Newsletter Friday 8th December 2017 @TowerbankPS www.towerbankprimary.wordpress.com

If you have some news for this newsletter please send it to admin@towerbank.edin.sch.uk

Well done to the Towerbank Ski team One Monday they took part in the annual Boyd Anderson Primary Ski races at Hillend. They entered the novice category and WON coming first ahead of all the other schools. Many thanks for all the support (and cowbells) from families on the day and to Kirsty McQuillan for helping out with their training session last Monday.

P2 Nativity

Well done P2 for all your hard work during our Nativity Rehearsals and for your fantastic performances this week. We are delighted to let you all know that we raised £187.65 for 'The Sick Kids'.

Thank you all very much for your kind donations.

Towerbank Parent Group Update Christmas Fair & Raffle 2017 Thank you to everyone who took part and came along to the Christmas Fair on Saturday. What a great afternoon and another great total…..

Raffle £1614.66 Fair £2195.96 Total £3810.62 It was a huge team effort involving parents, carers, pupils and staff, as well as the generous donations from the Portobello community/businesses and further afield. Thank you from the Christmas Fair Planning Team: Nadia McIntyre, Andrea Barlow, Denise Horn, Carah Johnson, Libby Dale, Jo Spencely and Ruth Bowen on behalf of the Towerbank Parent Group. easyfundraising Don't forget to do your Christmas Shopping via www.easyfundraising.org.uk such an easy way to raise money for the school at no extra cost to you! Towerbank Parent Group Meeting Wednesday 13th December, 7.30-9pm in the Lower Hall. All parents/carers welcome. Contact us towerbankparentgroup@gmail.com

The Lego Research Team have been running a competition to find Towerbank’s new water saving mascot. They picked 3 winners and combined their designs to create Walter Bottle. Here is the final mascot. Look out for more information on Walter coming soon… Congratulations to Anna, Amelia, and Hannah and Alicia who were the winners. They are pictured with their designs and some of the research team.

Findlay from P4B has won two swimming medals! We are all very proud of him. Keep up the good work Findlay! We hope your competitions keep going swimmingly!

Headlice information If you would like further information on what to do if your child has head lice here is a very useful document that also explains what schools are unable to do. http://www.healthscotland.com/uploads/documents/25-Head%20Lice%20Facts%20Detection%20Treatment-Oct2017-English.pdf

Pipes and Tyres in the Playground We would like to ask all children and families to please not play with the pipes and tyres when the playground is very busy with families at drop off and at the end of the day. We need all children to consider that they may present a hazard to adults and children in the playground. Many thanks for your cooperation. Marine Posters At the weekend we made some posters to share information about how dropping litter is affecting our sea life. We made eight posters and hopefully we will be able to put them up around Porty. We did this because on Friday, Catherine a specialist in helping our sealife told us about what is happening in our oceans right now. That was the moment we knew we could change the world. Ruby, Eva and Levon P6B Three Legged Race Last Friday we hosted a three legged race. It was one mile long across the prom. We got lots of sponsors and raised £111.59. It was lots of fun but most importantly all of the money we raised went to Children In Need. It was difficult but we are thankful we have helped save lives. Georgia and Fern P6B (and many others from P6B who were involved!) Litter Pickers Children from all the Primary 4 classes have been working hard to pick up all the litter from the playground at lunchtime as part of our Litter Pickers group. They have been working on keeping the playground clean for 2 weeks now and are delighted to have noticed an improvement on the results so far. Look out for daily results that are displayed around the school using a traffic light system. We will have more photos of the children in action soon and we will visit assemblies to share the results. Keep up the good work everyone!

P4 Ukulele The Primary 4 children have been learning how to play the ukulele with visiting teachers Lyndsay and Julie that have been working with us. We have learned a few songs and got a chance to perform them to another class on Thursday. Primary 4 would like to say thank you to the children and teachers that gave up their time to be our audience!

Towerbank Calendar 2018

These wonderful calendars now for sale via parent pay or from the office.

Each page features a photo of all the children who have a birthday in that month.

The borders of each month were designed by children at Towerbank.

The calendar will be very useful as it includes all the school holidays for 2018.

It is perfect as a Christmas present!

The school will be raising money for the School Fund through the sale of the calendars.

Towerbank Parent Group will be raising money through the sale of adverts and sponsorship in the calendar.

The Calendar is now available on Parent Pay. You can order between 1 and 10 calendars. We will then send these home with your child, each in an A3 envelope.

Please note – children who were absent on the day the group photos were taken will not be in the calendar.

The calendar in this photo can be used throughout December. It is made up of two cubes, each with six faces. These cubes can be placed to show all of the numbers between 1 and 31. Can you work out which numbers need to go on the 12 faces of the cubes to create a calendar that will work for the whole month. Be careful – this challenge is trickier than it first looks. Remember, single digit numbers need to have a zero in the tens column. For example, 1 should appear as 01. The images below show the net of a cube – these could be a helpful way of laying out your numbers.

Monthly Maths Challenge

The Amazing

Porty-Bellow!

Congratulations to all entrants to this month’s

challenge. Many of you worked out that after ten

seconds, there would be 64 sparks in the sky,

increasing to 2048 sparks after 15 seconds. Thanks to

those who provided striking visual explanations, such

as this one from Thomas.

Well done to Sally, and others,

who made the link between this

pattern and the way cells

regenerate when we grow or

heal.

Lucas made the link between these numbers and

technology. You will see this pattern in the size of

memory in storage cards, consoles, computers and

mobile phones. This is because of the way

technology stores information.

Special mentions also go to Donald, who made the

link between this pattern and Pascal’s Triangle, and

Chelsea, who developed a formula to work out

how many sparks there will be in any given case.