The Wee Vine

Naomi and Fiona were busy before the street Fayre planting the summer display at the Cross. This year we were ably assisted by Una, Fiona’s sister who was visiting from Germany at the time.  We try to have a change of theme each year so I hope everyone enjoys this year’s choice. All we need is some more sun to bring them on.

As we rely on donations for all the planting, we are always grateful to receive any donations towards the upkeep of the tubs.  In the autumn we plan to purchase another tub to put at the other side of the entrance to the memorial.  Collecting boxes will be at McNicoll’s and Rhubarb Lime. Thank you in anticipation.

Naomi Hirst

Stirling Community Planning Partnership CPP are currently developing a Local Outcome Improvement Plan known as a LOIP.  The partner agencies involved are wide ranging and include Stirling Council, Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue, NHS Forth Valley and Forth Valley College.

The LOIP is a high level strategic plan which sets out the vision and focus for the partnership over the next 10 years and will set out the main issues in Stirling that need to be tackled in a partnership approach.

Over the last month, workshops have been held with public sector partners, Third Sector organisations and a Community Sounding Board.  The workshops have reviewed evidence on inequalities in the Stirling Council area and have identified the big issues that require a partnership approach to tackle.

The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act places a statutory duty on all Community Planning Partnerships to prepare and publish a Local Outcome Improvement Plan LOIP by October 2017.

If you would like more information, or would like to be involved in community engagement of the LOIP over the summer, please contact the LOIP Core Working Group localities@stirling.gov.uk

1^st Kippen Brownies have just finished another busy year working towards badges as diverse as World Guiding, Environment and Cyclist.  We also celebrated Halloween, St. Andrews Day and Thinking Day in February.  Outdoors, as well as our cycle ride at Ladylands Farm. We’ve enjoyed a trip to the Woodland Experience, plus a fun evening laying trails and tracking around the village. Luckily, the weather was kind to us, for our end of term Sausage Sizzle held up at the football pavilion.

Brownies will re-start late Aug/early Sept and if you would like any more information about Kippen Brownies or Girlguiding in general you can contact me.

If you would like your daughter to go on the waiting list for a place at Brownies, please register at www.girlguiding.org.uk.

Fiona Hunter

Unit Leader – 1^st Kippen Brownies

fionaihunter@btinternet.com

Tel No.  01786 870322

We look forward to welcoming our new P1 pupils on 22^nd August. We have had many opportunities to meet them and they enjoyed 2 afternoons during the transition visit in June.

We will have 5 classes next year. There is always the chance that pupils can leave or arrive during the summer holidays, so classes issued before the summer are always provisional and may be subject to change.

P1/2 Mrs Mier

P2/3/4 Miss Campbell

P4/5 Miss Alexander

P5/6 Mrs Stirling

P7 Mrs Stone

We welcome Miss Campbell back to Kippen in her new role as Principal Teacher. We also welcome Miss Hebden who will work with us for 2.5 days a week in all classes and Mrs Seaton who will be in the school office every morning.

We said a sad farewell to Miss McGillivray and Mrs Newall from P4/5, Mrs Leask from the office, Mrs Hewitt who finished her Acting Head role, Mrs More(Music), Miss McKie (PE) and Mrs Street who has been a Principal Teacher at Kippen Primary for the past 12 years. Mrs Street had a song specially written for her leaving assembly. The pupils sang it so well and it was very catchy. Good luck for the future to all the staff that we said goodbye to.

We also said goodbye to our fantastic P7s and their families. For some families it was the last of their children to leave Kippen Primary and the end of many years of partnership working. Thank you again to all the families who have given so much support to the school. We appreciate it greatly.

Congratulations to our citizenship award winners this year. Holly Fielden was awarded the Junior Citizenship Shield and Chloe Watt was awarded the shield for Citizenship in the Senior School. Thank you to Mr and Mrs Marshall from coming to award these shields in memory of their son Ross. Well done to Holly and Chloe for being such good role models and demonstrating our school values with a kind and caring manner.

The Sports Achievement award, which is voted for by pupils, was awarded to Thomas Reilly who has once again had success in sport this year, including football, long jump, sprint relay, cross country and lacrosse. Well done Thomas!

Primary 1/2 started their year with a writing project entitled ‘Fairyland’. This involved rewriting a few traditional tales and creating artwork for their own books.We started by looking closely at the bean plants in the grounds so that we could get the detail correct. The next project was ‘Little Star’ the school Nativity play and the children enjoyed playing various roles in this first performance.

We then moved on to ‘Farm to Fork ‘ to learn more about where our food comes from and the pupils were delighted with their trip to Tesco. They went behind the scenes to see how the bread rolls were made and also had a chat with the fishmonger to see where the fish came from.

Our final topic was ’MInibeasts’ and the children were fascinated by the facts about insects and other minibeasts. The children created some great minibeast habitats using an old shoebox and creating minibeasts from clay. For our school trip, we went to David Marshall Lodge and saw lots of midge flies as we went on our minibeast hunt!

Primary 1/2 started their year with a writing project entitled ‘Fairyland’. This involved rewriting a few traditional tales and creating artwork for their own books.We started by looking closely at the bean plants in the grounds so that we could get the detail correct. The next project was ‘Little Star’ the school Nativity play and the children enjoyed playing various roles in this first performance.

We then moved on to ‘Farm to Fork ‘ to learn more about where our food comes from and the pupils were delighted with their trip to Tesco. They went behind the scenes to see how the bread rolls were made and also had a chat with the fishmonger to see where the fish came from.

Our final topic was ’MInibeasts’ and the children were fascinated by the facts about insects and other minibeasts. The children created some great minibeast habitats using an old shoebox and creating minibeasts from clay. For our school trip, we went to David Marshall Lodge and saw lots of midge flies as we went on our minibeast hunt!

In June Primary 3 visited Dynamic Earth. We had a great trip where the children experienced a ‘time machine’ to witness the big bang and feel the ground shudder as a volcano erupted. They touched an iceberg and got caught in torrential rain in the rainforest. We finished our trip with a visit to the ShowDome where we learned about Super Volcanoes. A wonderful time was had by all!

This year Primary 4/5 have had lots of fun learning about interesting topics such as China, Natural Disasters and Dinosaurs. We have enjoyed learning new facts about these topics. We performed a dragon dance at the Open Afternoon in October and we taught our audience a few facts about dragons. We loved having lots of visitors into the classroom at the Open Afternoon in March. In May it was time for the school show where we performed in the Village Hall. We have been busy! It’s been a great year with Miss McGillivray and Mrs Newall.

Primary 4/5 have loved all the sporting opportunities we have had this year. One of our highlights has been performing at the Macrobert Theatre alongside Active Stirling’s ‘Think Dance.’ It is something we will always remember. It was a fabulous opportunity to perform in a large theatre with a huge audience. We spent a lot of time practising to make sure that our performance was well rehearsed before we got onto the big stage.

This year in primary 5/6 we have explored Ancient Egypt, travelled through Light and Sound and immersed ourselves in the magical world of Harry Potter. We have been fortunate to welcome several people into our classroom who have helped us with our learning journey this year, especially Jamie from Balfron High School. Jamie came to Kippen most weeks to help us with our French, we had a lot of fun playing games and creating French monsters! We also really enjoyed learning about things in our world in a scientific way this year. We have learned about how our eyes and ears work, how plants grow, about carrying our experiments and investigations and the difference between reversible and irreversible reactions.

We have been fascinated by watching caterpillars change into butterflies and amazed by tadpoles transforming into frogs. We went to Edinburgh Zoo to learn more about other animals from around the world. We wrote a song about dragons… or rather about not judging people based on appearances! We went to Balfron High School for swimming lessons and left feeling more confident and skilled in the water than when we arrived. They showed us how to keep ourselves safe in the water and we have all practised these skills a lot now. We also worked hard with other classes within the school to put on performances of the Pied Piper that we were proud of and all through this we continued to work hard across all curricular areas too.

We supported each other, taught each other and learned from each other. We have had a fun and interesting year and are looking forward to our next year at Kippen Primary.