Month: October 2024

P6/7 welcome Robert McCrorie, a Community Safety Advocate for the Fire and Rescue Community Safety Team who talked to the pupils about how to keep themselves and others safe around fireworks and Bonfire Night.

He talked about fireworks, sparklers and bonfires and the issues we might come across. Ellie demonstrated how to hold a sparkler safely – at arms length and not being waved about, and Colin showed us how to Stop, Drop and Roll if any clothing caught fire.

We also discussed items which definitely shouldn’t be added to a bonfire and why not, and some of the rules and regulations which surround buying and setting off fireworks.

This was a really useful safety input and we hope it helps everyone to look after themselves this November 5th.

 

It’s back to school and a spooky one at that! P6/7 have enjoyed exploring all things pumpkin this week..

The week kicked off with group work as they named their pumpkins and scooped them out in preparation for soup making.

Tuesday was a busy day as groups worked with Mrs Kyle to chop ingredients and cook their Spicy Pumpkin soup, roast the pumpkin seeds and use wholemeal bread to make croutons to add to their finished dish.

Wednesday was design and carving day as each group worked together to give their pumpkin’s some added character! The class also tried their soup and shared their cooking with P1-4 too.

Thursday led to experiment day – with a chemical reaction of Hydrogen Peroxide, washing up liquid, food colouring and yeast being used to make each pumpkin puke! Delightful!

And that leads to tomorrow’s Halloween Party!

 

This afternoon, P6/7 joined a live lesson working on the use of Adobe Express. Each pupil worked on an iPad to create a multi-media collage with a spooky theme. They selected a background, added design elements, assigned animations to each object and layered sound effects over the top! What fantastic results!

The pupils then screenshot their work and emailed them to me (another handy computing skill) for me to upload them to the blog. You can’t quite get the full multimedia effect of sound and movement – but it does give you a glimpse of just some of the super computing skills in use.

Well done all – superbly spooky stuff 🙂

 

Today we had the pleasure of welcoming Jack and Linea from the Children’s Parliament back to talk about Sustainability.

Today’s focus was on our ‘campus’ and how we use our school building. This ties in with the Scottish Government’s aim that by 2030 they want to make sure that…

• all schools are eco friendly in how they heat, power and use materials at school.
• all spaces can be used to learn outdoors within,
• all spaces respect children’s rights.

The pupils were set the task of re-creating the school campus using anything they could find in the classroom – not easy but they worked together and did so well! They then needed to write down how each area is used and how eco-friendly these areas are. We linked our school campus back to the UNCRC Children’s Rights Charter so that we could see these rights as they are put into action. This gave us lots of things to talk and think about.

We are doing lots already to make our local campus as sustainable as it can be, but we know there are lots of steps we could take to improve. Some of these things we would need to help to put into action – but Jack and Linea said that all our opinions are important and they’d take all ideas back to the Scottish Government.

Another great session! We are looking forward to our next session next month too 🙂

This morning, P6-7 learned a very important life skill – CPR. This annual initiative was led by  Resuscitation Council UK which aims to increase the number of people surviving out-of-hospital cardiac arrests by helping more people learn CPR. We spent 5 minutes listening to a doctor explain about the importance of CPR, and how CPR and use of a Defibrillator hugely increases a person’s chance of survival.

We then learned what to do in the event of finding someone unconscious – we had to remember the acronym CCP.  CHECK for danger and to see if the person responds/is breathing; CALL for help by phoning 999 and putting your phone on loud speaker to free up your hands; if they aren’t breathing, PUSH on their chest to start chest compressions.

We practised doing chest compressions on a cushion – we got up on our knees, interlocked our fingers and pushed down in the middle of the breastbone firmly (the video said approx. 6cm). We kept this going for the duration of the Baby Shark song – and quickly realised how tiring it was to keep up the same momentum!

We learned that it’s better to have a go and try to save someone’s life rather than standing by and not doing anything. CPR is such an important skill to have – although one we hope pupils will never have to use.

P1-4 were delighted to welcome Megan Bark, Dental Health Officer, into school this afternoon to help them learn all about dental hygiene as part of their Health and Wellbeing topic. Megan gave the pupils some hints and tips to keep their teeth sparkling clean and pupils got the chance to put her advice into practise on some puppets.

Megan has set all of the pupils a challenge – to ensure that they brush their teeth morning and night, at least for the next month. They have all been provided with a toothbrushing diary that they need to tick to show when they brushed their teeth and should return it to school when finished. Those who return their successfully completed diary will receive a certificate! We are looking forward to seeing who is up to the challenge!

We were delighted to head to Leswalt Church this afternoon, having been invited by our Locum Minister for Leswalt, Marlene Cash. In preparation for this event, the whole school have been donating food items to distribute around the local community; the gardening club made a scarecrow whom they named ‘Les’ (short for Leswalt!); and pupils have been learning the song ‘Harvest Samba’ to perform at the church.

During the service, we discussed our favourite foods and learned where some of them come from. Marlene got pupils up to the front of the church to demonstrate how food isn’t distributed equally around the world – it often depends on how much money you have. But we learned that Harvest contains the letters ‘share’ and that this is a time for sharing food and making sure that everyone has enough to eat.

After the pupils sang their hearts out, P1-6 headed back to school and our P7 pupils went around the village with Mrs Baillie and Mrs Kyle to distribute our bags of donated food.

Thank you to everyone who was able to donate some food, to those who managed to attend the service today and to Marlene for a lovely service. We look forward to visiting the church again soon!