Pinkie St Peter’s Primary School

We are spending a whole week looking at books and as many things connected to them as possible. Thanks to Miss Brown, Mrs Dixon and Mrs Lally we have a wide range of interesting activities to try to stimulate a greater interest in books. The range of activites includes:

everyone reading in school- when a bell rings everyone in school gets a book out and reads it until the next bell, teachers too! Mr Wilson is reading Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown

We also have homework activites(reading-challenge ), talking books, a storyteller, Angie Townsend has a workshop on Thursday for P1-P4/5. P7 are writing to the Hearts and Hibs players asking them about their favourite books.

Levenhall nursery pupils have been invited to the school to join in on some of the activities.

On Wednesday we had Peter Kerr, a very respected Scottish author, in school to speak to staff and pupils. He had them in stitches with the humorous stories he told. You can read reviews of his work here.

The school library will be open so that parents can help their child choose a book. The pupils will also visit Musselburgh Library and P3 will enjoy a trip to Borders Bookshop. The pupils will be encouraged to swap books and comics. On Friday staff and pupils will be encouraged to dress up as their favourite book character.

Get caught reading is a competition for children to take a picture of parents/family reading. The most interesting/unusual will win a prize and be posted on thie page for all to see! There are many more activities taking place, encourage your child to tell you about them.

Writers in Residence

We are really lucky to have the services of two professional published writers who are coming in to school to work with the P5 class. They will be writing stories about Musselburgh and will publish their work as real books on the internet and as paper copies. The two writers are Lari Don and Linda Cracknell. You can read about Linda’s work on her website.

This was organised in conjunction with the Scottish Book Trust and is a very exciting project.

You can read reviews of Lari’s latest book if you click on the cover. We have two copies in school if you wish to read her work.

The eBooks the pupils will make are something like this one which is a wee experiment. There will more of a mixture of text and pictures and they will all be published here for you to enjoy.

Lastly we would like to direct you to some free books for you to enjoy.  Australian author DC Green has two free eBook novels, in this series. For free comics go here, if you like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, try this BBC site and for over 22,00 free books visit the Gutenburg Project. All the classics are there, just use the search facility to download a book to your playstation, phone, computer or any handheld computer or device including the new NintendoDSi. Another two good examples of free eBooks from Rising Stars one about racing cars and one about BMX and Mountain Biking, very good. bmx-and-mountain-biking racing-cars enjoy! These books are different from the norm as they have both fiction and non-fiction mixed together on the same topic, well worth a read for parents and pupils together.

Just before the end of last term some of our pupils were interviewed by Radio Forth and offered their opinions of what Christmas means to them. Listen to our interviews to see what is really important!

Christmas Food What I Want For Christmas

What Christmas Means

For Santa

In addition, we performed our carols for the Radio Forth audience. One from the upper school and one from the younger children. You can enjoy them here even though Christmas has come and gone.

Carol 1 Carol 2

Everyone at Pinkie wishes you all a very happy New Year.

The school recently held a Money Week to help promote financial education across the school. Pupils from every class contributed to the work on display. The pupils conducted pocket money surveys, ran a travel agents, were working pirates, held raffles, sold things through the Stock and Roll pupil shop and a variety of other activities including performing some plays. The pupils’ work cuts across all areas of the curriculum and was a great success. Over 100 parents turned up on the day to enjoy viewing the pupils’ work. We are trying to encourage the pupils to get into a saving habit and will be offering pupils and parents the opportunity to open accounts with a credit union.

All of the staff and pupils worked very hard to make the week a success and are very pleased with how successful it was. It was delightful to hear that the Minister for Schools and Skills, Maureen Watt got to hear about our work and mentioned it at a National Conference. In her opening address she spoke of the excellent work going on in schools and mentioned only one example - “Money Week at a Musselburgh Primary School” (Pinkie PS) where over 100 parents turned up at the end of the week to view the products, productions, activities and benefits to the children of the programme which was clearly delivering a Curriculum for Excellence.

We hope you enjoy our pictures and follow how we develop our Financial Education programme of work.

Primary 6 and Primary 3/4 are taking part in Internet Safety training. They are learning the best way to keep safe whilst using the internet both at school and at home. The teaching material being used is from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) whose job it is to try to protect and when necessary, prosecute those who may want to groom or harm our youngsters. We are using programmes of work called Hector’s World with 5-7 year olds and Cyber Cafe with the more senior pupils. There are sections of the websites where parents can get guidance and help and also gain interesting information, for example shorthand codes pupils use like PIR- parent in room, POS- parent over shoulder, when messaging each other. It is quite shocking the level of information that pupils will post onto their Bebo and other social networking sites. If your child has one check it out. From simple things like first and second name, school name it is easy to find out an address and a phone number in minutes. If your child then tells friends when you are on holiday, then you’d better check your house insurance as well! Visit the sites and find out how you can help keep your child safe at home. We are also looking at using avatars and nicknames when working on-line to help improve our safety and security. You can get free avatars for the whole family at a variety of sites, the one we are going to use is called doppleme. Guess which teacher this one is………no prizes!

Pupil Council Meeting Sept 08

Present: Blake P7, Arron P6, Erin P1, Joni P5/6, Ellie P5, Nicole P3/4, Jason P2, Michael P1/2, Sophia P2, Finlay P1, Ben P1/2, Andrew P3, Alisha P3/4, Becky P7b, Mr Wilson.

The following raised by the pupils and were discussed.

P6 pupils wanted the following:

• Seats in the playground
• More footballs
• Tooty Fruity to open as soon as possible
• A game room for Golden Time
• More playground equipment
• New football strips
• More iBooks

P7 pupils wanted the following:

• A climbing frame in the playground
• Basketball nets in the playground
• Football nets
• Paper towels in the girls toilet
• More sports equipment
• A tennis court

P2 Pupils wanted the following:

• A climbing frame with a slide

Mr Wilson explained that the whole of the school budget was spent for this year and the school would have no money until the new budget is given to the school on the 1^st of April. The school also has to make a saving of £11,000 to return to East Lothian so no new spending on the pupil requests can happen. The pupil council suggested that we could have a fund-raiser to help. Pupil ideas on how we could do this should be given to the Class pupil council member.

Mr Wilson asked the pupil council to see if the pupils had any ideas on what they wanted on the new school web-site. The address is http://edubuzz.oprg/blogs/pinkie

Becky and Blake volunteered to be the pupil council representatives at the next Pinkie Parents meeting.

Date of meetings: (All Mondays)

Monday 27^th Oct, 24^th Nov, 22^nd Dec, 26^th Jan, 23^rd Feb, 30^th March, 27^th April, 25^th May.

Primary 3/4 are taking part in a new style of learning that at first may seem like they are just playing games. We are using the Nintendo Wii to provide learning opportunities across the curriculum. We have just started using Wii Sports to have our own tennis tournament. The pupils will be researching tennis facts, producing written reports using a newspaper style of reporting, learning the rules of the game, producing art work and of course playing each other in a tournament. They will have to work out how to schedule matches, how to record results and how to select an overall winner. We will put our results here to let you know how we are getting on.

Doing homework can be a real chore, for children and adults alike. If your child is tired, grumpy and dis-interested after a day at school it is no surprise that homework can become a battlefield that ends up in tears and frustration, and that’s just the mums and dads. If you prefer to do some interactive maths work on computer you could do a lot worse that use the resources at a maths dictionary for kids. I defy you to dislike it! If your maths is a bit iffy, and let’s be honest, for lots of us it is. This is the answer to your prayers. Follow the link and try it.

This will be our home web site from now on. Here you will find out information about the school, our work and play and information to keep you up to date with hoidays, newsletters and Pinkie Parents. Visit us regularly and put us in your favourites file on you browser.

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