On Friday the 16th December, Port Ellen Primary School did a Christmas jumper day for Save the children. We raised £75.65 which was fantastic. We want to say a big thank you to everyone who wore a Christmas jumper and everyone who donated.

Dance club is run by Eva, Natalie and Lauren on  Fridays at Lunch break. It’s for any  P1234 that want to come. They have been learning dances and seem to be enjoying it. They hope to be restarting the club after the Christmas  Holidays.

P123 from Port Ellen Primary School will be doing a Nativity on the Wednesday 21st of December at half one at St Johns Church. They have been working so hard practicing and learning the songs and the words. We want to say a big thank you to Miss Brown for working so hard on the Nativity.

Port Ellen Christmas Fair was a great way to get ready for Christmas. P123 had the soap and bath bomb stall, P34 potpourri, chocolates, cookies, Christmas tree decorations, candle holder and more. P567 made Christmas magnets, Olaf’s, candles, lights, bobbles, tagul pictures, nativity finger puppets, little creatures and   .The fair in total was a great success, the school made over £2,000.

For the Christmas fair snappy snowmen are making penguin light bulbs to hang on your Christmas tree we have made 9 of them.We have also made scented candles.The pink candles are rose scented and the orange candles are orange scented we have made 13 of the candles all together.The last thing we have made is Christmas bugs with pine cones as the body and green Pom Pom’s for the neck and 2 red Pom Pom’s with Googly eyes stuck on top.We have all made balance sheets Rebecca and Holly made the balance sheets for the Christmas bugs Sarah made the balance sheet for the penguin light bulbs and Ruaraidh made the balance sheet for the candles and Kaya made the tags for our items.

Primary 7 have been busy decorating the Christmas Tree ready for the Christmas fair this Saturday at 2pm.  The tree was kindly donated to us by Laphroaig distillery, and we think it looks lovely.

Tips for parents on navigating screen time and technology rules when families meet up

On Friday 25th November, Port Ellen Primary School went down to the Co-op beach and did a beach clean with Re-Jig.  They collected 32 bags of litter and made an astonishing £300 pounds that will help the school.  They found litter that was covered in ice, which they found very interesting.  As you probably know Port Eleen Primary has citizen ship groups. Doing the beach clean was helping our community which is part of being a good citizen.

By Eva Munro

How does Ofcom, the communications regulator, tackle material online that may be inapprorpriate or upsetting for children?

Sumdog is when you have lots of games to play and when you play them you get asked questions your teacher can see how many questions you have done what ones you got right and which ones. Sumdog is good because it helps lots of children with their maths. It also helps them to try harder to make a difference with their maths. P5/6/7 have been doing the Argyll and Bute Sumdog competition. you have to answer 1000 questions to complete the test. Lots of schools all over Argyll Bute entered the competition so far only 2 people out of Primary 5/6/7  have completed the 1000 questions. The amount of questions that you get depends if you will make it onto the leader board. If you get 1000 out of 1000 it is almost definitely that you will make it to first. our school is 15th on the leader board in the whole of The Argyll and Bute.

Advice for working parents when looking for an after school club or nanny 

We are the Mindfulness Minions.  In our group are Ellie, Lauren, Caitidh, Freya, Dearbhla, Ellen and me, Millie.  Our aim is to to keep everyone in Port Ellen happy, fit and healthy.  We want everyone to treat each other as they would like to be treated.

We would like to do a health day and we could make music.We organised to have everyone wear PJs to school, baked cakes and had a teddy competition for Children in Need.

Every year Port Ellen Primary School does a fundraiser for children in need. They raise the money to give to children who are less fortunate than us and who are very ill , that’s why this year all the children came into school waring a onesie and brought in their teddies. They also had the Mindfullness Minions (one of the citizen ship groups) do a bake sale in the school, we also got some other cake donations from parents. They raised £200.36 for Children in Need!

How to help them cope and how to prevent it from happening again.

In P1-3 we created some poppy pictures to remember the soldiers that died in World War I. Each poppy on our pictures showed one of the people who died who were from Islay. It was good fun using PowerPoint copying and pasting the poppies onto the pictures.

With graphic images being shown on the front pages of newspapers and on daily news bulletins, even very young children are exposed to upsetting information. 

Yesterday P4/5 went to Port Charlotte. First we went to Port Mor swing park to have a play and then we went to see the chambered cairn that is in the field. I thought that it was pretty amazing that it is still there even after thousands of years.

Then we went to the museum and it was fun because we got to hold all the flint and stone hammers. There was a bit deer antler that was used as a hammer. I quite liked that we got to see the other things like the big huge lightbulb and the things from World War 2. Mara told the museum about her Grandpa Hector’s stone that he donated to the museum and they printed her off a copy of the Object Report. It said it was a flat stone with a carved cross.

After the museum we went to Port Charlotte school and we had lunch and a wee play the students showed us some Mesolithic bones and sheep hair from the past and broken pieces of pot .

By Mara and Ellen

On our trip we went to Finlaggan and it was so nice. When we got there, there was a little cottage. It was a light brown and it looked brilliant. Me, Orla and Dearbhla got out of the car and hid next to another car to hide from the people in the mini bus. Everyone went in to the cottage and we met Mr Bell and Mr McCowan. We talked about Finlaggan and then we went to the islands.

At the little island there was once a big grey house and a Great Hall. It was amazing and cool because people where living there 1,000’s of years ago. We were put in to two groups, we went around the little Island there were lots of signs around the Island that told us lots of facts. Our group leader was Mr. McCowan. We saw old ruins and the old graveslabs. We saw where the well was and where the kitchen would have been.

After we had had the tour we got put into three groups to do some investigating of our own.  We had to do measuring, maps and art.  It was soon time for lunch which we had in the cottage.  We also had a chance to look at some of the things that had been found during digs at Finlaggan.  The most interesting thing I saw was the Lord of the Isles home.

I rely enjoyed that we got to go and see the stuff on Finlaggan

Before we headed back to school Mr McCowan and Mr Bell gave us some crunchy M and M’s – a tasty end to a great day!

Freya Porter P5

Advice on how to help your child learn to question what they see or hear online.