots of fun activities with our super PSA, Mrs Macdonald. 

As part of our health and well-being lessons we have been learning all about kindness and self esteem. We had to write down all the things we love about ourselves, what we are good at and what makes us unique! 

Miss Graham came back to a lovely message on her computer from the class so it was only right that I gave the class a nice surprise with my note the next day. 

I meant every word! 

Take a look at our fabulous artwork inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow Rose. Isn’t it great! 

Here we are in PE working on our fitness

Please be reassured we will provide further information regarding any change to ELC pattern of hours in term 2.

Please see the attached letter regarding the move towards offering 1140 hours in our ELC provision.

Please see the attached letters from Nicky Grant, Executive Chief Officer. One letter is addressed to Parents/Carers and the other is for pupils.

We designed posters which linked with some of the themes in our novel, Divided City.

We are appealing to all our local community for support.  We would like to remind everyone to please park considerately when dropping off and/or picking up around the school area, and also following the Scot Gov. guidance on social distancing.

Unfortunately, some of our local residents are again experiencing issues in the streets nearby the school including cars being parked across driveways, on corners, near crossings etc., and also people not social distancing or where this is not possible there is no use of a face covering (for those that can).

As a school we value the positive relationship we have with our immediate school community and also local community members and as a Gold Rights Respecting School we would hope that parents/carers and children alike respect the rights and property of others and that there is mutual respect and consideration shown at all times.

Thank you for your continued support.

Highland school pupils asked to self-isolate from school during term time, through Test & Protect, who are eligible to receive means-tested free school meals, will receive vouchers to cover their isolation period.

The Council will automatically pay £15 per pupil per week. Vouchers are paid to P1-3 pupils in receipt of school clothing grants and P4-S6 pupils in receipt of free school meals.

Highland Council’s Welfare Support Team can support low income families who may be eligible to apply but have not already claimed free school meals and school clothing grants.

They can be contacted on 0800 090 1004 or by email to welfare.support@highland.gov.uk

A form has been given to your oldest / only child today should you wish to order any school uniform. Please return any orders in a sealed envelope with the correct amount of money or cheque made payable to Lochardil Primary School by Friday the 9th October.

We had hoped to commence our hot lunch service next week however we will now commence this in term 2 as originally planned. Thank you for your continued patience on this matter to ensure the children’s safety.

We played Hopscotch and timed ourselves for each throw. We had to work out the average times taken for each number. Some were as low as 11 seconds, but the highest was over 5 minutes!

Mrs Anfield’s group were measuring pace and distance after making some accurate estimates.

Pr 7A are enjoying some independent reading time this morning to support the Ness Book Festival. We use EPIC books on our Chromebooks or enjoy a book from our class library. A book can take you anywhere! Let’s celebrate our love of reading.

Well done to all the classes who took part in the Sumdog competition this week. We have been placed 27th out of 3, 428 Scottish Schools! There were 56, 587 pupils who took part and answered 11, 021, 562 questions correctly.

Everyone put in the time and effort to get us up the leaderboard. A great way to finish our week!

A reminder to join us for the Parent Council meeting tonight at 7pm. This will be held through Googlemeet, a link for which can be found on your childs’ Google classroom

As well as trying to catch Miss McLean’s Pr 7B class on the SUMDOG leaderboard, we are enjoying some outdoor maths this week. We played Ladders with a maths “twist” which ended in a draw. A tie-breaker was required!

We split into 2 groups. One group were recording and researching data (Is Faster Better?) using the cars in the staff car park. The other group were measuring and analysing speed and distance relative to our heights, shoe size and stride length. (Make a Bolt for it)

We are ready to share our Wee Flags for Change with Highland One World Group as they prepare an exhibition at Eden Court to celebrate the Sustainable Development Goals. Every stage of the school from ELC to Pr 7 has taken part. We made a pledge to help achieve the Goals and wrote our promises on the back of the flags.

http://highlandoneworld.org.uk/news/item/158-your-wee-flag

From Monday 5^th October we will be serving 1 hot meal option and 1 cold option for school meals. 

This is a week earlier than originally planned as we shared at the start of term we would be serving hot meals from Term 2 onwards for here at Lochardil Primary. 

All classes will transition to eating lunch back in the dining hall from tomorrow (Tuesday 29^th Sept).  This will still consist of a ‘Grab & Go’ option for this week and packed lunches. 

Please support all children with independent learning skills such as using cutlery, opening packaging etc., table manners, and ensuring they recycle any waste where possible.  This will support a smooth system for dining to operate.

Please see the attached temporary 4 week menu for Lochardil Primary.

We got going today with this competition and are very keen to do well! The maximum number of questions per pupil is 1,000. It closes at 8pm on Thursday 1 October. This has been set as homework for next week too. We hope we get a good placing on the leaderboard!

In Primary 4 we have started our learning journey in addition and subtraction. We have been looking at a range of different strategies to help us when adding and subtracting big numbers. 

We have also enjoyed doing the daily 10 to develop our mental math. 

In PE this week we were working on our hand eye coordination and throwing skills. We had to take our time to get the beanbag into the hoop and earn points for our team. 

This was great fun! 

We completed our first session of resilient kids and everyone loved it. I keep being asked when our second session is! 

We looked at positive and negative emotions and related these to real life contexts. 

In these photos you can see us using facial expression to show different emotions. 

Over the next couple of weeks we will be doing a lot of work on kindness. We have discussed the positive emotions we feel from being kind. 

We have even created our own posters to display in the school, showing others how they can spread kindness. 

The office bearers have agreed to remain in place for another year to support the school and community during the Covid 19 situation. We are very grateful to our parents/carers for this. The 1st virtual meeting of this session will be held on Wednesday 30th September at 7pm using Google Meet. You are welcome to join us for the meeting. The link will be shared the day before the meeting. Thank you