With the schools closing we wanted to ensure we had something in place in the community to provide families who need a little extra help with a local drop in place for any additional food items you might need now the kids are not in school.

A Currie Primary mum has set up (in the last day or so!) a community food initiative.

The details of which are as follows:

Community for food: 

Drop off points for donations of food: Mc Gills Butchers in Currie (Mon-Sat 8am-5pm) and The Village Hall in Juniper Green (Wed eve 4-5pm)

Collection of food will be from The Village Hall in Juniper Green (1A Juniper Park Rd, Juniper Green EH14 5DX) first collection morning will be Saturday 21st March 10am-11am and each Saturday morning and also each Wed eve 4-5pm

Contact number for more information is 07970901563

Email is: communityforfood@gmail.com

To assist with home learning the following guidance and information has been produced. Early Years Home Learning Guidance March 20 This is also available under our Information for Parents TAB.

ASL Information for Parents and Carers

Edinburgh Learns Guidance for Parents and Carers

Please see below a letter from Andy Gray Chief Education Officer regarding the closure of schools.

Andy Gray Chief Education Officer Letter to Parents and Carers

Dear Parents and Carers

Please share this information with anyone you know who has English as an additional language

Due to the changes made to the NHS advice regarding COVID19 on Monday afternoon, Doctors of the World have updated our Covid 19 translated guidance:

English, Albanian, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish are now ready – https://www.doctorsoftheworld.org.uk/coronavirus-information/

To be updated very soon: Bengali, Dari, Farsi, Hindi, Kurdish Sorani, Mandarin, Pashto, Urdu, Vietnamese, Tigrinya, Amharic, Malayalam, Somali

We have also added more European languages: Polish, Romanian, Russian are ready. Coming soon: Bulgarian, Latvian, and Hungarian!

4 people from P5 went to a Maths Fun day at Merchiston Castle School. The 4 people were Alex, Shree, josh and Kai. It wasn’t too far away. When we got there, we got a drink and a biscuit then we went into the hall. Once we were there we sat at a table. There were around 8 tables in a row and each one was a station. There were different activities at each station, the easiest was making squares with blocks. We also played a game called Flow on the iPads and other maths puzzles. Lunch was delicious. After lunch we had 45 minutes to answer as many maths puzzles as we could – we were spilt into 2 teams and had to answer questions then give our answers to our team mates. This activity was a little stressful as it was timed. At the end a mathematician talked to us about Magic Squares and how they work. All in all, it was a fun day.

Josh, Kai, Alexander and Shree, P5

P7 organised a fun day of activities for us all for Sports Relief as part of the Citizenship Award our older pupils work towards achieving. Each class was involved in a  variety of sporting challenges such as beat the goalie, hockey dribble, basketball shooting, as well as everyone’s favourite, throwing wet sponges at P7! P7 also organised a very successful Bake Sale and everyone wore red to school. A fun morning to support a fabulous charity. Well done P7!

On Wednesday 19^th February, Struan Murray came to our school to talk to the P5-7 classes and the members of the Reading Council, about his new book Orphans of the Tide that starts with a whale on the roof of a church. He told us about the main character who was an inventor and how the story takes place under the sea as well as in the last city in the world!

Struan told us he comes from a family of rowdy red heads and he is a scientist by day, but a writer by night. His favourite animal is the blue whale.

He shared with us how he liked comics when he was a child and how he liked to draw. He had his picture of Pingu and Pinga published in the official Pingu magazine when he was 7 years old. He wrote a newspaper called The Daily Sausage and he sold them to all the parents for 20p when he was at school in Edinburgh.

Struan liked to doodle as child and teenager and this helped to inspire him when writing stories. He also got inspiration from places in Edinburgh such as Deep-Sea World and the museum on Chamber Street.

Pupils learned about how the book cover of Orphans of the Tide was designed and voted for the one they liked best.

Struan then asked us to choose a character and setting for the type of story they wanted to create. We chose to have the story take place in a haunted library in a mansion, with a cook and a detective. This was fun and showed us how easy it can be to make up a story.

We were also very lucky to be able to buy his book and get it signed before it was available in the shops.

By Mason and Benjamin P7