We have been learning about COP26 and what it is about. It started on the 1 of NOV to the 12 of NOV and it is held in Glasgow. There are 30,000 people going to attend at COP26, and 198 of them are very famous people from all around the world. Some of the famous people going are Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Greta Thunberg and many more will be there at COP26. COP26 stands for conference of the parties.

COP26 are going to try and solve the problem of CLIMATE CHANGE! Some major disasters, that might happen if we don’t try to stop climate change, is that the temperature might rise up 1.5C and the water levels might rise 1.1 meters. But if we don’t do anything until 2030, the water levels might rise up to 5 meters. WHO WAN’TS THAT TO HAPPEN! What the Scotland is trying to achieve is to be net zero by 2030 and to make all cars electric, and to make the cheaper.

The reason why they are doing it is because everyone needs to help solve the problem of climate change.

James= I think that the people at COP26 have not done enough because I don’t think that any of them are going to do anything about it.

Dylan= I think that they have done enough because they have discussed that what they are going to do and what is going to happen.

The Message in a Bottle project was created for COP26 and involves school children from islands around the world. The idea came about when a film-maker on Uist found a message in a bottle from a local man in Greenland that had been buried in the iceflow that then melted; the message was about his worry about the effects of climate change on his island.  We decided to take part as we live on an island and are worried about the effects on our island and others around the world.  Islands are more likely to be affected by rising sea levels.

The whole class did it and went on the beach and Mrs Clark filmed us. We sent them to Andy McKinnon. Andy made a three meter bottle and he made videos of us then he sent them to COP26 where anyone can see.  We are very proud to be involved in this project.

Primary 5/6/7 have had some google meet’s with people from Lewis and know Gaelic very well and were teaching P5to7 Gaelic  and all the essentials in Gaelic. So P5/6/7 are getting good at it the person’s name is Caroline she is very good at Gaelic and today we were learning about family.

Remembrance day is a day to respect fallen soldiers. People wear poppies  because a soldier stood in a field were war happened and poppy stood  tall and a wrote a poem and that give people to wear a poppy.  Mostly every person on earth at the 11 month the 11 o’clock people have two minutes of silence. Poppy are different every where. At school we had one minute of silence at eleven clock.

We got out to the library van today and got to choose a book to bring in to nursery. Charlotte enjoyed looking through the books and chose “A Piglet Named Mercy” 📚 🐷 ⭐️ I can explore and choose books to read and listen to. 👣 We will look at and read the books we chose from the van in nursery.

We are pleased to announce that 3 of our pupils have achieved the highly Commended place in the Scottish Civic Trust’s My Place Photography Competition this year in the primary category.

The theme this year was climate change and the pupils had to take photos of their local environment that reflected this theme.

Katie took a photo of an abandoned house with the maltings smoke in the distance and called it Distant Threat.

Caillin took a photo of the electric charging point at the pier which looks very rusty and called it Charge Up!

William took an interesting photo of different building materials and called it Green Build- Stone, Metal ,Wood.

Well done to our three photographers!

For Maths Week Scotland this year the school took part in the Maths Inside photography competition.  Maths inside is a photo competition open to everyone in Scotland and asks people to take photos and then comment on the maths that relates to those photos.

There are three categories-  in the home, in the wild, and climate change.  We have 2 children who have received a Second Level Commended Entry and certificate; Iona for her picture of the logs from chopped down trees on the Oa in the ‘Climate change’ category and Connor for his use of maths to estimate the number of words he read in a book in the ‘In the home’ category.  We also have a highly commended at Early Level for Elana’s photo of the sea and questions How many fish are left in the sea?

Even more exciting we have an overall winner at second level; Finlay for his photo of fishing boats in Port Ellen- he talked about the different maths you needed to be a fisherman in the ‘In the wild’ category. He gets a certificate and £20 Amazon gift voucher.

Even MORE exciting we have the Overall Category Winner for ‘Climate Change’; Evie for her photo of one a locally caught fish we filleted for our food topic. She wondered about the maths needed to calculate how many fish and other creatures are left in the seas and how we know if we are overfishing. She receives a £50 Amazon voucher and certificate.

We also were a highly commended school for the number and quality of our entries.

Congratulations on your success in the maths inside photo competition! This really is an enormous achievement!

Earlier in the year we had Fiona from the INHT taking us out and about around the Ard and teaching us all about peat.  As a part of this project the children in P567 wrote peat poetry.  The winners and runners up of the poetry competition can be read below.  Well done to those who took part.

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7 weeks ago Ben and William planned the dodge ball tournament. 3 weeks ago they started it because they are in the healthy group and have been wanting to do a tournament for a while, they had a vote so that it was fair and everyone voted for dodgeball the scores were Orsay won nave came second and Texa came third the points were Orsay 49 nave 46 Texa 33 it was very close.it was played on the school pitch .

We done a football tournament and Nave came first, Texa came second and Orsay came third that was the scores for the football tournament. We are going to do a basketball tournament next time we do a tournament. And we had a referee just in case there was a foul and the referee kept the scores and Nave had a total of 48 goals and then Texa had 39 goals and Orsay had 33 goals and that was the scores for the football tournament.

In the be leaders group I am the leader for Texa with Dylan  as a vice captain, Callie for Orsay and Iona is the vice captain, Mya for Nave, and Finlay as the vice captain. As captains and vice captains we have to count up the house points every Friday. We also have to make the notice board look nice. On the notice board there will be a large sign saying Texa Orsay and Nave with a golden eagle next to Texa , Orsay with a stag and Nave with a salmon. Also we have to do a activity on Fridays were we tell Mrs. Clark who is here and what we have done in that afternoon. After the October holidays we will change the captains to other people for 1   term  and then there will be 2 different captains.

We have had a mathstastic week in Port Ellen primary!  All the classes have been busy outside snapping pictures for the Maths Inside competition, where you have to take photos of the maths you see in the world around you.  P567 have been baking cupcakes this week using their maths measuring skills and had a masterclass online from Peter Sawkins from the Great British Bake off.  P234 had to find their way out of a class escape room using their maths skills, it was very tricky but we can report that they all managed to escape!  P12 have been using the story Cuthbert goes on and on to learn all about infinity! 

P567 have been learning all about sustainable food choices this term as well as developing their cooking skills.  They have looked at food miles and created their own low food miles bramble jelly and rosehip jelly from foraged local produce.  We also made harvest chutney from locally grown vegetables.  After learning some key chopping skills, how to make bread and how to scale, gut and fillet a fish they chose and cooked healthy meals from around the world.  During maths week Scotland they used measuring skills to create a range of cupcakes: bramble, rosehip, citrus, chocolate orange and bubble-gum flavour.  Finally they chose to give a gift of the products they had made to the people in the community who helped during Covid.

Primary 1 and 2 had already collected and distributed food for the senior citizens in the village.  On Tuesday we delivered the 6 gift bags we made up to say thank you to our local covid heroes​.  Each bag contained jars of the jellies and chutney and a selection of the cupcakes.  P234 made lovely harvest loaves of bread to share as well.  They delivered the bags to the Co-op, the Post Office, the Ferry, Local Carers, the Doctors surgery and the School.  As a community school we feel it is important to support and say thank you to our wonderful community for supporting us!

For our topic we are doing food. And we are doing a healthy plate. To  have a healthy plate 45% needs to be  vegetables 30% needs to be carbohydrates 10% protein 14% dairy 1% oil and spread. Scotland is one of the worst healthy counties in the word. Because we eat so much sugar it gets us more heart disease and strokes. Our five a day should be the size of our hand.  So eat a balanced diet!

The Be Eco group is all about trying to be more eco friendly during life because we want to stop climate change and global warming. The people that run the group are James Norwood, Connor Stevenson, Jacob Hart and Hugh Mackinnon.

Some of are goals are to make bee bombs so that we can plant more flowers, and another one of our goals is to plant some more trees around the school. There are lots of other goals for our group, but there are to many to mention.

In school we were cutting different foods. One of them was potatoes and we were watching videos of the different cuts which were the bridge and the claw grip and peeling.  Be careful because peeler is sharp! Some people made chips by cutting the potatoes in a an angle and we also made mash potatoes so we used a peeler and peeled the potatoes and then used the bridge grip to cut them in two.

We are doing citizenship which is were there are groups that are going to help the school. We are the mindful group which is going to help kids be more calm and work harder on there work. It will be during morning break. We will also be doing healthy tuck.

The people that own the group is Katie, Chloe and Duncan.  Chloe is the magnificent manger, Duncan is the radical researcher, Katie is the radiant reporter! Chole and Duncan made an amazing sign for mindful group and our moto is lend a helping hand.

For tuck we are going to make smoothies and raspberry cookies. We went round every class seeing what everyone’s favorite fruit is. The most popular was strawberries. Then after the survey we went down to Mrs. Holyoake to see the amounts we need. Once we got all the ingredients we told Mrs. Clark and she bought all the ingredients away. Today we are going to make our smoothies for tuck we will be using strawberries, blueberry’s and bananas. The tuck is going to be free up in the fab lab.

A few days ago we made naan bred and butter chicken the people that made it is Evie, Jack, Chloe and Duncan.  Butter chicken is from India and this is the recipe for butter chicken and the ingredients.

Ingredients

1 boneless chicken

Full Fat plain yogurt

Olive oil

Ginger garlic paste

Spices 

Method

1 In a medium bowl, mix all marinade ingredients with some seasoning. Chop the chicken into bite size pieces and toss with the marinade. Cover and chill in the fridge for 1 hour overnight.

2   In a large saucepan and heat the oil. Add the onion garlic , green chili ginger and some seasoning. Fry on a  medium heat for 10 minutes or until soft.

3 Add the spice with tomato puree cook for a further 2 mins  until fragrant, then add the stock and marinated chicken . cook for 15 mins and add any remaining chicken left in the bowl. Simmer for 5 mins , then sprinkle with the toasted  almonds .

It is not that hard to make and this is what it look’s like but you don’t need any rice in though.

Scrumptious Scrummy  Spring rolls

On Friday Hugh, Finlay and Callin   made spring rolls Recipe for spring rolls:             Ingredients:                                                                                                                                                pepper, courgette, spring Onions, a tin of bamboo stalks, six carrots, spring roll wrappers and hoisin sauce.

Step 1 cut up a courgette, pepper, spring Onions, carrots and bamboo all into thin slices and put them all into a mixing bowl with the hoisin sauce and mix it all around

Step two boil some water an put it into a bowl  and dip the rappers in and get them coverd in the water

Step three get the rappers out of the water and put them onto a baking tray then get some filling and put in the middle of the rappers fold the bottom and top on the filling then rolls them the other way.

Step four cook them in the oven at two hundred degrees.  Then you have delicious spring rolls!

Mya, Jacob, Katie and Teddy made chili. Mya made the Guacamole by cutting a  avocado twisting it then squeeze the side with the stone in it into the bin. Then she cut lines in the avocado and scraped it into a bowl so that it was easier to mash. So she got a fork and mashed it firmly. What you need to do next is squeeze some lime into the bowl and add some salt and coriander. Then put it in the fridge for about one hour.

0n Friday we made a fruit salad that had oranges, grapes, apple, honey and strawberries.

How we made it: we chopped the grapes, apples and strawberries. we then grated the orange and then put it in the bowl with the rest of the fruit.  Then we put the honey in it to make it taste great and sweet.

After we made the fruit salad our whole class  came in and  we ate it  and it was delicious and sweet .

P5,6,7 has been split in to citizen groups. One of the groups has been based on the recent progress of the shop in the box it has donated lots of  school and we are buying lots of stuff. The  group is called ‘the sports group’ the members are me, Teddy, Ben and William. The school had a vote to show what we should  buy, the wining thing was a climbing wall with 29 votes. We might also buy a climbing frame with 14 votes. Even though it does not have many votes we think we might repair the round house. Only 3 people voted for it I think it will be better than ever before (it actually was only 2 people and 1 teacher one of those people being me.) We are also hoping to have  a dodge ball tournament  and a football club. 

The Be Creative citizenship group is doing a contest for drawings that are going on tea towels or bags. There will be posters in each class Telling the rules on what the drawings needs there will also be one in the steam room.

You can only draw something related to Islay like a distillery, animals like a deer, Kildalton cross and Bowmores church. Your name must be on the the other side of the page along with what  class that you are in.