Primary School of the Year 2022
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.
This term Port Ellen Primary have been getting visits from the local musician Keira who has been teaching them how to play some Scottish instruments like the Tin Whistle, Harp and Fiddle. The aim is that at the end Kira will pick the people who are best at playing each instrument and we will all learn a song all together.
We learnt how to play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the Tin Whistle, and everyone got a go on the Harp and Fiddle. Everyone learnt what the different colored strings mean on a Harp and that the thing you play a Fiddle with is called a Bow. It is very interesting learning new instruments.
We are doing a panto this year. A panto is where we do a show for our family and school. The panto that we are doing is Pirates of the Curry Bean! We have all got our parts. I am Dead Eye which is the narrator. The panto is on the ninth of June in the primary school hall.
The Curry Bean is hilarious. Its where a fearless pirate called Captain Swaggersword buried all his booty in a far distant land. But then the captain vanished! All his treasure lost forever never to be seen again well that is until now…
This is going to be funny, dangerous and a big adventure! We are learning lines and what to do on stage just now, and making props. We hope everyone will enjoy the play!
In school we made a distillery and a company for whisky. Our group was called Port An Eas. We made the distilleries in groups of five people and our group had Evie, Hugh, Connor, Iona and Calin . Everyone in the group had a different role in our Distillery: Evie is milling and mashing, Hugh is casks and ageing Connor is distillation, Iona is malting and peat and Callin is fermentation.
To make our whisky drinks we had lots of whisky smells and we had to pick the three smells that we liked best. Together we chose rose, caramel and coconut. A few Days later we made teas that replicated the smells that we chose with different flavours of tea. You can make it with 4tsp of black cat caramel tea, 3tsp of rose black tea ,1 pukka relax tea bag and 6 leaves of stevia.
We made are distillery with card and some modelling card to make it stand up because it is a circle it couldn’t stand up on its on own so we cut up strips of card to hold it up.
Our Loch Lili distillery is near a loch and it is located there because it is near water. Our distillery’s special features are we grow our barley on the roof and we have a windmill outside. It is located there because it is near a ferry so we would have some tourists around. But the negatives are too many tourists about and that could be a problem. We made a model distillery and this is a picture.
Our distilling topic is about whisky. We made our own distillery models with stills, wash backs and mash tuns and we made a barely farm on one of the sides. Our distillery also had a car park with cars then a truck with draft in the back of it. We have a mash floor above the ground we have an outside seating area.
We made are own non alcoholic whisky from different flavoured teas and identified the smells we wanted in our drink. We also made an advert for our drink including a photo.
In school we have been making distillery’s. My distillery group was called Glenastle. The different jobs are; manager which is William; casks and ageing which is Jack; Jacob is the still man and Teddy is the malting and peat. Our distillery its sited on Glenastle because there is 2 locks for water and the bottle is like a triangle shape so it can be packaged easy. The disadvantages is the roads are dirt tracks and the ground is not level so you have to level it or the distillery will be squint. We designed our own drinks and made the distilleries as models. We will be presenting to parents so they can see what we have learned.
Dolphins is a swimming club and we did a championship which was 5 hours. We had to bring a packed lunch and 2 towels; one to sit on and one to dry with.
I all of my races I got gold; breaststroke , front crawl, butterfly and back crawl. I won 2 shields, one of the overall winner for my year and I also got a shield for the fastest IM in my year: I got 1 min 45 secs. An IM is 4 lengths of all the strokes together and it is butterfly first, then back-crawl, then breaststroke and then front crawl.
At the end off all of the races we went and got all of our medals and trophies and we got sweets crisps and juice. Matthew Campbell got the club record.
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.
On the 30th march 2022 port Ellen Juniors FC played Tarbert at their pitch and we won 4-1 with Finlay scoring 2 in the first half. We enjoy travelling around Argyll to play matches and we have had a very successful season so far.
In school we were making clubs for the school and our group is the dodgeball club and the people that run it is Teddy, Duncan, Jack and Dylan. We do it every Friday. It is for everyone in the school and if you misbehave you go off for 5 minutes. We enjoy playing dodgeball!
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 😆🐮🐷🐴
Last week students from the University of Exeter Engineering department came to our school and made bottle rockets with us. We had to design and make the fins and decorations on our rockets so they would fly straight. We went outside to launch them. They launched ours and it went flying and almost went in the field. The one that went the furthest had a lego figure attached called Dave! Thanks Exeter University for coming and visiting us.
Reading club is on every Tuesday at lunch break for p1/2/3/4/5/6/7. We have awards for people who aren’t being loud or cheeky. Members of the club read a story. The members are Chloe, Iona, Rachel and Evie. The club is in the Steam room. We enjoy sharing and talking about books.
There is a football club on Monday at lunch break 12:30 to 1:00. It is for everyone in the school P1 to P7. It is run by William, James, Ben and Finlay.
We will split everyone in to 2 or 3 groups and do some drills and then a football match. All the teams will be a mixture of P1 to P7 so it can be fair. We enjoy coaching football skills.
On Thursday at lunch we have a club called coding club which P1-7 can come up into the fab lab and try coding there own and making games. We also teach them how to code and make there own code algrithrom and have fun.
At lunch break on a Wednesday there is a rounders club. It’s run by Mya, Katie, Callie and Thomas. This is part of our leadership and citizenship activities.
This is what we tell people that don’t know how to play it. You will have a bat or a tennis racket in your hand, Someone will be throwing the ball to you. You get three chances to hit the ball, Even if you miss it on your third try you still have to run. There is also four hoops on the ground the first one is the base that’s where you hit the ball. The second one is in the middle left that’s where you can run to as your first base before someone, and then there is fourth base. If you run all the way round you get a rounder. We enjoy playing with the school at lunchtimes!
On Monday 17th May p7s received a visit from Dr Weatherhog where she talked to us about high school, uniforms and answered our questions.
She talked to us about the necessities we needed for high school . She told us all about induction days and how we would go about them. She then talked about behaviours and punishments. P7s then asked any questions that needed answered which took about an hour or so.
On Tuesday 18th May Mrs Mitchell came in and observed our maths. She helped us with our fractions, decimals and percentages. Then we came to the floor at the front and put the decimals on a number line. Next we turned percentages into decimals and fractions. Lastly we did decimal marble run on active learn then she headed back up to the high school. This is to help us with the transition to High School.
By Callie
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.
Every Thursday our school does breakfast. We have lots of yummy food like scrambled eggs and sausages and pancakes. We use my honey fresh from my bee hives. Sometimes we have cereal. It is very healthy and we get to chat as we eat. Thanks to all the staff who do breakfast club!
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.
Outside of our school there is an Archeological dig happening because the new distillery is going up there and they need to check for ancient remains before they can build. When they are digging they are trying to find different colours of ground and put flags on that spot that was a different color. This tells them something was there, like a post.
A few people have come over to Islay to come and do this Archeological dig. They have been here for a while digging up mostly every day for a few weeks. There have been quite a lot of things they have found. We met with them in the playground and saw all the things that they had found like bits of pottery and flint. They were digging and they found lots of big rocks in the ground in a circle. Turns out there was a Round House underneath the ground, right next to our school, which is really exciting! They know this because there is evidence of posts from a building and a ditch and a circle of stones to mark out the site.
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.
This year three people called Amy, Gyles and Lynn came in to do Trèoir with us. This is a project that involves art, music and Gaelic.
To start off we got into a circle in the hall and we all said our names in Gaelic. My name in Gaelic in Seamus. Then Jyles made a rap song about three deer sitting on a fence trying to make 1 pound out of 85 pence. That was for music.
Then we had to paint pictures of things we see in everyday life like trees, flowers and clouds. We had to draw and paint a tree with a bench and a bush. It also had to be 3D.
Then finally we had to make our own sentence about our picture with a mixture of Gaelic words and English words. I have enjoyed learning in Gaelic.
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.
