Leswalt Primary enjoyed lots of World Book Day fun today 🙂 listening to real authors online, enjoying some cosy reading time, doing some shopping at our ‘in-school’ book sale and thinking about how books are written – with some fantastic ideas for possible books of the future!

The House Captains had worked closely with committee members and the librarians to set up a book sale with lots bringing in their pennies to buy some highly recommended books!

Wigtown Book Festival had some fabulous live sessions on offer featuring Mike Nicholson author of the Catscape, Museum Mystery Squad, The Giant Who Snored, Grimm and the ‘Thistle’ Scots language books! P1-4 had great fun in the morning session and P6/7 found out about how to start writing and making something quite ordinary become something extraordinary!

All pupils left school clutching their World Book Day book tokens! Snuggle up and enjoy a new book from our book sale or bought with their book voucher – loving books is what World Book Day is all about 🙂

UNCRC Article 29 Aims of Education Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

Meta Skills Focusing Fergus Initiative Ivy

Communicating Cate Collaborating Cora

 

 

 

Launching Stranraer’s Wheels, Water and Well-being Festival 2025!

Agnew and Stair Park 7-8^th of June.

We were delighted to welcome Janet Jones, Project Developer at Creative Stranraer, (www.creativestranraer.com) into school this week, talking about an exciting new venture – Stranraer’s Wheels, Water and Wellbeing Festival, coming to our shores on the weekend of June 7-8th 2025! This festival is building on the brief 3-hour cycling festival last June, where many children and adults requested the festival to become every year.

There are lots of activities on offer in our wee town, to name a few; the skate park at Stair Park, rowing and water sports on Loch Ryan and the Kirkpatrick Coast to Coast bike trail. This brand-new bike trail starts at the bike sculpture at the end of the pier, connecting Stranraer on the west coast, to Eyemouth on the East coast. Every Saturday, Parkrun is held in Agnew Park when folks of all ages walk, jog and run their way around the 5k course.

Janet explained that this new festival is looking to bring lots of these activities – and more- together in one fabulous weekend to be enjoyed by locals and visitors alike!

After hearing the latest health data, that by 2050, over 50% of the adult population and a third of children, will be overweight or obese, Janet is more passionate than ever to encourage the benefits of active travel, health and wellbeing.

In the run up to the festival, there are three exciting projects for the schools in Stranraer and the Rhins to get involved in. The first creative project is to design an image that represents, wheels – bikes, scooters, rollerblades or any kind of wheels people get around on. It can also be anything to do with activities on the water or an image of wellbeing. These images will be completed by the 27^th of March and delivered to the Creative Stranraer Hub by the 28^th of March at the latest to be entered into a competition. The images will be on exhibition at the Creative Stranraer Hub during May at the top of King Street. AND both the children and teachers cannot wait to try some introductory Qigong next term from the world-renowned expert, Mark Pogson, who will be offering sessions at the festival too! The festival will have something for everyone, of all generations.

In May, the children, and parents or their family members, can take part in completing an Activity Diary, logging all the active fun, places visited, and with who, this can then be entered into a prize draw at the festival.

Watch this space for more exciting details…

 

 

 

Tara and Alan from Stranraer Development Trust popped in to see P6/7 today with some exciting news… they had chosen a winner and runner-up from their recent Dream Jobs competition! But who were these talented pupils?

With her wonderful drawing of her Dream Job as an artist – Miss Ela Chang was runner-up!

And, coming up trumps with her fabulous sketch of her Dream Job as a teacher – Miss Ellie Bennewith was the WINNER!

Well done to both girls who received a fabulous Scottish Nature Activity tin each – and Ellie won a £20 Ryan Centre cinema voucher too!

Meta Skills  Initiative Ivy Focusing Fergus

UNCRC Article 29 Aims of Education, Article 12 Respect for Children’s Views and Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

 

Such wonderfully confident young ladies took to the stage last night, representing Leswalt Primary at the Annual Rhins Burns Federation competition! The fabulous trio of Ela, Hannah and Daisy entertained the audience alongside pupils from other schools with their Scots recitations and singing.

Daisy was up first, singing ‘Skye Boat Song’ accompanied by Mrs Jane Sloan. She performed this beautifully and was placed 3rd in the P6/7 singing category! Hannah represented our wee school in the P3-5 section with her recitation of ‘The Circus’. She did this with confidence and a lovely clear voice – she made us very proud. Next up, was Ela competing in the P6/7 category with ‘Address to a Haggis’. Expressive and articulate, she was excellent – and her excellence was rewarded with her being placed 1st in the P6/7 recitations! Amazing!

We are very proud of all three girls for representing Leswalt Primary so wonderfully. They all received  double merits for the being Confident Individuals and Effective Contributors. Well done girls!

Next stop… Wednesday 12th March when Daisy and Ela are competing in the Scots Song category at the Galloway Music Festival! What a talented bunch we are lucky to have in our village!

Meta-Skills – Initiative Ivy and Focusing Fergus

UNCRC

Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

What a beautiful February afternoon we enjoyed with Jack and Linnea over at the Aldouran Wetlands! Our sessions with Children’s Parliament are nearing their end and we’ve all had such good fun discussing our community, climate, curriculum and campus and the important features of these.

We chatted about what makes a community strong and the ways in which we all work together to make the 4 Cs be the best they can possibly be!

This afternoon’s fun involved building a den using natural materials  –  using climate to build a campus, working together to create this – utilising our curriculum, and creating role-play scenarios to represent everyone who is involved in our school – community.

All good fun and giving us lots to think about. Looking forward to our next session with Jack and Linnea from the Children’s Parliament.

UNCRC 

Article 24- Health, Water, Food, Environment

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Article 31 – Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

Meta-Skills

Initiative Ivy        Integrity Imani      Adapting Aleksander

This afternoon, we were delighted to welcome back Jack and Linnea from the Children’s Parliament with another interesting session about caring for our environment.

Each session so far we have focused on a different element – curriculum (how our learning helps us to explore and find out more about our area), campus (when we made models about what we would view as part of our environment), community (an online session when we talked about all the different people and organisations who are involved in the wellbeing of our school) and  today’s focus which was on culture.

We are always encouraged to share our views and opinions and got the chance to do this today again in lots of different ways; creating a podcast with Linnea about the environment and climate change, working as a group on a Scavenger Hunt finding evidence that our school showing that the environment and climate are important, using our creativity to make models of the ways in which people show they care for each other and their surroundings, chatting about ways in which we can share our ideas and suggestions for and taking the time to write and draw about things which make us happy at school. All of these activities offered us a chance to explore our school environment’s culture. Each activity was given a different environmental name – Vegetables of Voice, Cauliflowers of Care, Fruits of Feeling and Onions of Importance and ensured that we were looking at all the different aspects which ‘feed’ into caring about our climate.

Our pupil voices will be taken back to the Scottish Government to help shape the ways in which we learn about and look after our environment in years to come – and for younger children too.

Jack and Linnea always make these learning sessions fun! We are really grateful to them for coming to work with us 🙂

 

Meta Skills

Focusing Fergus, Adapting Aleksander, Integrity Imani and Initiative Ivy.

UNCRC Charter of Children’s Rights

Article 24 – Health, Water, Food and Environment

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Article 13 – Sharing Thoughts Freely

Today, we participated in Safer Internet Day 2025 – an annual event which explores all the ways in which we can use the amazing source that is the internet in the safest  way possible!

This year’s theme is ‘Too Good to be True’ and gave us all a chance to consider all the offers which we might see online and how to keep ourselves protected from scams.

Our learning this morning was led by our Digital Leaders Rachael and Murray. They presented the whole school with an information powerpoint, held a quiz to check everyone had been listening and set a ‘Design an Cyber Superhero’ competition for all to get to involved in! Working as buddies, older and younger pupils worked together to create their best designs and what wonderful superheroes they all produced!

The Digital Leaders then had the unenviable task of judging the Cyber Superheroes!

And the winners are…

P1 – Gregor                                     Runner-up – Erin

P2 – Jorgie                                      Runner-up – Cameron

P3/4 – Hannah                             Runner-up – Keira

P6 – Rebecca                                 Runner-up – Roman

P7 – Ellie                                         Runner-up – Ela

We all joined the BBC Live lesson at 11am which was a fun 30 minutes of interactive games and top tips about how to stay safe online. P6/7 followed this up by using this theme for their Literacy Comprehension lesson.

A busy Safer Internet Day!

UNCRC

Article 17  – Access to Information

Article 29 – Aims of Education

Meta Skills

Initiative Ivy

Integrity Imani

 

As winners of our in-school K’Nex Challenge before Christmas, Rachael and Rebecca were chosen to represent Leswalt Primary at the Rhins Cluster Creating Engineers Challenge held yesterday at St Joseph’s Primary Stranraer. This exciting K’Nex Challenge is run annually by the Glasgow Science Festival.

The girls were set the task of designing an exercise bike using K’Nex. They needed to sketch their plan, work together and have a finished product ready to be judged – all within a one hour time-scale!

Rachael and Rebecca were super role-models for our school – they were polite and mannerly, listened well and worked together co-operatively. Mrs Kyle, who had accompanied them, was very proud of them.

Two judges took the time to look at all the K’Nex models before leaving the room to discuss their findings.

They then returned to tell the waiting competitors who had won and…drum roll please… Rachael and Rebecca WON!

Next stop…the regional K’Nex finals in Dumfries! Well done girls – you have done our wee school proud!

UNCRC

Article 29 Aims of Education

Article 31 Rest, Play, Culture, Arts

Meta-skills

Initiative Ivy,  Adapting Aleksander,  Focusing Fergus

Today we enjoyed our annual Burns’ Lunch – a little later than we had initially planned due to the storms but it was worth the wait!

Daisy led the celebrations in her role as chairperson inviting Betty in P1 to carry in the haggis, our ‘Address to a Haggis’ P7s to recite the poem with gusto (thanks Ben G, Ela, Sean, Holly and Ewan!) and Sean to say the Selkirk Grace before we all tucked into our tasty lunch!

Following this we enjoyed listening to the toasts. Ben G and Ewan gave the Toast to the Lassies – with a little bit of teasing thrown in! Holly and Amelia gave the Reply to the Lads with an equal measure of joking. Isla and Ellie were invited to give their Toast to the School which celebrated all things good about our wee school. Ela rounded up our lunch with a Vote of Thanks before we all joined in with a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne.

A braw wee afternoon with the weans!

 

Today we had the pleasure of welcoming Kathryn Purchase from History Alive to the P6/7 classroom! The pupils have been investigating Scotland at the time of Wallace and Bruce and Kathryn’s presentation brought this history period alive and visual – and what an amazing morning we all had!

Kathryn took us on a whistle-stop tour of Scotland (and England and France!) at the time of the 1280s onwards. We learnt about the influence of the French Normans, the rule of Edward I, the importance of the Church and the power struggle which was taking place in Scotland caused by the death of King Alexander III. We enjoyed sharing what we had already learnt about this – we have researched as far as Wiliam Wallace so far – and Kathryn told us about the battles and key figures which followed next culminating in the reign of Robert the Bruce.

My goodness but the battles were gruesome! Kathryn had some replicas and explained about the Scottish victories and defeats and how important weaponry was.

The class enjoyed exploring the replicas and costumes – it was such a great way to learn!

Just  take a look at the photos below…