After scooping the coveted Eden Award, at the Rolls Royce Science Awards, held at the Science Centre in London, last November, with their Biodiversity project entitled ‘If You Go Down In The Woods Today’, the children of Primary 7, along with their teacher, set about planning the 1,100 mile round trip visit to The Eden Project, St. Austell in Cornwall.
Continue reading St. Mun’s Explore The Rainforest…. In Cornwall
The pupils of St. Mun’s Primary have just completed their designs ahead of the deadline for the Scottish Engineering Leaders Award for STEM 2014/15. The Awards challenged Primary and Secondary school pupils across Scotland to research and interview inspiring engineers, providing them with a fantastic opportunity to engage with real engineers who could convey the importance of STEM in their daily working lives.
Continue reading Primary 7s at St. Mun’s Show Off Their Inventions
Cardross Primary had a fantastic end to the netball term by winning the annual Lomond Primary Netball Tournament. The team faced stiff competition from Colgrain Primary in the semi-final and Hermitage Primary in the final. Well done to everyone involved.
Nicholas, a P6 pupil at St. Joseph’s Primary School in Helensburgh recently attended Hampden Park with his mum and teacher, Miss Trainer for the winner’s day out following the ‘Show Racism Red Card Competition’. Show Racism the Red Card (Scotland) is a charity that promotes anti-racism through education. The aim of their campaign is to combat racism through education and the use of footballers as role models.
Continue reading St. Joseph’s a Winner at Showing Racism the Red Card!
Book Week
We held our very own Book Week. This involved writing book reviews, class talks about our favourite books and dressing up as our favourite book characters. We also had parents come in to read to us. John McCallum from the Campbeltown Courier came to our school to talk about his job. We asked lots of questions and found out lots of information about being a journalist.
By Caitlin, P6
Continue reading A busy week at Southend Primary
It was Open Day in P7 and we invited parents, grandparents and carers to come in and join us with the Spaghetti Marshmallow Challenge!
Each team was made up with P7 children, one or two parents or helpers, 100 sticks of raw spaghetti, 20 marshmallows and just 30 minutes. The challenge was to build the highest tower using just these materials, plus lots of communication skills, teamwork, determination, creativity, problem solving and speed!
Continue reading Kirn’s P7 Great Spaghetti Marshmallow Challenge!
Islay High School Band, Primary School Band and Ceol na Cloinne our P3/4 Training Band, held a fantastic concert on Thursday 19th March. Our special guests were Coisir Og Gaelic Ile, Ella Edgar Dancers and Islay High School Pipers. A great night was had by all, there was a lot of new exciting music from all bands not to mention soloists from the Primary band and High School Band, all of whom put on great performances. A great night was had by all, well done boys and girls!
Pupils from Oban High’s XL Group have been working in the Community Garden at Glencruitten run by H2O. They have been building planters to help disabled people access planting and benches for people to sit and admire the gardens. They have been working towards their Community Project for XL and their Dynamic Youth Awards for helping others in the community.
At the end of January, Ms Bidwell asked the school if anyone would be interested in doing Tobermory Drama Festival this year. Lochdonhead volunteered and decided to write a play called ‘Our Teacher’s a Witch’. We formed a drama club and we rehearsed every Thursday night for 2 months. We also gave up some of our breaks and lunchtimes to practice as well.
This term Primary 3 in Park Primary School have been learning all about stories and books! We visited Waterstones and the Oban Library to find out how books are created and shared. Then we wrote our own stories and published them in book format. On Friday 27th March we hosted a book launch assembly for the rest of the school and lots of parents and other family members who came to share and celebrate our learning.
Furnace village hall was visited by some glittering film stars in the evening of Friday the 27th of March.
They arrived in style too, by Limousine!! This was a huge surprise to the children as the local youth club had arranged it and thankfully the parents had kept it a secret.
‘One of the best projects our school has ever done!’….quote from one of the admiring parents as she viewed the newly hatched chicks recently at St. Joseph’s Primary School in Helensburgh. 11 fertilised eggs had been purchased by the school in the middle of March to bring alive the learning in P3 and P6 as they studied ‘The Owl Who was Afraid of The Dark’ and ‘Animals around the World’ respectively.
Continue reading Chicks Hatched and Re-homed at St. Joseph’s!
Lochdonhead Primary School took part in the recent Argyll and Bute Sumdog Maths Challenge. Even though we are a very small school, we were delighted to have won. Here are comments from our pupils –
Henry P7 – I enjoyed the teamwork, helping and encouraging everyone to do their 1000 questions. We used Edmodo to motivate and encourage each other.
Kara P7 – Sumdog helped develop my maths skills and my resilience because I kept going and tried my best. Continue reading Sumdog Maths Challenge – Lochdonhead Winners
In January we started a Parent and Toddler Group at Lochdonhead Primary School. We have around 6 toddlers who come and enjoy playing and meeting with their friends, every Friday afternoon at the school. We asked the parents what they thought of the arrangement and they said, ‘Brilliant’, ‘There is a good variety of toys for them. Different things every week’, ‘It’s a lovely bright space for them to play’. Hopefully in the warmer weather, the toddlers will enjoy growing seeds in our greenhouse and making use of our lovely Gaelic Story Glen. It is great to have young members of our community enjoying the facilities of the school. Many thanks to Alison MacKenzie, Principal Teacher of Early Years, for providing a rich and interesting variety of resources to support our group.
In 2012 our school joined the Crofting Connections project and as part of that, we were given a loom. We did lots of work around weaving and even went to collect some lichens to dye our own wool. Then we used the loom to weave a piece of fabric that was green and white and rather rough. Fiona Macdonald (a good weaver that lives close to school) helped us to set it up. Then we decided to have a competition to see who could design the best tartan.
The children at Minard Primary School have been using their grounds to enhance their learning. Recently they have been hard at work designing a trim trail round the playground using natural resources. The children do laps at least three times a week and then convert the metres into kms then into miles. Next, they mark their progress by plotting the joint distance travelled on a map of Scotland. They hope to reach John O’Groats by the summer holidays! (They’ve reached Cairndow so far.)
A fantastic day was experienced by pupils and staff when members of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and a BBC film crew took over Lochgilphead Primary School for the day! Pupils from Kilmartin Primary and Ardrishaig Primary also joined us for the day. A huge variety of activities took place with children participating in a whole school assembly, singing workshops, as well as musical and non-musical response workshops.
Continue reading BBC 10 Pieces Take Over Day at Lochgilphead Primary School
Primary 6/7 pupils at Colgrain are currently learning about the events of The Clydebank Blitz. They were shocked to return to their classroom after lunch to discover that the school had been hit by a stray bomb! To protect themselves from any more possible attacks they spent the afternoon working under their desks. The children worked together to produce ARP reports on the damage sustained and produced poetry based around their feelings of being caught up in the Blitz.
Friday 20th March, 2015 saw the post-graduate teacher training students from Strathclyde University revisit St. Joseph’s in Helensburgh to complete their Sciences VIP (Vertically Integrated Project) Option module of their course with P5, P6 and P7 children. The students had first visited in February for an orientation and fact finding visit to see first-hand the progressive STEM teaching in which every pupil is involved at St. Joseph’s.
Continue reading VIP Project in conjunction with Strathclyde University at St. Joseph’s
Our pupils have been busy using their enterprising skills to raise money for good causes:
Our Pupil Council organised a ‘Bedtime Story Day’ to mark World Book Day. We wore our pyjamas and brought in books to have a book sale. We raised £88.50 to buy new books for our school.
