Author: Mrs Ferguson

It was a sad farewell we said today to our 6 Primary 7s – Andrew, Chloe, Gregor, Jack, Joshua and Luke.

But we sent them away with lots of happy memories of their years at Leswalt Primary. My my – did we have a plethora of photos to choose from for their P7 slideshow! Look out for its premier on Youtube as it is well worth a watch!

We also celebrated  all pupils at our end-of-term celebration today. Unfortunately Covid-19 restrictions meant we couldn’t invite parents along to this, however we all made sure that the pupils had a great morning reminiscing over the fun learning experiences they have enjoyed this slightly unusual year; celebrating success and sharing memories.

Such fabulous celebration stories!

End of term awards Leswalt 2021

100% attendance awards

Ellie Bennewith, Rachael Drummond, Cara Jamieson, Chloe Kennedy, Struan Scott

Accelerated reading star readers

P2  Colin Mc Gregor

P3   Ela Chang

P4   Cara Jamieson

P5 Struan Scott

P6 Breagh (most books), Malcolm (most points)

P7 Andrew (most books) Jack (Most points)

Responsible citizen
P1	Lily – confident little lady who will stand up for herself and others when required.  A force to be reckoned with!
P2	Ruby – kind, caring little girl who always looks out for others.
P3	Holly – never sets a foot wrong.  Sets a great example to others.
P4	Carys – super helpful and a great support to younger pupils.
P5	Alexander – helpful and very hard-working
P6	Breagh – empathetic and caring classmate. Encourages others.
P7	Andrew – fundraising efforts/initiative , always  wanting to help attitude

 Sports

Mini walk medals        

Ben Thomson, Rachael Drummond, Mark Drummond,  Thomas Agnew

Sports champions certificates

P2-Murray Reid

P3- Hamish Scott

P4- Mark Drummond

P5 – Fraser Reid

P6 – Murray Williams

P7 – Chloe Kennedy and Gregor Reid (shields)

 House points shield

Soleburn – 116 (sports) + 144 = 260

Lochnaw – 74 (sports) + 189 = 263 – very close!!

 

 Who has passed Platinum rainbow tables this year?

Hamish Mc G, Alexander, Tristan, Struan, Murray, Joshua, Gregor, Rose

Who has passed platinum rainbow spelling this year?

Rose, Chloe, Aidan, Jack , Luke, Malcolm

	P1-4	P5-7
Literacy award	Hamish Mc Gregor – sets himself high standards. Reads novels that are pretty advanced, written work is entertaining and imaginative.  Super listener and always makes interesting contributions during class discussions.	Aidan Adams – superb vocabulary range and uses this to great effect in his writing work and reading comprehension!
Numeracy award	Ewan Clark – Clark the Calculator!  Quick accurate recall of number facts and bonds.  Loves to share strategies when learning is shared and is super enthusiastic and determined about all new learning.	Thomas Agnew – Loves his number work! Working super hard on all maths tasks. Gets the bit between his teeth and won’t give up until he’s cracked a question!
HWB award	Faye Adams – strong moral compass, shows great empathy for others.  Will help and support anyone who needs it.  A kind caring individual.	Gregor Reid – super duper athlete! Excellent distance runner too. Great House Captain for this year too. A good friend and classmate who is fun company and fair.
REACH award (you might want to consider resilience, effort or positive attitude during lockdown learning?)	Sean Mc Credie – Has worked his little socks off this year and made super progress in his P3 year.  Showing a real determination to do well.  Excited to see what he will achieve!	Rose Santangeli – smiley, friendly and hard-working. Worked well throughout lockdown and always tries her best. Joined us here at Leswalt less than a year ago but feels likes she been with us forever. A real asset to the class.

Nina Agnew

Creativity award – Gregor Reid, for Scots poetry achievements

P5-7 Award for Endeavour – Jack Cloy, for making us smile in all he did!

 Finally, do enjoy browsing through our photos below and check out the Youtube slideshow (Mrs Baillie has emailed the link)

Youtube – Leswalt P7 Leaver’s slideshow

 

It didn’t rain!! To be honest, expectations for a dry day were pretty low as we headed off to the east of the region and the fabulous Mabie farm Park. Not that the weather really bothers children! But our luck was in – we had the most perfect day! No rain, no wind; just smiling children pedalling boats, laughing on trampolines and bouncy pillows, scooting downhill on grass sledges, hopping on-board the quad bike ‘Choo Choo train’, petting the farm animals, jumping in the hay barn, clambering on the adventure play area and eating ice cream! Sounds like a pretty perfect school trip to me.

The North Rhins trio schools were the only schools there and the staff at Mabie were on-hand to ensure they had the best day out possible. Take a look at the fun photos below. Wish you had been there too? It comes highly recommended by us all!

Last week, the Clark family headed up to the Royal Highland Showcase to show sheep – with great success!
Alexander showed and got 1st with a ewe lamb; then he, mum and Ewan achieved 1st again with a ewe and two lambs. Alexander was then awarded with a 1st and a Reserve Champion in the Young Handlers with the ewe lamb – and Ewan got 2nd!!
Well done Team Clark 😀

 

 

It was sports fun in the sun today for Leswalt pupils at their new temporary home at Kirkcolm Primary! To make things even more exciting, the Leswalt and Kirkcolm pupils got together and enjoyed a joint sports day (our lone P1 pupil got to run with buddies her age from Kirkcolm!) This was made possible as we are all operating in a bubble together – with pupils lunching and playing together at break times. Unfortunately, Covid-19 restrictions meant we weren’t able to invite parents to cheer along but our classmates and staff made lots of encouraging noise from the sidelines!

Pupils participated in everything from traditional egg and spoon races to the bean bag throw; sprints to the sack race; skipping to a challenging distance race! All done with good fun as a priority and top sportsmanship skills on display. Full sports results to follow later, but in the meantime please enjoy these happy snaps!

What a brilliant day out the North Rhins P7s enjoyed at Galloway Activity Centre on Friday! This was organised as a special treat as they had missed their last two residentials – and what a fabulous time they had together before they head off to S1 at Stranraer Academy.

Thankfully the high winds and rain of Thursday had abated and Friday dawned dry and reasonably bright. We met at Port Rodie and clambered upon the minibus to head down the road to Loch Ken.

Once there, we got kitted up with our laser guns and headsets for our first activity. Diving in and out of the wooden hides (and in Mrs F’s case headfirst over a tree trunk!) the teams worked to avoid being ‘killed’ by the opposition. Strategy meetings were held, tactics discussed and rounds of ‘ammo’ were fired… and yes the teachers were shot! All good fun. The teachers went from being quite cool and mature to being VERY into this game! Why had I never played this before? Highly recommended!

Next up, the children donned their wetsuits (many comedy moments were had with Mr Cloy!) and enjoyed a session of kayaking. They were naturals! Once they were kayaked-out, the suggested dare from Instructors Rob and Hannah to jump off the the end of the pontoon was met with great cheers all round. The phrase ‘drowned rats’ comes to mind as they all padded back up towards the centre to get changed into dry clothes.

A quick bite of lunch and it was time for the climbing wall and zipwire with instructors Rob and Ben. What a bunch of adrenaline seekers we have! Superb climbing and ‘zipping’! The offer was then there for those who wanted to have a 2nd,3rd and even 4th shot of the climbing wall.

We thanked Rob, Hannah and Ben for a great activity day and climbed aboard the bus to head to Castle Douglas for a bite to eat. Chip-shop dinners in hand, we stopped the bus by Carlingwark Loch and munched our tasty suppers, before heading back along the A75 towards home.

The kids were an absolute pleasure to be with, the activities were fantastic fun and the chip-shop tea rounded off a perfect day out! Just check out our pictures below to see for yourselves….

 

We had a fantastic time exploring our new Kirkcolm surroundings for Outdoor Classroom Day today!

The sun shone as we headed down Fisher’s Lane to the beach. P1-4 investigated symmetry in the natural environment, explored a measuring challenge and enjoyed creating messages using the Viking Rune alphabet.

P5-7 worked on some sand multiplication challenges, measure and writing about settings – and what a fabulous setting we have.

The older pupils had rugby training in the afternoon and then carried on the fun with a school rounders game. Great fun!

Take a look at the fantastic photos to see just how much fun we all  had! What a brilliant day!

It’s been a busy few weeks here at Leswalt as shelves have been cleared, boxes packed and containers filled in preparation for our temporary move to Kirkcolm whilst our wee school has a refresh! Huge thanks to our buddies at Kirkcolm for letting us come and share their building. Leswalt had its last full makeover in 1989 and we’re super excited about the sparkly shiny school which we will return to some months from now!

We’ve made so many happy memories here; but there are so many more to be made. Our location may be changing for a wee while but we’re still Leswalt pupils! It’s not goodbye but see you soon…

Check out the BEFORE pictures! We can not wait to show you the AFTER!

See you next week at Kirkcolm!

Thanks to today’s Leswalt Litter Picking heroes for all their hard work in keeping our school and community looking fabulous! Several bags of rubbish were collected using great teamwork – top job Leswalt!

Many thanks to Active Schools for their recent delivery of the letters of the alphabet for their upcoming initiative Alphabet Street!

Leswalt gladly took delivery of their letters – and promptly put them to good use spelling out their own message! See below…

As we are on the move to share Kirkcolm’s school and playground very soon whilst our exciting refurbishment gets under way, we will store out alphabet letters for the moment and plan some fun with them on our return! Meanwhile, we will enjoy using Kirkcolm’s letters to participate in the Active Schools Challenges. Thanks Active Schools Team!

P5-7 enjoyed Feis Rois with a difference last term – as their weekly lessons were delivered via Microsoft Teams to their own living rooms!

Jamie and Emily, who are multi-instrument musicians with Feis Rois, led our lessons which had us listening to and identifying different musical genres, participating in Scottish and Gaelic action songs and, rather excitingly, working collaboratively to create a sound postcard!

This involved the pupils who participated in the weekly meetings recording sound effects and an extract each of the spooky local story ‘The Phantom Piper of Dunskey’. Rose designed the artwork for the postcard which was then produced into a final piece incorporating the drawing plus a QR code which can be scanned to hear the story production! Very clever stuff.

Thanks to Malcolm, Aidan, Rose, Noah, Breagh, Murray, Thomas, Tristan and Struan for the story recordings.

Check us out below with the finished articles and our class ipads which we used to scan the QR codes and listen to our work.