To help the children understand the importance of numeracy skills in the world outside of the classroom and to give the children an exciting context for their learning, all of the children at Kilmartin P.S. visited Portavadie Marina for lunch. The trip was wonderful, the food and service from the Portavadie staff was second to none but…the children had to do a considerable amount of work prior to the trip to earn this fabulous reward! They studied ferry timetables, investigated ticket prices, learned the difference between a single journey, a return ticket and a 6 ticket deal.

They discovered that different vehicles are charged depending on their size and lots more. The children calculated the cost of their lunch and transport combined as well as the total cost of the trip. They looked at maps of Argyll and used the AA route planner to work out how long the journey would take from Kilmartin to Tarbert and then onto Portavadie. They found out the distance of the journey and the names of the roads they would be traveling on. During the trip, there was also lots of incidental learning. The children got the chance to see live crabs, lobsters, mussels and oysters in Tarbert. They had a chance to speak some French over lunch as we had a visitor from Montpelier with us. The children showed that they all had excellent table manners and could ‘chat’ while waiting for their food to arrive.

There were also opportunities to let off steam at the excellent marina play park and to experience the fun of traveling by ferry on quite a choppy day! Back at school the children have written and drawn about their experience and reflected on their learning and the skills that they used. We would like to say a huge thank you to the Portavadie Marina staff who gave us 5 star treatment and the children would highly recommend this learning experience to other schools.