Primary School of the Year 2022
P12 news
On the last day of term Port Ellen primary school did Dance a Thon to raise money for making Blytheswood shoe boxes for children in Romania. Children in the school danced to different songs in the hall and in each class the best dancer got a prizes. Everyone has enjoyed the Danceathon and it has raised a lot of money, helping children meet the right to health care article 24.
On the 8th of September we got a special visit from someone. They were book authors! Philip Reeve and Sarah Mcintyre came to our school and did some games, talked to us about how to write books, and also joked around with us. They wrote books together like Pugs of the Frozen North, The Legend of Kevin, and many more. We did it in the hall and they had things on the wall where it was like a quest and we had to come up with ideas to make it more exciting to travel through. They also read a bit of one of their books which we all really enjoyed listening to. They came to Islay for the Islay Book Festival. That is where lots of famous authors come to Islay for this special festival.
Over all this was a great afternoon with good fun.
This term we have been working with the new primary ones and twos. We have been reading them stories and they have been loving it, playing with them with the parachute and more. We all had a good time. On Friday we had a teddy bear picnic with them. We also had banana muffins when we were outside. We built houses boats and more for our and our buddies teddies. we looked after the new primary ones at their first day. After we had the muffins we did a teddy bear race, it was fun!
Primary 1 and 2 and ELC had a super joint session this afternoon building obstacle courses for our teddies and developing our mathematical problem solving and language skills. This is to help us with our transition to big school!
What an amazing adventure P1,2 had today with our new friends from Bowmore Primary! We had a day filled with stickman activities from raft building to mapping. We loved our packed lunches and were very excited to see what treats we had inside them. We made s’mores and played on the swings. Only a few of us fell asleep on the bus home until we saw a helicopter carrying an electricity pole! Well done team, you were fabulous!
P1/2 have had the best day with our friends from @BowmorePrimary on our #bilingual Stickman adventure day. @sngaidhlig @abc_OCTF @EdScotOL pic.twitter.com/VUw1Z2Awvi
— Port Ellen Primary School (@portellenps) February 27, 2023
P1,2 had a great morning doing all things STEM in class, lots of investigation and science fun!
We’ve had a super #STEM investigation day in P1/2. Lots of amazing questioning, predicting and exploring. @STEMedscot @STEMLearningUK @STEMAmbassadors @STEMscotland pic.twitter.com/1hXNcOV0PA
— Port Ellen Primary School (@portellenps) February 23, 2023
P12 have been busy getting ready for their nativity. They have been busy learning the Christmas Story alongside practising our Nativity this week. We worked as a team to create a Nativity scene in the classroom.
Today we put on our Fireside nativity for all the parents to see. The hall was packed and we even had the ELC join us as sheep. We were very proud of what we achieved. Thanks to everyone who helped!
P12 have read Katie Morag and the New Pier. The children were very excited to go on a trip down to the ferry to meet Linda and Innes who were ready to let them be ferrymen and women! We got to try on the uniform, beep the tickets, talk on the radio and even see a life jacket inflate and hear the whistle to attract attention. We had some brilliant questions about the pier, the different ferries and the jobs available at Calmac. Thank you to the team for letting us come and visit!
We had the most amazing trip to the sorting office today to learn about how our mail gets to our houses as this weeks book is Katie Morag Delivers the Mail. We were astounded by the volume of mail that our wonderful posties have to contend with everyday. We learnt all about the different areas of our island and how there are secret messages on our letters. We think our posties are fabulous and are working so hard for our community especially at the moment. 
We had a very exciting afternoon, the fire brigade came to see us! We got to use the BIG hose and make our own rainbows with the reflected water. Some of us were brave enough to try on the fire helmet and turn on the sirens!
We have had a fantastic day in the woods as part of our Maths Week Scotland learning. We walked the whole way to the woods, set up our base camp, had some healthy snack and a good explore before getting into our groups. We then had to follow our map to find all the teachers hiding at different points. After collecting all four signatures it was time to head back to base for some lunch and then a trip to the distillery to use the toilets! It was back to base camp for our final mapping activity – a scavenger hunt to collect items to work out our treat…. Thank you to all our grown ups for our yummy lunches and giving us cosy clothes to wear!
We were very excited to receive some classroom pets this term! We have ten tiny wriggly caterpillars we are watching metamorphosis into beautiful butterflies. We’re very much looking forward to watching this process.
We were very excited to see how much our caterpillars had grown after a few days, they’re huge! We’re wondering how long it will be until they go into cocoons? Some of us were also delighted to see that our sunflowers have started to grow! We’ve added another page into our diaries to track their progress. Laurie’s is 4 cm tall already!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
On Monday 22 of March, The school had a google meet with Georgie Crawford the manager of the new Farkin distillery which i being built next to the school.
These are some of the questions we asked:
The answers:
This has really helped with our distillery project!
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.
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!
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.
Niamh Dunn had brought in an enormous marrow for our harvest collection which she had helped her grandparents grow. We were all amazed by it and lots of us hadn’t even seen a marrow before. It was so big it didn’t fit into the harvest bags with splitting the bottom so we asked Mrs Holyoke in the kitchen what she could do with it. She took off the skin and used the flesh to make some tasty soup!
This afternoon we had our second buddy session and we had a harvest tea. Miss Brown read us a story called Annette’s baguette to set the theme for the afternoon. The big ones taught the littles how to make bread as they have been doing lots of cooking in class of late and the littles shared the brambles they had harvested and turned into jelly once the bread was cooked. We then worked with our buddy to make a harvest card to be added into the harvest bags for some of the older people in our community.
This afternoon we went to harvest some brambles along the Croft roads. We practised some road safety along the way, ensuring that we stopped, looked and listened before crossing the road and made sure our partners kept safe too. We worked in teams of 4 to collect as many brambles as we could. In total we collected over 1kg! Mrs Hannett took them home tonight and boiled them up with jam sugar before straining our the juice and pouring it into sterilised jars. Hopefully tomorrow we will be able to taste some bramble jelly with our buddies from P5/6/7 and make some bread to go with it too!We’ve had a busy day planning and preparing for our first buddy session. The library van visited this morning which gave us the opportunity to choose a book to share with our buddy this afternoon. We made pancakes and popcorn to support the ‘p’ sound P1 has been learning and a real life tiger came to tea too! We loved spending time with our big buddies, getting to know them a little and playing games with them. We’re looking forward to seeing them again soon.
As part of our whole school project on marine litter, P1/2/3 are reaching out to other schools near the sea to find out if they find lots of plastic on their beaches too.
P1/2/3 enjoyed sharing their learning about solar power to visitors to our Community Open Afternoon.
We have been learning about healthy eating and all the different food groups. We have designed our own sandwiches and got to make them! We also learned about hygiene in the kitchen, how to use sharp knives safely and Mrs Holyoake explained all about the different chopping boards and how to store food correctly.
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