Rights Respecting Schools Unikids Group

OUTRIGHT Campaign Certificate

We received our certificate today to recognise all the work we did about raising awareness of  Children's Mental Health and how important it is to support all children to feel well.  Good team work Lochardil!

UNCRC Article 12: I have the right to be listened to and taken seriously.

UNIKIDS Assembly Dignity, Equality and Equity

We had our first assemblies in the hall since Covid began. It was exciting for us to be altogether again and learn about what dignity, equality and equity are about. How well do we show and know this in our school?

    Rights Respecting School Outright Campaign Response

We are delighted to have received such positive feedback about our engagement with the RRS Unicef Outright Campaign. Everyone's hard work has been recognised, celebrated and valued. Our voice and requests have been noted. It was great to read about what is being done to support all young people and their mental health. 

Lochardil ECO Team  having  a Spring Clean  30.03.22

Despite a  snowy morning, we set off for MacDonald Park to collect litter. We were not very busy! Well done to the local residents who make use of the park and enjoy a clean and safe place to play and walk their dogs. We came back to school and did a litter pick around our own school grounds before the holidays. Thank you to Mrs Kellacher who came along as our helper.

Rights Respecting Schools Outright Campaign

Children and Young People's Mental Health

We have completed another whole school initiative linked with mental health and wellbeing.  We are sharing our learning with our school community and  campaigning for our requests  to be actioned by the Scottish Government.

Dear Ms Haughey,                                                                                                                  

We are contacting you as we conclude our work on UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools Outright Campaign. The theme for the campaign has been children’s mental health.

Each class has been involved in developing our understanding of who and what helps us with our mental health, our UNCRC rights and what influences our mental health.

We would be delighted if you could use your position as Minister for Children and Young People, to raise awareness of the need to support mental health and wellbeing for children. We have an understanding of the United Nations Rights of the Child and recognise that these articles are now part of  part of the law in Scotland. 

We wish to speak out and speak up for those children and young people who may need some extra input and support to ensure positive outcomes for their mental health. We know that you can make a difference to so many.

We have created a Powerpoint summary of our learning. We linked the Outright Campaign with Safer Internet Day and Children’s Mental Health Week.

We have shared our work with our school community and appreciate the impact you could make for us with our scope and influence.   

Thank you for your support with our campaign.

Kind regards

 UNIKIDS team

     UNIKIDS Rights Respecting Schools Group               2.2.22

Today we went over the ABCDE of Children's Rights. We had worked on it last week and we were testing ourselves to see what we could remember!

A= All children have these rights

B= We are born with our rights

C= They cannot be taken away from us

D= We don't have to earn them

E= The rights are all equal

We chatted about the Dress to Express event which is part of Children's Mental Health Week next week. The theme is " Growing Together". We see physical changes as we develop. We also change emotionally, Who helps us to understand our feelings, stresses and anxieties? Who helps us to grow to become more resilient and in control of what is affecting us? Who support us with our mental wellbeing? 

We looked at rights linked with our mental health and wellbeing.

We hope we allowed to have our dress down day. More details to follow.

Lochardil Eco Team  Let's Sort It   2.2.22

UNCRC Article 29 - You have the right to education which tries to develop your personality and abilities as much as possible and encourages you to respect other people’s rights and values and to respect the environment.

Today we were busy out and about. We supported the RSPB Big Schools' Birdwatch campaign. We used our Bird identification data sheets to record the type and number of birds we spotted.  There wasn't a wide range of species today but we heard some lovely singing in the branches! The ECO team will look at our results next week and send them away to the RSPB. Good work team!

We said hello to Sam Harrison and Laura Dorrant  from The Sheiling Project. They came along to cut back and shape  our willows before they start growing again. Sam can use the willow for weaving projects at The Sheiling.

We were delighted to receive a delivery of 5 free fruit trees  last week. Mr Grant has located a suitable place to plant them and will kindly get them in the ground for us in the next few weeks. Thank you to Mrs E Carlisle, one of our parents, who shared the link to The Tree Council to apply for the trees. We look forward to some apples, pears and plums.

UNIKIDS (Rights Respecting Schools) 

Terms 1,2 2021 update

After our class reps were chosen in Term 1, we met to discuss what UNIKIDS could do to promote UNCRC Children's Rights in the school and community.

We were delighted to have a meeting with Mr Drew Hendry (MP) to share our work on the Keep My Friend Learning Campaign. We worked on this in Term 4 2021, but due to Covid restrictions we had delayed sharing it at that point. We were very encouraged to have Mr Hendry's support to take our comments further. We will create  a "petition" and share this with him for future use, when he presents to Parliament.

We are working on including Pupil voice in our school policies and how our rights are linked with aspects of our learning.

We hope to raise awareness of the current  issue of mental health for children. We will use resources from UNICEF Rights Respecting Schools to support our understanding of this. We look forward to evaluating our Gold Award and hope that we can receive our second Gold award this year.

ECO Schools Term 1,2 2021 update

We have started off our Green Flag 7 with lots of enthusiasm. We have completed our environmental review and chosen Litter and Waste , School Grounds and Biodiversity as our main topics to focus on. The SDG we have chosen is Life on Land (No. 15)

We have carried out a bin audit and feel we have enough bins, but need to move one to a more obvious place so that there will be less litter on the pitch. Due to Covid restrictions, we are still playing in our zones, and so we have tried to make sure that each zone has easy access to a bin.

We have completed our Collect Our Packets project. We collected hundreds and hundreds of empty crisp packets. We donated 5 blankets to the Inverness Foodstuffs charity. We were supported by our community volunteers who made some  Biffy Bags. These had waste plastic ironed onto the crisp packet blanket which helps to make them more durable and warmer. We still have lots of blankets which we can use ourselves or donate as needed. Thank you to everyone for supporting us. We made a short film of the project which was shared at the Highland Council Climate Change conference in October. 

We look forward to working on the next stage of our Action Plan.