Prestonpans Infant School Newsletter

April 2014

Thank you to Christine Knox for giving so many of our mums, aunts

and grannies by teaching the children to give a lovely hand mas-

sage for Mother’s Day. After the initial rush, we managed to take

some photos and you can see them on www.weepans.org The raf-

fle raised £123 for P3s trip to Innerwick.

Tickets 91-95 and 316-320 can claim their

prizes from the office. Thank you all for

your support.

We were all sad to say farewell to the

Aitchison Family as they moved to Lauder at

the end of term. Charlotte Aitcheson has

worked so hard for the school over the years, driving forward the

purchase of the playground equipment in the playground and

teaching all our current P3s to plant, tend and harvest fruit and

vegetables in our school garden We thanked Charlotte at the last

Assembly of term. Now we need others to help with gardening

with the children. Could you do that? If you can please see

Ms Laing.

P3s enjoyed great adventures in

the outdoors at Innerwick in the

last week of term. Thank you to

the Parent Council for financially

supporting this residential ex-

perience. A huge thank you to

Mrs Graham and the 21 staff

who supported the camp.

A few families are not getting texts from school. We

have checked we have your correct phone numbers

and have now worked out the problem. Your mobile phone setting

is set to DO NOT ALLOW WEB SERVICES. You need to

change this setting to allow our calls.

We are getting

ready to welcome

around 125 new P1

children to Preston-

pans Infant School

in August 2014. P1 parents and carers are invited to meet with us

on Thursday 8 May at either 1.45pm or 7pm, whichever suits your

family best. A crèche will be provided at both meetings.

We are sad to tell you that Mrs Mowatt, Support for Learning

Teacher and Mrs Ellis, Nursery Teacher are both retiring in Au-

gust 2014. Both teachers have taught many Prestonpans children

and served the school community so well over many years. We are

grateful to them for all they have given our children so generously

over the years.

We will have 12 classes in August 2014—we have 11 classes now—

and are appointing a new Principal Teacher, who will teach in P1.

This is because our roll has grown so much and NOT because Mrs

Kettell is leaving, as rumour would have it! We are also interview-

ing for 1 full time and 1 part time Nursery Teacher to start in Au-

gust 2014. We will keep you posted once we have more news.

We have written the children’s reports in a shorter form this

year, as you will see on Tuesday 29.4.13, when the children bring

their reports home. There were 2 reasons for this.

1 To reduce teacher’s workload, in particular the writing of re-

ports, in line with Scottish Government and East Lothian Council

guidance.

2 To simplify the written report we give you and to add 5 mins

on to your consultation time with the teacher. This means you

will have a 15 minute consultation with your child’s teacher. To

give you this time, we have arranged 3 consultation times for

you to choose from. Wed 30 April in the evening, Thurs 1

May after school or Friday 9 May in the afternoon.

We have also listened to some parents’ concerns that the dining

hall does not give enough privacy for discussion and we will hold

the next consultations in the GYM HALL.

Mr Hardie, who has been our Additional Teacher this year, will be

asking your views of our arrangements this year at Parent Consul-

tations so we can decide on future arrangements. Please take a

moment or two to share your opinions.

You have probably heard of this great pro-

ject that 30 families and 9 leaders have

been enjoying over 7 Friday afternoons last

term. The families will ‘graduate’ this Friday

afternoon. Many of the families have made

new friends with each other and with staff

as they have learnt and enjoyed fun times

with the children. The programme runs

again for another 30 families in September.

Let us know if you would like to be involved.

We teach 2 blocks of Religious & Moral Education a year at Prestonpans In-

fant School. In December we learn about Christianity. This session, we

gave the children a choice of which religion they would like to study next.

At Assembly Ms Laing taught the children

a little about Buddhism, Judaism and

Sikhism. Each child was given a voting

paper by their Pupil Council member.

The Pupil Council then col-

lected the votes from their

class and they counted the

votes in the whole school. The

results were:

Judaism 82

Sikhism 58

Buddhism 50

So we will all be learning about Judaism in the first three weeks of term.

There are a few public holidays this term

so there will be no school for pupils on...

Monday 5 May 2014

Tuesday 6 May 2014

Monday 19 May 2014

The summer holidays begin on Fri 4 July 2014 at 12 noon.

Children return to school on Wed 20 August 2014.

The Scottish Government are increasing the number of hours

children spend in Nursery School from August 2014. So the

longer sessions will be from:

8.30—12noon for morning children

12.45—4.15pm for afternoon children Children will attend nursery every second Friday from

8.30—12 noon.

The Nursery staff will be talking to you about this and East Lo-

thian Council are preparing an information leaflet for all nursery

families that will be with us soon.

The current Place2Be Playroom will be mov-

ing to a new room just opposite the Place2Be

office in August 2014. Children attending

Place2Be just now will not be disturbed by

this as this will happen after they end their

Place2Be sessions. This will allow the cur-

rent Place2Be room, which is situated in the

P1 cloakroom area, to

be used as a classroom for P1 pupils from

August 2014.

I would like to thank Sue Kennelly, our

Place2Be manager for being so accommo-

dating with this move.

The Early Development Instrument is a survey that measured the

school readiness of our current P3 children when they were in P1.

It gave a report for schools, towns and the whole of East Lothian

Council on children’s readiness for school. Steven Wray from

Support from the Start is coming to Parent Council on

Wednesday this week (23.4.14) to share the results with par-

ents and carers. You are all welcome to joins us at 6.30pm in

the staff room to learn more about this fascinating study, which

will be repeated in 2016.

The EDI measured children’s

Physical Health & Wellbeing

Social Knowledge & Competence

Emotional Health & Maturity

Language & Cognitive Development

Communication & General Knowledge

One of the areas for improvement in Prestonpans Cluster was

Physical Health and Wellbeing. Headteachers were asked to de-

velop a project to improve one area of school readiness and we

choose this one. We find that sometimes children struggle to

have enough energy for learning and that sleep is an important

part of being ready to learn so from September, all schools in

Prestonpans Cluster are going to be learning about sleep. All

means all children, staff and parents/carers. It’s going to be fas-

cinating. To start us off, we would REALLY APPRECI-

ATE if you would fill in the attached Sleep Question-

naire (on green paper) and return it to school by

Tuesday 29 April 2014. Complete it for a normal 2

week period in term time. Thank you.

3rd Prestonpans Brownies are in the

process of planning the summer

term and further. However we have the

sad news that we are possibly

losing 4 girls at the summer and more

a t C h r i s t m a s . O u r u n i t i s

already small and loosing these girls

without more coming in will mean

the possibility of us having to close the

unit. None of us want to do

that when we are celebrated 100 years

of Brownies and 62 years of our

unit. So I'm asking you for help, if

you have any girls coming up to

Brownie age could you PLEASE let

t h e m k n o w t h e r e i s a T u e s d a y u n i t i n

Prestonpans? We meet in Prestongrange Church Hall on Tuesdays from

6.30—8pm.

It’s our school Summer Fair on Saturday 24 May 2014 from 10—

12 noon. This is the second of our 2 main fundraisers this year.

The money that is raised goes to pay for our P3 Innerwick trip,

blue reading bags for every child and to develop the outdoor play

area in our woods and field. The Parent Council are about to buy

great pipes and pulleys and messy kitchen resources for the out-

doors, which will give the chil-

dren so much fun so please

support this Summer Fair by

donating baking, raffle prizes

and toys, bringing friends along

and helping with preparation or

on the day if you can.

Wed 23.4.14 Parent Council 6.30pm

Fri 25.4.14 FAST families GRADUATION

Tues 29.4.14 Reports out to children

Wed 30.4.14 Parent Consultations 6—8.30pm

Thurs 1.5.14 Parent Consultations 3.30—6pm

Thurs 1.5.14 Raising Children with Confidence 11am Pennypit

or 6.30pm in school for FAST families.

Mon 5.5.14 MAY DAY HOLIDAY

Tues 6.5.14 In Service Day—school closed to children

Thurs 8.5.14 Welcome new P1 parents/carers 1.45 OR 7pm

Fri 9.5.14 Parent Consultations 12.30—3pm

Wed 14.5.14 Parent Council 6.30pm

Mon 19.5.14 VICTORIA DAY HOLIDAY

Tues 20.5.14 P1 trip to ZOO

Wed 21.5.14 Support from the Start meeting

in Pennypit at 9.30am

Sat 24.5.14 SUMMER FAIR 10—12 noon in school

Wed 4.6.14 P3—some take part in launch of Diaspora

Tapestry (aft)

Mon 16.6.14 Bingo to support Prestonpans Gala—evening

Tues 17.6.14 SPORTS DAY

Sat 21.6.14 Prestonpans Gala Day

Thurs 26.6.14 P3s to Prestonpans Primary School all day

Fri 27.6.14 P3s to Prestonpans Primary School all morning

New P1s Meet the Teacher in your class.

Wed 2.7.14 Some teachers/classes will move classroom

Fri 4.7.14 12 noon SCHOOL HOLIDAYS

Wed 20.8.14 BACK TO SCHOOL 8.45am for P2 and P3

New P1s start at 9am until 11.30am.