The School’s Carbon Footprint
Primary 6/7 have been learning about carbon footprints. A carbon footprint is how much carbon dioxide you make because of your actions. Like when you drive instead of walk or when you keep the lights on in your house instead of switching them off. If you want to lower your carbon footprint then if you have a car try to fill it up with as may people as possible. Or you can always turn off the lights in your house.
We found out the schools carbon footprint using the BP online calculator. We found out that we produce 61 tonnes of carbon a year. Most of it was from our energy use, 55 tonnes in fact. That left only 2 tonnes for rubbish and just four tonnes for travelling. Altogether I thought it was exciting to find out how large our carbon footprint was because we didnt know before so it was a mystery because of that. We now know that we have to reduce our carbon footprint and should look at reducing energy use. We want to find out more about renewable energy as a way of doing this.
Imagineers Presentation London Trip
On Saturday 18th November I went to London as a finalist for the Tomorrows Engineer competition. In the competition there were 10 finalists from all around the UK. All the finalists had to meet up in the Science Museum to present their invention in front of 4 judges and the audience. We had professional posters made to show our inventions. My invention was the Scaredy Sheep, a device that would bark like a dog and is attached to the sheeps ear so when sheep get stuck on their backs they are scared into jumping up again.
When the finalists first arrived we went down into a room where the judges were and we got to talk to them and the host so we weren’t as scared to talk about our inventions in front of them. We also had to get head sets on so we could do a sound check. After the break we all went down and sat down. The first thing that happened was a balloon experiment and a bubble experiment. In the bubble experiment a lady got bubble mixture and big bubble stick. Another lady came out and got another bubble stick and each side of the room did a bubble competition. The balloon experiment was really cool because a lady put a balloon on fire and it made a REALLY loud bang.
Then the first finalists went up to present their ideas. Then we got a quick break to explore the museum. After about 15 minutes we had to go back and on my way in their was a robot called Oscar who walked into me. Oscar was a really cool robot because he speaks to you and hands out chocolates and lollipops. Finally we got into the room and sat down and then there was another quiz. Then it was lunch and after we got to have a quick demonstration on how the body digests food. It wasn’t a good sight at all!
After the disgusting demonstration I had to go up and present my idea. I was nervous but excited and was proud of explaining my invention. Then the judges came out and the host announced the winner, and the winning design was an excellent hover wheelchair. We all congratulated the winner and then we got to explore more of the museum. After a long day I went back to my hotel. I really enjoyed the competition and I would like to be an engineer when I grow up. While I was there I learnt that to complete something you have to stick with it and keep trying.
Scottish Swimming National Competition Qualifying Event
Wednesday 15th November was the Argyll and Bute swimming competition for qualifying for the nationals in Dunoon. From Islay and Jura Dolphins swimming club there was: Ross Thompson, David John Morris, Matthew Mcusker and me. The coaches were ; Karen Siddle and Allan Campbell my dad. It was my first swimming competition away from Islay and I loved it. Ross was a big help; he told me when to go up to the Marshall which is when you line up to get ready to go up to the blocks to dive off. My races was front crawl and back stroke. In my front crawl my previous personal best was 1:07.7 min but now my personal best is 47.35 sec. In my back stroke my previous personal best was 59.73 sec but now my personal best 55.34 sec. I had a great time, thanks to Karen and my dad for taking us!
The Engineer Grabber Challenge
In class we have been looking at engineering and we have been doing challenges in groups to help us feel like an engineer. For this challenge we were told that we had make a model and we were to be able to pick up an object from one metre away. First thing that we did in our groups was go off separately and make a design and label it so that we could see how it would work and what materials it needed to be made. When that was finished we got back in our groups and we decided what one that we would make. We went of and started to make our model and when we had to test it out and my group managed to pick up a water bottle from a metre away. Then when we had finished Mrs Clark decided who was the winner of this challenge and it was my group.
Rowan Morris
BLYTHESWOOD SHOE BOXES
Last Thursday the school asked us to take in shoe boxes filled with Christmas goodies to go to people on the other side of the world. They could go for old people , young people and babies and they are for those people who don’t have anything like us. This year our school put in 24 shoe boxes for those people around the world. Why do we put shoe boxes in? So that other people around the world can have new Clothes, Shoes, Toothbrush, Toothpaste, Hats, Scarves, Gloves, Shampoo, Body Wash and sweets. You aren’t allowed to put Chocolate and water into the box. The project is run by the Blytheswood Trust.
By Charlie
Children In Need
Every Year On Friday 17th November it’s Children in Need or Pudsey day, children in need help families that need a bit more help than we do. Children in Need is a really big deal to the families that need them, everyone that helps all the kids and even adults change their life completely. We decided to raise money and everyone came to school wearing something spotty to raise money for Children In Need and baked cakes. Our school raised £137!!! that’s a lot of Money from just a tiny school on a tiny island. Everyone can make a donation for children in need even if its as little as £2.00 or as big as £200!! So maybe next year everyone can make a difference and help the children!!
By Sophie Macdonald
November Diary
Renewables Engineering Islay – November Diary
Mentor Visit
We were all delighted to welcome Neil Chattle from Rolls-Royce to the school at the end of October. He spent time getting to know the team and having a tour of the school. He gave a presentation to the children in the afternoon and they had an opportunity to see some of the materials and parts that make up a Rolls-Royce jet engine. We were all amazed that the cooling mechanism allows the engine to operate above it’s melting point and that it would be capable of preventing an ice cube melting in a hot oven! Clever engineering indeed! Neil introduced the children to the Bloodhound SSC. Working in teams, the children then built model Bloodhounds powered by balloons and had a great afternoon trying to refine them to make them go faster. Coincidentally, Neil’s visit was the day before the first public test run of the Bloodhound in Newquay, Cornwall…..so the whole school watched as the car made 210mph. We will follow Bloodhound’s progress with interest.
Children as Leaders
Following leadership training, P6/7 children have been encouraged to set up clubs for younger pupils so we now have a KNEX Club and a Lego Club, in addition to the usual football, table tennis and dance clubs. Maureen MacDonald, Headteacher, encourages us to promote leadership at all levels within the school. The clubs have been really well attended and we used some of the funding to purchase new KNEX and Lego material for them. Dearbhla says that ‘KNEX club is really fun because you make something new every time and I am learning new skills to make cubes that are really tricky.’ Donald, who runs the Lego Club said that “We are encouraging children to use their imagination and be creative with the Lego.” Charlie is promoting teamwork by asking children to build small components of bigger models.
After-School Clubs
We have started an after-school club for children from P4-7, supervised by Jo Clark. Again there has been lots of interest in this and we are lucky to have the support of two senior pupils from Islay High School – Young STEM Ambassadors – to help us. It’s great to have these young women to be positive role models for girls in the primary school. They have been giving children open-ended problem solving tasks where children have had to work together to solve a problem. Last week they were engineering a carrier to transport a ping pong ball down a zip-wire.
Tomorrow’s Engineers Week
Throughout the school we are continuing to promote engineering and develop engineering habits of mind. As a school we engaged with Tomorrow’s Engineers Week. Jo Clark and P6/7 found out about sustainable engineering and the 6Rs – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Refuse, Rethink and Repair – to appreciate that the environment needs to be considered alongside any engineering solution and that any design needs to be both efficient and sustainable in terms of the environment. Matthew Campbell says ‘We had to rank the 6Rs in order – I thought that reuse was the best one because things can be used many times are best for the environment.” They were tasked with building a “Helping Hand Grabber’ which had to have a reach of 1m. In Kate Brown’s P4/5 class the children looked at different types of bridge design. They then worked in groups to build some fantastic bridges. Already Kate could see progress in her children from the initial bridges that were built on the baseline build. In P1/2/3 Maggie Harrison invited parents in to join their children doing an engineering challenge – design and build a chair for baby bear, who had cruelly had his chair ruined when Goldilocks visited. Alison Logan and all the children in the Nursery have been making the most of the new resources we have bought for them – Kids KNEX and stories like Rosie Revere, Engineer. This week we are starting our joint sessions – structured play for pre-5 children and P1 and P2 together. Maggie and Alison will be working together on this; once the children are settled into this new routine this will be an ideal opportunity to share practice in developing engineering skills.
Thinking about Energy
Meanwhile the whole school are continuing to think about how we use energy in our school and in our lives. Our new Eco-monitors are being vigilant about switching off lights and George Dean from the Islay Energy Trust is going to get the school some energy meters. The Islay Energy Trust is a community-owned charity. Its aims are to develop and operate renewable energy projects for the benefit of the community, and to reduce the island’s carbon footprint. George will be supporting us with this project, organizing site visits for children and putting us in contact with different renewables companies that are looking to operate locally. P4/5 are busy organizing activities for Switch Off fortnight – more news to follow. In all the classes we have started looking at the effect that our energy use has on the planet and this will be our focus for the rest of this term. Maureen MacDonald and Maggie Harrison have met the Parent Council and are promoting the project more widely in the community.
A Chair for Baby Bear
As part of Tomorrow’s Engineers week mums, dads and grans came in to help P1/2/3 with an engineering challenge. The problem was that Goldilocks had broken Baby Bear’s chair and so when Mummy Bear made him some more porridge there was nowhere for him to sit. A great afternoon was had by all and we had some interesting designs. At the end of the afternoon Baby Bear tested out all the chairs; they had to stay standing for 10 seconds. Thanks to everyone who came along to help us.
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Our Rainbow Beam Bridge
We built a bridge using cardboard, lego, string, lolly sticks and tape. We tested it to see if it was sturdy by putting a toy car on and it didn’t fall down. We had to make the legs shorter because it was not stable. We added lolly sticks like a triangle for extra support. The lego was used as pillars to hold up the glass roof which is to shelter the vehicles or pedestrians from the weather.
Bridges
Today we made bridges and we are only allowed to use scissors, sellotape, string, lego, cardboard, lolly sticks and plastic. Myself and Dylan made a suspension bridge we used lots of lego – Dylan was my lego helper he went to get me lego. We used string for the suspension part of the bridge, lego for the legs and suspension part and cardboard for the actual bit of the bridge. We used sellotape to tape the legs on and the suspension part of the bridge and to tape the string on to the lego and now it is done. We are very proud of our bridge!
Tomorrows Engineers
In school this week the whole of the school is doing a topic called Tomorrows Engineers. In p1/2/3 they have been getting their parents in to help them make their models which were chairs. In p4/5 they have been making fabulous bridges some are small and some big. In p6/7 we have been making grabbers to pick up something.
Here is one of p6/7’s grabbers:
Here is one of p4/5’s bridges:
Here is one of p1/2/3’s chairs:
By Abi Logan
Brilliant Bridges
We created a sturdy bridge with 2 coffee can as supports as well as 1 tower of lego in the middle, on top there is a strand of card , a welcome sign on top of the card and some triangles made out of sticks. it is a very sturdy bridge because of all of the supports. we can also fit some boats underneath. so overall it is a very good bridge design.
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Tomorrow’s Engineers Week
This week, 6-10th November is Tomorrow’s Engineers week. At Port Ellen we will be doing lots of engineering challenges and finding out more about what an engineer is and how they solve problems. We will be engineers on a mission, solving problems and sorting the planet. See the PPT below to find out more about engineering careers.
Port Ellen welcomes our Rolls-Royce Science Prize mentor
We were delighted to welcome Neil Chattle, our mentor for the Rolls-Royce Science Prize, to Port Ellen on Wednesday. Children enjoyed listening to a presentation about Rolls-Royce and Neil’s career as an engineer with the company. They got a chance to handle some pieces of jet engines and we were all amazed how lightweight some of the components were and how the cooling systems within the engines would be able to stop ice cubes from melting in a hot oven! We were then introduced to the Bloodhound, a supersonic car powered by a Rolls-Royce engine, and got to work in teams to build a model Bloodhound powered by balloons. Neil said that he’d never seen balloon models go so far!
Watching Bloodhound
Just a day after Neil Chattle’s visit to Port Ellen we all enjoyed watching the first public test runs of the Bloodhound. What a coincidence when we were just building Bloodhound models the day before!
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I wish…
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Engineering Bridges
A big part of our Rolls-Royce Science Prize project this year is developing engineering skills and encouraging children to think like engineers. Our first challenge was to build a bridge with a span of 30cm that could support a plastic cup which would then have weights added. To make it even more tricky there was a strict time limit! In P1/2/3 the winning bridge held 20 marbles!!
New Islay Timeline Panels Unveiled
Last session Port Ellen took part in the Scottish Diaspora project – a national project which produced a series of hand-sewn tapestry panels showing the movement of people into and out of Scotland over it’s long history. Twenty pupils from Port Ellen worked together with Mrs Hazel Onions to produce a panel depicting the arrival of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers on Islay and this was put on display in St. Giles cathedral in Edinburgh. Just before the summer the whole school then worked on a timeline for Islay using appliqué techniques rather than stitching. We had an amazing day with lots of support from the Islay Quilters, parents, grannies and community members. Over the school holidays the quilters have finished the panels off for us, ready to hang and be enjoyed by everyone – here is the finished display, which was unveiled at our Farmer’s Feast. We’d like to say another HUGE thank you to all of those who were involved in this project, producing a lasting and meaningful display which we hope at some point will be moved out of the school to be enjoyed more widely in the community.
Visitors for Lunch
New P1’s invited mums, dads and grans to come in and join them for lunch. An enjoyable lunch was had by all!
October Diary
Renewables Engineering Islay
Our project for the Rolls-Royce Science Prize aims to build children’s understanding and experience of engineering within the context of renewable energy. Living on a small island means that children have a limited experience of different jobs and we want to promote engineering. We feel that developing Engineering Habits of Mind as a way of tackling problems will not only apply to engineering tasks but many other learning experiences that children encounter. The renewables context for the project comes from our amazing natural environment. Islay is surrounded by sea and subject to regular strong winds. It is home to the Limpet Wave Station – a prototype wave turbine and there are plans to use the strong tidal currents to power an array of underwater turbines in the future. We also have our first community wind turbine.
What is an Engineer?
In this first phase of the project we have tried to establish some baselines so that we can measure the impact of our project at the end of the year. In all classes, children were asked ‘What is an engineer?’ The results of this were fascinating; nearly all of the children in P1/2/3 thought that engineers ‘fixed cars’ while children in P6/7 almost all children saw engineers as wearing hard hats, steel capped boots and having tool belts. Many children also saw engineers as being ‘only boys.’ P6/7 have started to research different fields in engineering such as chemical and biomedical engineering.
Assessing our Engineering Skills.
Since developing Engineering Habits of Mind underpins our project we have used a Do you think like and Engineer? self-assessment tool with children to see how they felt about their skills at the outset. The resource we used was developed by the Royal Academy of Engineering for schools participating in the ‘Thinking like an Engineer’ project during 2014-2016. Staff also decided that we should try and assess the children’s engineering skills in a practical task at the beginning and end of the project – we decided on a bridge to span a 30cm gap and support a plastic cup into which weights would be dropped. This was also the first session where we used the video camera, which made us all nervous! It was interesting to compare notes at the end of the day – almost all children had just gone for a wad of straws taped together with Sellotape. However, one boy in P1/2/3 had visited a bridge and remembered details of how the structure was supported. He then built his bridge single-handedly and put on some railings to stop the cup falling off – this was really unexpected.
In all the classes, staff are talking to the children about engineering and how engineers work and all opportunities are being taken to encourage thinking like engineers. Jo Clark has encouraged P6/7 to create design boards for the Young Imagineers competition run by Statoil. They had to come up with an engineering idea that could solve a problem for the future, and lots of great ideas were generated. 3 were chosen by the class to enter for the competition; Sarah’s Scaredy Sheep device stops sheep getting stuck on their backs by barking like a dog, Rebecca has designed a device that uses static electricity from clothes to repell rain from your glasses and Lauren has invented a device that knows when the inside of your car gets too hot and sends an alarm to your key.
In the Early Learning and Childcare Centre Alison Logan and Katie Bonar have been making the most of their new equipment. The children have been working together to build bridges and ramps, problem solving to make sure that the structures were sufficiently wide and long for everyone to fit across. They have also been problem solving to bail out the boat in the outdoor area. Using lengths of bamboo, they have engineered a solution where bailed water can flow down and be collected at the other end.
Thinking about Energy
The first phase of our project has been Thinking about Energy, how important it is to our lives and how we use it. In P6/7 with Jo Clark, children have been working on a farming topic in which they calculated their own carbon footprint and looked at the carbon footprint involved in food production and transport. They cooked their own low carbon footprint foods for a buffet for pensioners in the local community for Harvest. They have started work on the School’s Carbon footprint and will complete this next term.
Kate Brown’s P4/5 class have been looking at the energy they use in school and at home. The devised questionnaires to find out how many different electrical items children had at home and made tables and graphs to show their results. The class then looked at the energy use of different appliances and were amazed how much energy was used by their showers. Next term they are going to engage with the community to encourage energy saving and will hopefully be getting hold of some energy meters to look more closely at what we use in school.
P1/2/3 with Maggie Harrison have been finding out what makes their toys work. As well as looking at forces they have been finding out about toys that produce movement, sound, light and heat and thinking about how energy is needed to make them go. Linked to their transport topic, they have also thought about what powers different vehicles and designed their own cars and boats. They have started to Think like Engineers, working in teams on engineering challenges.
We have enlisted the help of George Read from the Islay Energy Trust. Our team also includes Maureen MacDonald, Head Teacher. Maureen began her career at Port Ellen as a class teacher, was promoted to Head Teacher in 2008 and in 2016 became shared HT of Port Ellen and Bowmore Primary Schools. Having worked with Education Scotland as an Associate Assessor, Maureen has been a member of various teams engaging in evaluative and professional dialogue. This experience has been invaluable and has influenced practice within the school. Community involvement and parental engagement feature highly in the work that Maureen does. She has conducted the school Gaelic Choir for many years, achieving national success and helping to raise the profile of Port Ellen Primary School. During the October holiday the choir have been competing, and winning, at the National Mod!
Moving forward into the next phase of our project. we are looking forward to our first visit from our mentor, Neil Chattle, just after the October break.
With a little help from my friends
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Young Imagineers Competition
Primary 6&7 have been busy inventing. They have been creating design boards for the Young Imagineers competition run by Statoil. They had to come up with a great engineering idea that could solve a problem for the future, and lots of great ideas were generated; extra robotic arms and hands so you can get more done, high viz vests for cows, smart material kneepads that bounce you back when you fall in the playground, the Scooper for stopping ice cream dripping on your hands and lots more. 3 were chosen by the class to enter for the competition; Sarah’s Scaredy Sheep device stops sheep getting stuck on their backs by barking like a dog, Rebecca has designed a device that uses static electricity from clothes to repell rain from your glasses and Lauren has invented a device that knows when the inside of your car gets too hot and sends an alarm to your key. Good luck in the competition and great engineering!
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The National Mòd in Fort William
This year the National Mòd is going to be in Fort William. Port Ellen Choir will be singing 3 songs and the joint choir will be singing two. In the joint choir is some members from both Port Ellen and Bowmore choir, this choir was started when Mrs MacDonald became the head teacher in both schools. We hope that we will win all of our songs and we also hope that all the people doing solos, poems and duets will be fantastic and win their competition as well!
by Sophie and Rowan