Primary School of the Year 2022
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!
Well what an amazing day we have had! We left school and took the big new bus to Bruichladdich distillery where we went on a tour with Lesley who taught us all about the whisky process. After that we went back to the shop and met Kate and James who are the foragers for The Botanist. They told us all about their jobs and let us make our own bases for gin. Then we headed to the brand room to meet Adam and Julie. Adam told us about his job making the whiskey for Bruichladdich and answered our tricky questions and Julie helped us realise that the things we enjoy doing provide us with skills which we could apply to jobs when we are older. We then headed down to Port Mor for our lunch where Basia, Eilidh and Ranga had been busy making us cakes for our pudding. Luckily it didn’t rain so we got to have a good run about in the park before heading to the museum of Islay Life. It was tiring so some of us had a wee snooze on the way home! The children were superb today, fantastic behaviour, awesome questions and good listening! Well done P1/2!
We got some lovely new shapes for the light box and had lots of fun today using the shape spyglasses to find the correct shapes. The children loved using the shapes as glasses 🌈
The Bee Healthy citizens group ordered some free fruit trees and hedging plants from the Tree Council last year, so we could start to make an orchard to grow our own fruit. The trees arrived on Thursday, and we had to plant them before the holidays, so today we were out planting trees and hedging in the hail and snow! We were very lucky to Have Gordon Currie and Ello come and dig a trench for the hedging plant
s for us. Hopefully this autumn we will have some fruit to pick!
I was waiting for this day for ages! I was so excited. On February 2nd we did a rugby tournament with Bowmore, Keills, Port Charlotte and Jura.
First we all got our waterproofs on so we don’t get wet. When we first stepped on the pitch there was so many people! I only knew some of them. All of our group played a wee mini game to practice. Then we got into teams to play the other schools my heart was racing!
Our class got split into teams first the other team played Bowmore. It wasn’t contact rugby it was were we had a tail and if the other team got the ball we have to pull off their tail for them to pass the ball. The other team of our class got 8-5 Bowmore won. Then it was our turn first they got a goal then we got goal. Over all we got 11-4! I learnt the proper way to throw a rugby ball in that game.
The second game we were ready because we’d already played a game. We didn’t see the other half of the class but against Port Charlotte they got 5-4 to Port Charlotte. I passed the ball a lot then we got… 11-6 to us! We were all super happy. Then we were against Jura I was nervous because we heard that they were really good. We all powered through the rain and tried our hardest. Then the score was 6-4 to them. We were all sad but happy for them.
The other half of the class lost 5-4. Then last of all we played Keils. We were all having fun and laughing its didn’t matter if we lost or won. We played with big smiles on our faces. We won again 9-2! The other team got 9-2 too! Over all we had a great time. We all had yummy Pac lunches half way through aswell.
During our maths time today, we started talking about weight. We found it tricky at first to think about the different things we would need to weigh and why. After some discussion we realised we needed weight for cooking and some people like to weigh themselves too. We had a go at weighing ourselves and were amazed at how much Mrs Hannett weighed….we think she needs to stop eating biscuits in the staff room! We then used the balancing scales to see if we could find two things that weighed the same, this was really hard. In the end we worked together to estimate how many pieces of Kappla we needed to to balance a block.
We were super excited this morning that our orbeez that we had put in the freezer had frozen. 🥶 We enjoyed experimenting with them and we all chatted about different changes that water goes through. ⭐️ We are learning the different states of water (ice, water and steam) and using words to describe it. 👣 Our next steps are to continue using ice and experimenting with it inside and outside. Maybe we might even get some frost!
We have been learning how to make Christmas gifs using Keynote @AppleEDU pic.twitter.com/HWn2sGjLKz
— Port Ellen Primary (@portellenps) December 22, 2021
We would like to wish everyone a safe and merry Christmas 🎅 pic.twitter.com/0MtMzhzIhe
— Port Ellen Primary (@portellenps) December 22, 2021
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