JRSO

Junior Road Safety Officers (JRSOs)

our JRSOs, like all out pupil groups are elected members of the school group. They are required to apply for the positions, sharing their strengths and skills via a written application and interview process as well as their commitment to the safety of all in our community.

JRSOs lead by example. They model excellence in behaviour, attitude and learning as well as continuously promoting the road safety message.

JRSOs are also trained in their role to enhance their knowledge and understanding and awareness of how they can help the children of our school community.

This is a prestigious position. Our JRSOs are often the face of the school, visible by their fluorescent clothing at the beginning and end of the school day. They are outstanding ambassadors of our school and we are proud of their efforts and achievements.

Please contact Miss O’Brien or Miss Gilmore for further information.

We are a Fairtrade School

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Primary 4 lead our learning as a Fairtrade school and ensure that the Fairtrade message is promoted throughout the school year within our whole school community.

Our learning from P1-7 is centred around our development as responsible citizens and effective contributors to society, therefore, where appropriate, fair trade is a common theme where we can ensure a real and meaningful learning experience!

Please continue to support Fairtrade wherever you can. Let us all make a difference as active, global citizens.

Walking to School

P6 have been learning about their personal health and well-being, specifically they have learned about the benefits of physical activity particularly during walk to school week. Of course, they also celebrated ‘Walk to School Week’ by taking part in the Midlothian Inter-School Walk! They used their creative writing skills to create dramatisations, raps, songs and so much more. They have even built their own time machine to compare people’s attitudes to exercise in different eras! Now they are hosting competitions to encourage others to take part!!

It’s All About Me!

P6 are learning all about themselves this term!

 

During the coming term we will be focusing, as a whole school, on developing our questioning and higher order thinking skills. We will develop these skills across the curriculum. In particular we have already been applying and growing these skills during our bug club reading and our talking and listening experiences as we learn about equal rights.

 

We will be finding out about our changing bodies and as we begin to understand the changes that occur we will learn how to best prepare and look after ourselves. We will investigate our physical health and wellbeing as well as or emotional and mental health and wellbeing. As we learn about ourselves we will also be finding out how to maintain healthy relationships with our peers and families. We will familiarise ourselves with the people in our lives that we can use for support and guidance.

 

We recognise now that we are becoming more independent but as we become more independent we need to be more able to keep ourselves safe. Going forward we will be learning about how to keep ourselves safe, both in public and on the internet.

 

As well as learning about ourselves we will be experiencing our local environment, and building an understanding of the processes involved in where our food comes and the processes involved. We will be visiting Dalkeith Country Park to take part in a ‘Food and Farming’ learning experience.

 

It will be an exciting term for us!

St. David’s PS and the community it serves

Saint David’s Primary School and the Community it Serves

St. David’s is situated on the south side of Dalkeith in Kippielaw Playing Fields.  It is a one-stream co-educational Roman Catholic Primary School for children of primary school age with a catchment area that includes not only Dalkeith but also Eskbank, King’s Lines, Danderhall, Pathhead and surrounding areas.

Pupils are accommodated in a purpose-built, semi open-plan school.  The building contains seven class bases, wet areas, a general-purpose room, school hall and Library and outdoor learning areas with extensive school grounds utilised for both curricular and extra-curricular activities.

There is, at present, nine teachers, including: Head Teacher, Mr Currie; Principal Teacher, Miss Chidgey, Support for Learning teacher, Mrs Lumbard and visiting teachers of physical education, music and French as well as instructors of brass and violin and an English as an Additional Language (EAL) Assistant.

The school also employs the support of an administrative assistant, four Learning Assistants, breakfast club and dining room supervisors, playground supervisors and site supervisor. Cleaning and catering are contracted to the region’s in-house’ service organisations. A crossing patrolperson operates at the entrance to the school on Lauder Road and there are various other crossing patrol points which serve the school along Lauder Road.

St. David’s has an extensive programme of support and extra-curricular activity before school, during lunchtime break and after school through, for example, morning Breakfast Club and activities such as football, rugby, basketball, gardening club, Masterchef and ‘Street’ and Hip-Hop Dance to name a few.

We have an excellent working partnership with St. David’s High School, St. David’s Parish, Dalkeith, and the Archdiocese of St. Andrew’s and Edinburgh and often work alongside other local religious organisations and other major world faiths in the Midlothian and Edinburgh areas.  Respect and tolerance and the celebration of diversity are integral to our schools’ visions, values and aims.

 

 

Respectful Robert Tokens

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The Rights Respecting Schools Team have started a new whole school points system. Every member of staff have been given Respectful Robert Tokens that can be handed out to children who are meeting the weekly challenge. The class with the most tolkens at the end of the week gets a certificate and the class with the most wins at the end of the term will get a class treat.Rights Respecting School assembly

Our Learning

This term Primary 5 will be learning about Our Body, Food and Fitness. As a class we have been planning our learning to build on what we already know. Through our Interdisciplinary topic we will be developing our skills in Science, Religious and Moral Education, Health and Well Being, Technologies and Literacy and applying these skills across the curriculum. We will be developing our fitness through daily P.E lessons and learning about how we can sustain exercise through our lives. We will be learning about healthy eating and how we can build and cook healthy meals. We are also going to plant and grow our own vegetables! We will be learning about our bodies and the impact that our lifestyle can have on our body and how our body changes as we grow. We have planned a trip to Dalkeith Country Park to learn more out where our food comes from at the Food and Farming Event.

We will be learning how to use Higher Order Thinking Skills through our class Novel ‘The Butterfly Lion’. We will be learning to recognise, answer and create our own lower and higher order thinking questions. We will be developing our individual reading skills through Bug Club which we can access on any electronic device!

In Numeracy and Maths we will be consolidating our mental strategies for the four operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. We will also be learning the formal written strategies and applying these strategies to help us solve different problems. In Maths we will be learning about Time, Shape and Measure and applying these skills in a real life context.

We are very excited for our final term in Primary 5 and preparing ourselves for the transition into Primary 6! We will keep you up to date on our learning journey so check back soon!!

P7 Summer Learning

Primary Seven have lots of fantastic and exciting things to look forward to this term! As it is our last term of primary school, we want to make it as special and memorable as possible!

We have an amazing trip to London planned at the beginning of June so we will get the chance to explore the famous sights like Big Ben and the London Eye, get a taste of London culture and even see some West End shows! Many of us are really looking forward to going to Harry Potter Studios! We are really excited to have this opportunity and can’t wait to make some super special memories.

Harry Potter Studios here we come!

Harry Potter Studios here we come!

We also have our long-awaited transition days at our high schools coming up. We will get the chance to meet some of our new classmates and build some new friendships, get to know the school and the teachers a bit better and we will be getting used to following timetables to get to our lessons. We are looking forward to this experience as we feel it will help us to feel more prepared for our move into secondary school.

We are really enjoying our learning so far this term too:

In Maths, we have been focusing on ‘Measurement’. We can now find the areas and perimeters of simple and compound shapes and have been applying this learning to real life problems. We have also revised telling the time and reading analogue and digital clocks. Our next step in measurement is to read and interpret timetables in order to help to prepare us for reading timetables when we go to High School. 

In Literacy, we have been focusing on developing our use of openers in our writing and learning to write simple, compound and complex sentences. Our next step is to improve the punctuation that we use across a range of writing genres.

We have been using Bug Club to help improve our reading comprehension. We get assigned different genres of texts regularly and have the opportunity to answer questions about the texts and develop our higher order thinking skills too. Bug Club is great because we can also use it at home to really challenge ourselves and make extra progress. Our next step in reading is to develop our own questioning skills using Bloom’s Taxonomy to challenge our own and our peers’ thinking. 

First Holy Communion

Sacramental ClassPrimary 4 have already successfully prepared for and received the Sacrament of Confirmation earlier this year. Arch Bishop Leo Cushley celebrated the Sacrament in St. David’s Roman Catholic Church alongside Monsignor Chambers. We are now learning about the life of Jesus and the ultimate sacrifice He made for us. This is in preparation for the class making their First Holy Communion in June this year. We ask that you keep all the Sacramental pupils in your prayers as they continue on this spiritual journey.