Primary School of the Year 2022
On Wednesday we held a street party style lunch for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. She has been on the throne for 70 years! Mrs Holyoake and Ms Brown provided us with a fantastic lunch which we enjoyed in the bright sunshine despite the midges. Thanks to Mrs Leask, Ms Mackie, Mrs Mcfarlane and Ms Murney for setting up.
Primary 7s helped to sell lots of goods for the parent council at Laphroaig today. They sold tea towels and water bottles and bags. They even sold cakes and sandwiches on the path on the way up! We even had little helpers from ELCC helping up at Laphroaig after nursery today to raise money for the School.
Port Ellen Primary on Islay has received a silver award in the Pearson National Teaching Awards for ‘Making a Difference – Primary School of the Year’.
The awards celebrate excellence in education and recognise the life-changing impact that an inspirational teacher can have on the lives of the young people they work with.
Port Ellen received recognition for its commitment to achieving excellence for all, enabling pupils to flourish in an environment that values every child, promotes high expectations and provides opportunities for achievement. The school has now been shortlisted to win one of just 16 Gold Awards later in the year.
Maureen Macdonald, Head Teacher at Port Ellen Primary School, said: “At Port Ellen Primary we endeavour to provide an education that enables all our children, from early years right through to primary seven, to acquire and develop the skills, knowledge and attributes needed to thrive in and to shape our ever changing world.
“We aim to give our learners the confidence to develop and celebrate their individuality and creativity and to help them see their worth and value in society.
“I feel so privileged to work alongside passionate, conscientious staff and so proud of everyone within the school community who collectively support our children to be the best they can be and to realise their potential. That’s what makes the difference!”
Argyll and Bute Council’s Policy Lead for Education, Councillor Yvonne McNeilly, said: “The Pearson National Awards are widely recognised for celebrating the best educators in the country, so it is wonderful news that Port Ellen Primary has been selected for a prestigious silver award.
“Teachers play a vital role in our young peoples’ lives. From their earliest school days right through to their senior years, a good teacher can have a massive impact. They can help young people grow in confidence and, with the right encouragement and teaching methods, they can inspire our young people to achieve their goals.
“I am extremely proud of everyone at Port Ellen for the commitment they continue to provide pupils on a daily basis and I wish them all the very best as they progress through to the gold awards.”
We had a lovely morning in the sunshine this morning. We had our snack at the park then headed down the front beach to measure the wind speed with our new anemometer to see how windy it was to fly our kite.🪁 ⭐️. We really enjoyed using the anemometer and flying the kite, it was a bit trickier than up on our school hill. We will be looking at getting a weather station and learning more about the weather.
As part of our biodiversity topic we have been learning all about bees in P12. Bees are very important to keep our world healthy as they pollinate all the plants we eat. Fiona from the Islay Natural History Trust came in and told us all about bees and how they live and make honey. We also had a visit from Jacob in primary 5 who is doing Beekeeping for his Endeavour topic and showed us his Bee suit and model hive he made with his Papa. We now know lots about bees!
In school we are all using a plastic count sheet to tally mark all of the plastic items we throw out or recycle from tonight until Thursday night. On Friday we are will use these sheets to create a class graph of all of the plastic rubbish we have thrown away. This is part of our Eco Schools work to reduce plastics use.
We started to set up our vets surgery today. We have lots of patients in already and lots of resources to make them feel better. We read a story about Mog the cats visit to the vet. We also have a lovely story sack with lots of puppets that goes with a book called Old MacDonald. We sang Old MacDonald had a farm and shared the puppets.
We made our own farmland outside today on the tuff tray. We collected dirt and grass then children decided we needed stones and wood. We added our farm animals and had lots of fun playing in the farmland. Porter thought it was funny when the animals got dirty then jumped into the water bucket for a bath 😆🐮🐷🐴
Today P12 have been exploring the Emotion Works blue cog – regulation strategies. This helps us think about what we could do before we explode with anger, sadness or excitement. Things that might help us to calm down. We paired this learning with finding out a little bit about Andy Warhol and the POP art movement. We created fizzy juice cans in the style of Andy Warhol and added thought bubbles about different regulation strategies we could use when we needed them.
We have been learning about healthy eating and our senses. After planting our herbs in the garden we decided to make some herbal teas. We had to use our senses to describe what we could smell and we even had a go at tasting the teas. Some people thought some of the teas tasted nice and some tasted yucky !
Today we have been looking at advertising techniques and trying out Keynote to make adverts for our mocktails. This is part of our Distillery IDL. We learned new ICT skills to make an advert.
Today at group time talked about what what a certain number looks like. We counted our current buns and found the correct number symbol. We sang the Current Bun song and bought our buns with a penny. We talked about how many were left and how many we had eaten. ⭐️ We are learning about how many are left and identifying the correct number. 🦶 We will continue to play number games and revisit this concept.
Mrs Hannett is working with ELCC children who are soon going to be going into P1! To help the transition she is making weekly virtual classrooms for parents to share the transition experience. They also have joint sessions so they can get to know their P2 buddies next year. Below is a virtual classroom and a QR code link to the Seesaw post explaining how to use it.
Yesterday afternoon we presented our distilleries to our class. We needed to think about how we built our model, ensure we spoke clearly and used as much distillery language as possible and could answer questions from our friends. We gave each other feedback on our designs using 2 stars and a wish.
P234 were talking about things that go on our skin and inside our bodies. We had a chat about what alcohol and how it affects the body. We then finished off our topic by making some mocktails, agreeing on the ingredients with a partner….some were very inventive! Lots of fun!
This morning P12 started our new IDL topic of biodiversity. We joined lots of schools across the UK to meet with Keeping Scotland Beautiful, The National Book Trust and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland. We found out about the importance of food chains and how all species rely on each other, we got to meet the endangered Pine Hoverflys and Wolves at The Highland Wildlife Park and meet with author Gill Lewis to talk about some of her books which are about how humans and animals can work together to make a difference.
P234 were revisiting the past, present and future and making a timeline for Islay distilleries, including some of the early ones which closed. We discussed how distilling had changed over time and what it might be like in the future, remembering our Googlemeet with Georgie Crawford about the new Farkin distillery.
We have been looking at the design of Farkin distillery and all the different things involved in the planning. We have designed our own distillery, created a side view, made a model from Lego and then created a plan view of our design.
P12 have been inventing their own healthy mocktails as part of their distillery topic. They used lots of lovely fruit to make delicious cocktails and then they wrote evaluations of their drinks.
Last week P12 had the challenge of trying to get barley to germinate. Some of us decided we should put our barley outside (picture 1) this had two different outcomes. The barley which were left under/beside the train disappeared! We think some visitors ate it….. The barley that was protected by the creel was very wet but did begin to germinate slightly. The barley that was in the fridge (picture 2) went mouldy although it did begin to germinate too which Mrs Hannett was surprised at! The barley which was left in the classroom by the window and kept damp germinated beautifully and we will attempt to plant this tomorrow. Fingers crossed the deer don’t get it!
We were learning about the importance of exercise and how it is good for us. We had lots of good ideas. Over the next few weeks we are going to look at different aspects of fitness. We were finding out about the different aspects of fitness…speed, strength, flexibility, agility and stamina. We did some activities to test how good we were.
We were engineers this afternoon making paper aeroplanes ✈️ it was a bit tricky so Mrs Bonar had to help a little. We wanted to see who’s could go the furthest and decided that we had to be up high so used the cable reels. We made predictions and wondered if we needed stronger paper or if there was different shapes we could make!
This morning we have been investigating the red cog. This helps us to think about how different emotions feel inside our bodies and where we feel them. We watched the story Marvin gets Mad to help us think about how anger bubbles and builds inside us. We then used our Emotion Work resources to help us think about other emotions. We drew around Cievah and used her body shape to help us think. We then used tickets which showed the different body parts and added some describing words to think about how these felt – shaky, cold, tight, tense, butterflies… Afterwards we worked in small teams to do the same outdoors with different emotions.
We visited the library’s van this morning, this will be our last visit this term. We have really enjoyed going and choosing our own books. We know we must look after the books and return them for others to use. We are learning that there are people in our community that can help us and we must take care of the books as they don’t belong to us and will be shared with others. We will continue to visit the library van and also learn more about our community and who can help us.
This afternoon we had another joint session. This we thought about how we grow and what we need to ensure we’re growing healthily. We decided we needed exercise, good food and water and to have birthdays so we know we’re bigger!
Use the QR code to watch the video.
We had the loveliest morning chasing the ferry to the end of The Ard where we had a wee rest and some snack. Then we walked round the path and headed back to school. We are so lucky to have this on our doorstep and will be spending lots of time over The Ard over spring and summer.
Ms Brown has been teaching us Yoga in P234. Yoga helps to make us more flexible, builds our core strength and helps us to relax. It is good for the mind and body.
This morning we looked at the yellow emotion works cog. This helps us talk about the triggers for our emotions. We used Ruby’s Worry by Tom Percival to help us think about our worries and have been busy creating a new wall display to replace The Colour Monster that we have had up for a wee while.
We went on a sunny walk round the nursery and school ground this morning looking for signs of spring🌼 we noticed that the pond look really full, Mrs Logan found two frogs under the tarp and lots and lots of frog spawn 🐸 the children were so excited!
